Marion and her friends passing around a cigarette. Had there been Facebook in 1910 this picture might have proved detrimental to her career.
I got a book for Christmas, an encyclopedia really, called Historica’s Women: 100 years of women in history, first published in 2007. It’s chronological.
I went straight to the 1900 -1910 time period and found the usual suspects, the suffragettes etc but two entries were more side-bars to history- and very interesting to me.
The first was about a woman, Miss Katie Mulcahey, got arrested for smoking in New York City. Women couldn’t smoke, although children could.
There was a kind of prohibition movement for tobacco. A few states had banned it, a few others were trying. But the tobacco lobby was too strong.
Edith and Marion Nicholson both were heavy smokers all their lives. Edith lived to 92, Marion died of a heart attack at 60. Edith lived long enough to see those ads for Virginia Slims, “You’ve come a long way, Baby!”
The other story is about a Canadian-born business woman called Florence Nightingale Graham, who changed her name to Elizabeth Arden and opened her first beauty salon in 1909 on New York’s Fifth Avenue.
How interesting!
Wikipedia says that she was born in Ontario and that she followed her brother to New York and that she travelled to Paris in 1912 to learn the make-up secrets of the French and brought them back to the US. (Wow! In one of my first chapters of Flo in the City, I have Flo and Mae at Sutherland’s talking about ‘rouge de theatre.’
As I have written on this blog, money spent for ‘hair-dressing’ was by the men. Women did their own hair.
I had seen an advertisement for a ‘hair sculpting parlour’ somewhere in a Toronto Magazine of the Era.
And I’ve written in my essay about why women no longer wear hats (in a consumer society gone ballistic) because HAIR is the new HATS.
HAIR styling, today, is a huge huge huge industry.
And the tobacco industry won’t die either.
