ABSTRACT
Cigarette smoking is a behavior with profound biomedical and psychosocial consequences across the lifespan, when examined from perspectives ranging from that of the individual all the way to that of society as a whole. It is a behavior intimately linked with disease and death, which is characterized by those who peddle its material form, the cigarette, in terms of youth, beauty, sexual appeal, personal success and independence. It is a behavior temporally tied to the evolving role of the woman in western society, one which brings greater devastation to our gender just as hard-sought changes are occurring in the realms of education, employment and oppor-
female lung cancer mortality surpassed breast cancer mortality in Washington State, a finding which will also occur in California in 1983 (Austin, 1983; Starzyk, 1983). For all sites causally linked to smoking, approximately 53,900 new cases of cancer in women will be diagnosed and 39,750 women will die in this year (American Cancer Society, 1982).
