Fashionable Women’s Drinking, Smoking, and Gambling
It is impossible to look with complacency upon the increasing practise of cigarette smoking, drinking, and gambling among fashionable women of the larger villages and cities. Card-playing and card-parties have taken this form to a deplorable extent. In a paper read before the New Jersey Medical Association, Dr. H. J. Symmott, of Mt. Clair, N. J., said:— The possibility of secret drinking and cigarette smoking, even among women of education and refinement, must not be disregarded in looking for causes of nervous prostration among women. It is indeed quite common among fashionable women for wine, and sometimes stronger drink, to be served, not only at their card-parties, but at fashionable restaurants. The generally higher nervous temperament of women makes them much more susceptible to the evil results of these practices than are men. Add the excitement of the gambling table to these, and we have a trio that is hard to excel in the ruin of physical and moral stamina. Says the Baltimore Christian Advocate:— Physicians tell us that both of these habits [drinking and smoking] are largely on the increase, and along with the morphin habit are undermining the health, not to say the morals, of a large number of the women of our land, and wholly unfitting them for their relations as wives and mothers. This is a sad and serious fact, and one fraught with the most baneful foretokenings. Unless something is done to arrest the evil, the unhappiest results to our home life and to society will ensue.