farouk
Well-Known Member
YW @dhh712Thank you. ...
You're evidently a history buff; I was interested to read that apparently in Antebellum times in some areas it was customary on Sundays after church for women to congregate outdoors and smoke together; in fact it was even considered a bit rude not to smoke as well if one joined them in conversation.
Fast forward to the Progressive Era onward, from where the Fundamentalists got a lot of their culture, and it became a supposed taboo in many Fundamentalist churches for people - especially women - to smoke.
Obviously what is known now about the effects of heavy cigarette smoking is greater than what was known in Antebellum times, and in any case in those days it wouldn't have been the cigarettes like you occasionally smoke but pipes that women would smoke, after church.
If heavy smokers can quit, then more power to them, I say.
But I really don't buy at all the idea that the mere fact that a woman in her own right as an adult smokes an occasional cigarette socially, etc., is supposedly "unladylike"; I really don't buy that sort of Fundamentalist taboo at all....
(Such a taboo, historically, would be hard to vindicate, also.)