Rosemary Elliot

Inhaling Democracy: Cigarette Advertising and Health Education in Post-war West Germany, 1950s–1975

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the West German government was faced with the challenge of addressing a damaging health behaviour, smoking, in the context of an emerging late modern democracy, when the precedent for addressing that behaviour was set in the Nazi past. This paper details the two-pronged approach which the government took: seeking restrictions on cigarette advertising, whilst educating young people to adopt positive health behaviours in the face of pressure to smoke. This approach can be understood in the social and economic context of the time: an economic commitment to the social market economy worked against restrictions on the sale of cigarettes; whilst concerns about past authoritarian structures prompted the health authorities to seek novel ways of addressing smoking, emphasising choice. In a nuanced way, post-war anti-smoking strategies were a response to West Germanys National Socialist past, but more importantly, a signal of an increasingly international outlook.

'Everybody did it' - or did they?: the use of oral history in researching women's experiences of smoking in Britain, 1930-1970

From having been predominantly a masculine habit in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cigarette smoking was adopted by flappers and film stars in the 1920s and 30s, symbolising new types of femininity. However, it was not until the economic and social dislocation of the Second World War that substantial numbers of women began to smoke cigarettes. This article draws on oral history material to explore the reasons why women took up smoking during and following the Second World War. It suggests that smoking among women became more acceptable in a wider range of circumstances following the War, reflecting the adaptability of the cigarette and its role in negotiating an increasingly diverse range of femininities. The article examines the impact of current anti‐smoking discourse on smoking narratives, as interviewees set up opposing discourses of social acceptance in their youth and awareness of the health risks today.

Smoking for Taxes: The Triumph of Fiscal Policy Over Health in Postwar West Germany, 1945–55

In the postwar period, the West German tobacco industry faced several challenges, not least competition from smuggled Virginia cigarettes. This reflected the Americanization of smoking tastes and threatened domestic tax revenue. The popular preference for ‘American blend’ cigarettes also hindered trade with Greece and Turkey, suppliers of Oriental tobacco to German manufacturers. The proposed solution was tax cuts to stimulate demand for domestically produced cigarettes. These proposals antagonized welfare groups, who saw tax cuts as a threat to the health of the population. The ensuing debates and settlement shed new light on the liberal smoking policies of postwar West Germany.

Miscarriage, abortion or criminal feticide: Understandings of early pregnancy loss in Britain, 1900–1950

This paper explores the close links in medical understandings of miscarriage and abortion in the first half of the twentieth century in Britain. In the absence of a clear legal framework for abortion, and the secrecy surrounding the practice, medical literature suggests contradictory and confused views about women presenting with clinical signs of pregnancy loss. On one hand, there was a lack of clarity as to whether pregnancy loss was natural or induced, with a clear tendency to assume that symptoms of miscarriage were the result of criminal interference gone wrong. On the other hand, women who did not present for treatment when miscarriage was underway were accused of neglecting their unborn children. The paper suggests that discourses around pregnancy loss were class-based, distrustful of female patients, and shaped by the wider context of fertility decline and concerns about infant mortality. The close historical connection between miscarriage and abortion offers some insight into why both the pro-life movement and miscarriage support advocates today draw on similar imagery and rhetoric about early fetal loss.

Matthew P. Romaniello and Tricia Starks (eds), Tobacco in Russian History and Culture from the Seventeenth Century to the Present , Routledge Studies in Cultural History, No. 10 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), pp. X + 295, £60.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-415-99655-6.

Tobacco in Russian History and Culture is an edited collection looking at the social, economic and cultural history of tobacco in Russia from the sixteenth century to the present day. The collection grew out of the editors’ shared interest in the history of tobacco in Russia and includes sixteen chapters from an international and interdisciplinary range of contributors (including historians and researchers in public health and marketing). Although the focus here is on Russia, the story of the emergence of tobacco use from the fifteenth century onwards through to the development and consolidation of worldwide tobacco control policies in the late twentieth century is an international story, with national developments influenced and shaped by cross-cultural discourses as well as multi-national trade. One of the many fascinating aspects of this edited collection is the spotlight it throws on the role of Russia’s European neighbours in encouraging the spread of tobacco use within Russia from the early modern period through to the Soviet era. In the early seventeenth century, Dutch and English trading interests in particular were looking for new markets to exploit and Muscovy represented an untapped market. Similarly, in a very different context, rising Soviet tobacco consumption was met by cigarette production in Bulgaria in the post-Second World War decades. Movements countering the spread of tobacco use can also be seen to have international dimensions, if not direct links. The long prohibition of tobacco use in seventeenth-century Muscovy had parallels in the bans imposed by James I of England (James VI of Scotland) in the early seventeenth century, and in various German states through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The uniqueness of the Russian experience, the authors argue, was that the ban in Muscovy lasted seventy years, whereas in other countries such bans tended to last less than a decade. None the less, many of the anti-smoking arguments mixed medical, religious and moral sentiment in ways that were also apparent in the west. This is particularly true by the turn of the twentieth century, where concerns about health were augmented by fears about moral and physical degeneracy, an emphasis clearly seen in other European countries and in the United States. By the late twentieth century, it was the example of the west that promoted the largest cigarette producers in the USSR, the Iava factory, to gradually, and ineffectually, introduce similar warnings on their cigarette packets at the behest of the Soviet leadership. Given the global dimensions of this story, it is surprising then that the editors do not do more to locate their collection within the already substantial literature on the history of tobacco use and to highlight the distinctiveness of the Russian case within that. The long-standing seventeenth-century ban on tobacco use provides the basis for an introductory discussion of emerging tensions and conflicting agendas between economic and cultural imperatives and gendered and medical discourses, which the book seeks to follow from the early seventeenth century through to the present day. What makes the Russian experience unique is the questions it raises about the route of many of these discourses from the western world to eastern Europe, the particular factors within Russia which shaped such discourses, and the singularity of Russian experiences (territorial expansion, dynastic agendas and schisms, revolutions) which mean that Russia itself was geographically, politically and culturally a changing entity across the period. It is within this dynamic context that enduring arguments about tobacco’s economic dominance and cultural tensions retain their power. The impressive scope of the book means that some areas are under-discussed—there is little on the eighteenth century, for example—but, as a whole, the book makes a substantial contribution to the cultural and economic history of Russia. Many of the chapters in the volume also give an insight into the enduring attraction of tobacco for its users, despite the best (or worst) efforts of the state. The collection includes an interview with the former director of the Iava tobacco factory, Leonid Iakovlevich Sinel’nikov. Sinel’nikov describes how he went with the chief of the Tobacco Committee of the Russian Food Ministry and the Instructor of the Central Committee of the Communist Party to observe how people responded to the health warnings on cigarette packets in 1978. After waiting in a long line, customers were just anxious to get their cigarettes without wasting any time on the health warning; they also feared that concerns over health would lead to price increases for cigarettes. This reaction illustrates experiences of the planned economy as much as a response to the health dangers of smoking—it is both particularly Soviet and universally human. In a similar way, this book contributes to the global story of tobacco use but offers an important new perspective.

Book Review: The freedom to smoke: tobacco consumption and identity.

The central argument of this book is that liberal ideals—of the individual as a “rational”, “self-possessed” person—structured rituals of smoking in turn of the century Montreal: “from the purchase of tobacco, to who was to smoke, to how one was supposed to smoke, to where one smoked” (p. 5). Tobacco connoisseurship emphasized moderation and exemplified gendered spatial and social norms. Until the First World War, smoking was almost wholly a masculine pastime; and tobacco connoisseurship was founded on a hierarchy of products and tastes, symbolizing wealth and power. The Cuban cigar topped the hierarchy, and Rudy provides a fascinating analysis of how “Cuban” as a cultural category was created through the imagining of race, gender and terroir (the knowledge of the farmer, the quality of his soil and the suitability of the climate for growing tobacco). For working-class men, pipe smoking was a central part of cultural life, although there is less evidence of the hierarchies and rituals involved. Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as Rudy shows, these liberal notions of smoking were challenged from three directions: the Womens Christian Temperance Unions (WCTU) anti-smoking movement, the growth of mass produced cigarette consumption, and an increase in smoking among women. In broad outline, The freedom to smoke recalls Matthew Hiltons Smoking in British popular culture 1800–2000, and Rudy acknowledges this influence. However, the distinguishing feature of The freedom to smoke is its permeating analysis of ethnicity; indeed, the backdrop of Montreal is perfect for cross-cultural comparisons. Differences between Anglophone and francophone female smoking are tantalizingly touched upon, and racial and religious differences teased out in discussion of oppositional discourses to smoking more generally. As in the United States, the WCTUs prohibitionist stance was shaped by social gospel Protestantism, but also by national concerns about physical and moral degeneration. French Canadian Catholics opposed juvenile smoking on degeneration grounds, but supported moderation among adults. But most compelling is Rudys analysis of the social position of rural French Canadian tobacco, le tabac canadien, which provided a counter culture to liberal smoking norms. The liberal construction of smoking appears to be an Anglophone one, and while elements of the Francophone population subscribed to these notions, Rudy details the enduring popularity of rural French Canadian tobacco. Although rejected by the urban liberal bourgeoisie, rural French Canadian tobacco had a rich heritage. Home-grown and characterized by small-scale distribution methods, it remained untaxed by the Canadian government until well into the twentieth century, an anomaly in the western world. Rudy explores the clash of urban and rural cultures, as many rural French Canadians migrated to the city. He also shows the march of industrial agriculture and the influence of multinational corporations, as distinctive French Canadian tobacco was transformed into a blander product, suitable for cross-cultural, even international, tastes. The chronology is hard to follow at times, because many developments were contemporaneous, and the interwar period is only sketched in. Detail on the multinationals and their history in Canada is frustratingly thin: it is not clear, for example, what, if any, relation Imperial Tobacco bore to the British company of the same name, or how they came to take over a large American concern in Canada. Standardization crossed national, as well as cultural, boundaries, but it is notable in Montreal that this occurred more slowly than in Britain or the United States: soldiers in the First World War retained allegiance to the pipe and le tabac canadien well after their return to civilian life. In the end, however, Rudys book is less about urban liberal ideals dominating rural heritage, than the eclipse of both.