Women smoking cigarettes in old-time Phoenix

I've always been open-minded and liberal, especially concerning my relationship with beautiful women, but something that has always been a deal-breaker with me is if she smokes. I'm not interested, sorry. It isn't a matter of some kind of principle, or anything like that, I simply found it unpleasant. So, if I saw a pretty girl that I wanted to approach, if she lit up a cigarette, I turned around. In fact, if she smelled of tobacco, I'd wander off, too. I've never been intolerant, or a "goody two-shoes", it's just that, to quote Forrest Gump, it would be that she "tasted like cigarettes". Yuk!

But of course this is from the perspective of someone who was born when cigarette smoking was kinda on its way out. The Surgeon General's Report came out when I was a little kid, my parents both stopped smoking, and I just didn't spend much time around people who did smoke.

Attitudes have changed, but it isn't as if people were totally innocent of the dangers of smoking going way back. Even before a direct connection was made between lung cancer and cigarette smoking, people called cigarettes "coffin nails". But by the 1920s if you were a young woman in Phoenix you really wouldn't have made much of a flap with the modern crowd if you didn't smoke. It was what we would call a "YOLO" (You Only Live Once) attitude, something that annoyed the older generation, who were stodgy and old-fashioned. Thoroughly modern women smoked.

In my lifetime I saw a similar connection in the early 1970s, during what was called "Women's Lib" (The Women's Liberation movement). It was a big push towards throwing off the limitations of yesteryear, and it included the end of separate Male/Female "Help Wanted" ads, and even the language started changing, as non-gender-specific names replaced things like Mailmen (with Postal Workers, or Letter Carriers). And just like in the 1920s, women proudly smoked cigarettes.

I lived in California during the 1980s, and the places where I worked were already designated non-smoking. And when I moved back to Phoenix in 1989, the building where I worked (Valley Center, now called Chase Tower) had just been made non-smoking. You could see the yellowish tobacco stains on the ceilings above some of the cubicles, and of course the people who did smoke had to exit the building every time they needed a puff. It must have been pretty miserable for people who smoked, and my best guess is that it discouraged these people from working in a building like that. So I was surrounded mostly by non-smokers. I really never gave it much thought.

I'm at the tag-end of what is called the "Baby Boom", and I remember the TV commercials that came out against smoking. So I became what the commercials called "the unhooked generation", which was really true, in spite of the people who did get hooked, and nowadays smoking is very rare, and I can't imagine in a million years a young woman doing it to look glamorous. But if you time-traveled back to the 1920s, or even the 1970s, that's what you'd see.

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