In the early twentieth century changing social conventions and beauty standards—and the new availability and popularity of cigarettes—gave rise to a materially sumptuous smoking culture, as well as a new consumer base for tobacco accoutrements: women.
Are Ozempic-thinned celebrities bringing you down? So what else is new? A century ago another form of appetite suppressant caught fire among females in the smart set—nicotine. As hourglass figures were supplanted by boyish frames, slim became the new ideal and smoking provided the means to get there.
In the early 1900s, tobacco use was largely limited to men, who favored “chaw”—chewing tobacco—pipes, and cigars. Cigarettes, rolled by hand or machine (patented in 1881), comprised just 2 percent of the overall market. American women generally shunned tobacco: smoking and chawing were considered crude, unfemi- nine, and highly sexual. Only women of no social stand- ing openly used tobacco. On December 29, 1907, James Martin, proprietor of the Manhattan lobster palace Café Martin, made national news by announcing that “the gentler sex” would be allowed to light up in his establishment during the New Year’s Eve celebration. According to the New York Times of December 30, this was billed as a “one night only” concession, with Martin having final say on whether the privilege would continue. “Personally, I think New York is ready to allow ladies to smoke in good restaurants,” he said. “The other sort will be excluded as assiduously as before. It is not a question of what women do. It is a question of who does it.” Less than a month later, New York City passed a law making it illegal for women to smoke in public venues, but the Sullivan Ordinance only lasted two weeks. The debate about whether females could/should publicly smoke was not settled in the United States for at least two decades.
Smoking increased six-fold among American males after cigarettes were included in World War I military rations, thereby rendering chaw, pipes, and cigars old-fashioned. Cigarettes came to represent the modern world. When Prohibition took effect in 1920 everything changed. By merely firing up a match in a speakeasy, a woman could at once be “exotic” (as alluded to by the brand names Camel, Fatima, and Helmar Turkish) and dismantle old social conventions—a thrilling combination, especially for the young. Men and women lapped up bathtub gin together and, as moralists feared, smoked together. As the New York Times put it in “Going Up in Smoke” on September 24, 1925, “Short, snappy, easily attempted, easily completed, and easily discarded before completion—the cigarette is a symbol of the machine age.”
In 1928 the Lucky Strike campaign “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet” featured slender luminaries such as aviator Amelia Earhart, movie star Constance Talmadge, interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe, and others proselytizing for cigarettes. By 1930 the campaign tying weight loss to smoking made Lucky Strike the number one cigarette brand in America.
As cigarettes became more popular with women, so did the cigarette holder. Invented for men in the late 1800s, the first iteration was a ring with a wire attachment to prevent nicotine-stained fingers or burned gloves. The more familiar stick holder came after. Jutting away from the face, it protected the smoker’s eyes and kept ash off clothing and tobacco flakes out of the mouth. Once smoking became chichi, jewelers turned the prosaic tool into a luxury item—think FDR’s ivory holder, clamped resolutely between his lips. The holders intended for men had shorter stems and more subtle designs than those created for women. The latter were sometimes inset with jewels, enameled in various colors, and could reach lengths of nearly two feet. The longer ones were said to accentuate the line of a lean body. Although a twenty-inch holder looked elegant while being brandished, the lit cigarette it bore could put a dinner companion in serious peril.
In the depths of the Great Depression, jeweled smoking accessories were paired with gleaming necklaces, bracelets, and earrings. At pretty much every level of wealth, ladies of the 1930s glittered with bijoux, real or not. As Emily Post wrote in her long-in-print and continually revised Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage, “The New York smart world has developed a veritable mania for covering itself in public as well as at home with pearls, rubies and emeralds made of—glass!” The working class regarded the cigarette holder as too swish, leaving the glamorous trinket to the rich and those who aspired to look that way.
Smoking was integral to entertaining at home. Every seat was near a table, and three objects were essential to each tabletop: a cigarette holder (a box, an open tray, or a lidded container); a lighting implement (a lighter, a matchbook, or a holder for match sticks); and an ashtray. These items were sold either in sets or individually, and in a range of styles, materials, and sizes. Echoing Martin from 1907, Vogue editor Marya Mannes wrote in “Nicotined Lady,” in the October 15, 1934, issue: “It’s not what you do so much as how you do it.”
How you did it—meaning in good or bad taste—was very much a concern during the early twentieth century. For example, while smoking was encouraged as a civilized conclusion to a meal in the first couple of decades, the privilege was extended only to men, who puffed on Havanas at the table or in a designated smoking room. By the 1920s the fashion among the elite was for both sexes to light their cigarettes at the dinner table before dessert was served (cigars were smoked separately, in what continued to be a male-only rite). Smoking became more widespread in the fast-changing ’30s. In 1937 an exasperated Emily Post tacked a new section onto her Blue Book that dealt with “the ever-increasing custom of smoking in nearly all places at nearly all hours and by nearly all the people.” A non-smoker herself, she fretted that the custom at dinners now stretched from the appetizers to the liqueurs: “Young Mrs. Inconsiderate lights her cigarette even before laying her napkin across her knees.” Women were allowed to light up without censure in public restaurants and nightclubs, but Post drew the line once they left the table: “Dancing and smoking at the same time is in very worst taste.”
Smoking was at its height in 1964, when Surgeon General Luther L. Terry declared cigarette use a health hazard. While the number of smokers decreased after this, the number of cigarettes sold actually increased. Not until the 1980s was there a decline in both. By 1991, the year that designer Carolyn Hsu-Balcer spotted an 1890 Viennese telescopic cigarette holder at a flea market on New York’s West Side, the once prized objects were long out of style. Yet to Hsu-Balcer, who now owns more than four hundred holders, they are “beautiful expressions of functional craftsmanship.” Her cigarette holders and the smoking accessories found in private and public collections demonstrate “How It Was Done.”
MAGGIE LIDZ is the author of Polly Jessup: Grande Dame of Palm Beach Decorators, recently published by D. Giles.
MAGGIE LIDZ is an independent historian. Her book Polly Jessup, Grande Dame of Palm Beach Decorators will be published by the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach and Giles in February 2025.
