“Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire”: Tobacco Use and the Construction of the Canadian Citizen, 1890–1930

Abstract

This study explores the discourse around tobacco use, mainly cigarette smoking, as it related to changing values of citizenship in English Canada between 1890 and 1930. It focuses particularly on changing perceptions of working-class male youths who had taken up cigarette smoking in this period. Despite the general attraction of smoking to other sectors of the population after World War One, including middle-class male youths and adults as well as young women, this paper will argue that cigarette smoking had special symbolic meanings for those relatively disenfranchised from mainstream civic order and respectability. Conventional wisdom has long held that in addition to tobacco's threats, there are also certain benefits. These benefits have been presented as age-, gender-, and product-specific. After 1920, smoking represented different terrors for those establishing and monitoring Canada's civic norms, and different "performative" possibilities for those contesting them.