ABSTRACT
In contrast to other areas of women's health, there is an absence of feminist research and feminist debate about cigarette smoking. There is only a handful of studies which seek to understand women's smoking behaviour in the context of the social divisions which shape their identities and their daily lives. The lack of a feminist agenda around women's smoking would be unimportant if cigarette smoking was not related either to women's health or to gender divisions in any significant way. But cigarette smoking is connected to both, and in increasingly pronounced ways. Cigarette smoking is currently identified as the major single cause of disease and premature mortality in industrialized capitalist countries, and is increasingly implicated as a cause of women's mortality and of ill-health and death in children. Further, smoking patterns are changing in ways which are tying cigarette smoking more closely to gender divisions and to other hierarchies of oppression. In Britain, as in other capitalist countries, cigarette smoking is emerging as a habit acquired and sustained by those who occupy disadvantaged positions within the social hierarchy.
