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Humanities and Social Sciences Library > Collections & Reading Rooms > Print Collection > DRY DRUNK QUESTIONS OF GENDERAs tobacco "drinking" gained popularity, it began to appear with increasing frequency in literature and the visual arts, presented sometimes as new and fashionably sophisticated, but more often as a dubious activity, linked to the lower, libidinous classes, be they sailors, peasants, or workmen. If it gradually became de rigueur for a respectable man to smoke, women remained steadfastly on the margins of recreational tobacco use. The early explorers unanimously reported that even in native American cultures women used little or no tobacco, and in the rare 17th- and 18th-century images that depict a European woman with a pipe, she tends to be of unsavory character. The activity of smoking or even just holding a pipe was suggestive of a variety of character traits, supplying machismo to the sailor or hunter, and sophistication to the gentleman. On the other hand, the woman who smoked was consistently labeled as sexually promiscuous or otherwise disreputable. The verb "to pipe" continues to have lewd connotations in languages such as French and Dutch, adding further support to this perception of the masculine, carnal implications of smoking. The earliest examples in this section clearly reinforce this stereotype, but here, as in other genres, the situation modified in the 18th century. A more even-handed sense of humor took over, so that a rustic husband and wife smoking together look equally ridiculous and, moreover, singularly out of sync with their libidinous sides. When George Woodward dreamed up his ironic women's club in 1792, responding, no doubt, to the proliferation of gentlemen's clubs in his day, and giving, in his book at least, separate but equal rights to the grandes dames of the age, he included among the official rules of the club the decree that all fines be expended in snuff, perhaps a slightly more ladylike means of consumption, but still within a preeminently gentlemanly sanctuary. 29 According to Woodward, "this Book is solely intended to promote Mirth and Good-Humour," accomplished with a series of pseudo-portraits of "the Bon[s] Vivants of this Kingdom." Although women's and mixed-sex clubs did exist in England, they were purportedly not quite like men's clubs, with stricter rules, and all-powerful patronesses –witness the intimidating Mrs. Tyler. Besides dictating that "all fines . . . be expended in snuff," the rules of this women's club also forbid anything "of the Male kind to be admitted, on any account whatever"; each lady was allowed one bottle after dinner, "before the general discourse concerning Politics takes place." 30
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33 Seventeenth-century Dutch artists were masters at representing themes of love in seemingly everyday settings. The relaxed couple, with their supply of gin and tobacco, is a good example of the low end of this specialty. The image of the leering lone woman smoker, with her bottle of gin and supply of tobacco in its paper beside her, is packed with suggestive details placing her outside the realm of respectability, as a rather too independent –i.e., masculine –woman. 34 The woodsman-hunter, accompanied by his attentive if somewhat wild-looking dog, presents the other end of the gender spectrum: masculinity, enhanced by the pipe, in an earthy woodsman, who epitomizes the term. 35 Sir Busick Harwood, professor of anatomy at Cambridge, a "bon-vivant, very witty, and very licentious in conversation," lies in bed with his corpulent wife, both of them puffing away, framed as if on stage by the bed curtains. The note on the edge of the bed near the professor suggests that he is not well –is this his healthy morning pipe, or the cause of his illness? The wife's corpulence, coupled with her furious smoking of the pipe and the intense, frightened look cast upon her by her husband, combine to give her a rather fierce look. The print was, incidentally, published by Gillray's customary –female –publisher. 36
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