Refinement and Respectable Consumption: the Acceptable Face of Women's Smoking in Britain, 1918–1970

This article examines British women's magazines and the insights that they can provide into the relationships between social class, gender and respectable feminine consumption. The discussion focuses on magazine representations of women who smoked cigarettes in the years between 1918 and 1970 with particular attention to the period up to 1950. Magazine images reveal the visual parameters of respectable smoking for women between 1918 and 1970 and the centrality of refinement to respectable consumption. However, while respectable smoking was always visibly associated with refinement, the absence of working‐class smokers 1918–1970 suggests that smoking was visibly inconsistent with refined and respectable working‐class femininity.