Almost twenty-two percent (21.9%) of all American woman are currently cigarette smokers, according to 1998 Census Bureau statistics, down from 27.9 percent in 1985.  Females aged 18 to 24 are the only group to have an increase in the percentage of smoking from 1995 (21.6% to 24.5%).

(Source: U. S. National Center for Health Statistics, Health, United States, 2000; in the U. S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2000 [120th edition], Washington, DC, 2000, p. 142.)

"The same people who tell us that smoking doesn't cause cancer are now telling us that advertising cigarettes doesn't cause smoking."

(Source: Ellen Goodman, Newsweek, July 28, 1986, p. 17; in Andrews, Robert; Biggs, Mary; and Seidel, Michael, et al., eds., The Columbia World of Quotations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. www.bartleby.com/66/. [10 December 2001].)

Not too many years ago, lung cancer was a man's disease, relatively rare among women.  But since the 1960's, tobacco companies have deployed feminist slogans of liberation and empowerment to attract female customers.  But medical research is now exposing the cruel irony in those seductive slogans, for epidemiologists are finding that women are actually more vulnerable to smoking-induced lung cancer than men.  The destruction of traditional restraints on female smoking has apparently sent tens of thousands of American women to an early grave. The cost of liberating women to smoke stands out in grim relief in a recent article in Social Science & Medicine by researcher Sarah Payne of the University of Bristol.

Surveying international data on lung cancer, Payne remarks that "the overall picture in developed countries is one of increasing incidence amongst women compared with decreasing incidence amongst men."  Payne sees the upsurge in lung cancer in "the US in particular the female mortality rate has increased dramatically when set against the male rate" and has in fact "overtaken breast cancer mortality."  Of course, a primary reason for women's new vulnerability to smoking is the smashing of the old taboo against women's smoking.  Indeed, Payne reports that in developed countries such as the United States "among younger age groups more females than males have started smoking" in recent decades. 

Few if any of these new female smokers have realized, however, that the tobacco habit is actually riskier for them than for male peers.   Payne cites "research [which] has shown that women's risk of lung cancer is higher than men's at every level of smoking, and for both low tar and high tar cigarettes."  Furthermore, while for men the relative risk of developing lung cancer is especially high if they start smoking before age 19, for women "the period of increased risk appears to last 6 years longer, up to the age of 25, so that women who start smoking up to this age have a higher relative risk than those who start smoking later in life."  Why the elevated vulnerability to lung cancer among women?  Although specialists are still investigating this question, it appears that "there may be something about female biology that is more vulnerable to the impact of cigarette smoke."  Some scientists speculate that "reproductive and hormonal influences" may be at work; others blame a gene found on the X chromosome (double in women; single in men) responsible for "the airway expression of the gastrin-releasing peptide processor."

And while the details of these investigations may escape the layman, the implications are quite clear: smoking is particularly dangerous for women.

So what was all the cheering about when American women began defying tradition and lighting up?

(Source: Sarah Payne, "'Smoke like a man, die like a man'?: A review of the relationship between gender, sex and lung cancer," Social Science & Medicine 53[2001]: 1067-1080.)