Smoking was quite the thing among European society women and actresses by 1912. The impression that it was not "done" is wrong. It was actually the latest craze, declaring to all that one was fashionable and "moderne."
So although conservative types considered the trend of women smoking to be improper, attitudes were changing. In America it was still a shock of course. In 1908, London stage star Mrs. Pat Campbell, while dining at the Ritz-Carlton in New York, was asked by the maitre d'hotel to extinguish her cigarette as the "sight" was offending other guests. She absolutely refused and management was forced to compromise by having a screen put around her table! In 1910 at a White House luncheon, President Taft was displeased when the wife of the Russian ambassador lit up a ciggie; he afterwards thanked the American ladies for not following her example.
Lady Duff Gordon smoked Benson and Hedges while in the U.S. and when in Paris she had specially rolled, monogrammed, scented cigs made for her; these she smoked through a long, straw-tipped holder. I'm sure she smoked aboard the Titanic and all other ships she sailed on, though she probably would not have made a production of it.
Even so it was beginning to be a common sight for women to smoke in public - even on shipboard - though the American press remained critical.
In October 1912, "Lucile," as she disembarked the Kronprinzessin Cecille (sp?), was asked by clamoring reporters what she thought about the "spectacle" of women smoking on board. Poking her way through the throng with her walking stick, she exclaimed: "Nobody cares about that! All chic women smoke nowadays. Only the old frumps and those it makes sick are the exceptions."
And here, from the New York society rag "Town Topics," is an indelicate joke (for those days)which Lucile, a staunch advocate of "the New Woman," told at a dinner party at Sherry's in 1912:
"Two girls are chatting up matters of love over cocktails and cigarettes. One says: 'Marriages are made in Heaven.' Her friend agrees:'Yes, but thank the Lord to unmake them, we only have to go so far as Reno.'"
I have a news clipping that her granddaughter, the late Flavia Anderson, gave me from some New York paper of a letter-to-the-editor written by a parish priest in which he complains about various press interviews with Lucile whom, he insists, "ought to be ashamed" for condoning drinking, smoking, dancing and "naughty dressing" on the part of young ladies. "Despite her title," he sniffed, "I am convinced she is no lady."
