Smoke Signals

With smoking bans being implemented across the British Isles, Penny Tinkler's Smoke Signals could hardly be more timely. This fascinating study illuminates the complex and highly gendered socio-cultural meanings of smoking, charting the rise in smoking by women from 1880–1980. The key strength of the book is that not only does it look at visual representations of women smokers but it also studies smoking as a visual practice. Tinkler begins by outlining the increasing visibility of women smokers from 1920 and the broader implications of this. She then examines how, through smoking, women made ‘visual statements about status and identity’ (p.2). Smoke Signals thus holds in tension official discourses surrounding women smokers with the ways in which they have defined themselves. In the first of eight chapters, Tinkler provides a useful overview of visual culture in relation to smoking by women during the period 1880–1980. She begins with

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