Smoking and Women

Abstract

Women already constitute a majority in the United States, with a numerical advantage over men that grows as our population ages. However, the difference in longevity that leads so many women to survive their male contemporaries is being abridged by an increase in the number of women who fall victim to their most deleterious habit — smoking. The proportions of this equal-opportunity tragedy are rapidly coming into view.At the dawn of this century, smoking among women was limited to the very rich and the "indecent." Even in the 1920s, tobacco companies refused to promote cigarettes directly to women for . . .