ABSTRACT
American women were slower than men to adopt cigarette smoking and never reached the smoking rates achieved by men in the 1940s and 1950s, when up to 70% of the male population smoked. By 1965, smoking prevalence among women had reached 34%; probably at least in part as a result of the publication of the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report documenting the health hazards of smoking (U.S. Public Health Service, 1964), followed by increasingly stringent societal measures designed to discourage smoking, the percentage of women smokers leveled off rather than continuing to rise. Starting in 1978, smoking prevalence in women began declining to its current rate of 23%—still slightly lower than the prevalence in men, although the two have nearly converged.
