If some strange force were killing 165,000 American women a year, you might expect women's groups to take notice. Especially if the Surgeon General went to the trouble of writing a 675-page report on the subject. But the recent release of "Women and Smoking," the first Surgeon General's report in 20 years to focus on tobacco's effects on women, has occasioned nothing more than yawns among the watchdogs of women's freedoms.
The Feminist Majority Foundation's Web site is all over the issue of gender apartheid in Afghanistan. The National Organization for Women is eager to apprise Web surfers of the state of political parity in French city councils. But you'll search long and hard among the sites of the leading women's organizations to find the news that 27,000 more women died of lung cancer than of breast cancer last year. The Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues listed 30 measures related to women's health on its agenda for the last session of Congress, ranging from breast feeding rights to research on lupus, but smoking -- the leading cause of preventable death among women -- appeared nowhere on its list.
Since 1965, smoking has fallen among women from 34 percent to 22 percent. But the rate of decline has been lower than it has been for men, and an alarming 30 percent of high school senior girls still smoke, making them the one age category that almost has parity with male smokers.
What accounts for the women's movement's weird indifference to the problem of smoking? One explanation is that the tobacco industry has extended the deep tentacles of its purse into all kinds of organizations that serve women. The Women's Research and Education Institute -- an offshoot of the Congressional Caucus on Women's Issues -- receives funding from both Philip Morris and RJR Nabisco for congressional internships. Philip Morris funds the publication of a directory of elected women officials for the National Women's Political Caucus, which as of this week is still hoping the company will chip in for its annual meeting in May. RJR Nabisco sponsored a fundraising dinner for the Women's Campaign Fund last year. Women Executives in State Government lists Philip Morris among its four most generous corporate sponsors (and has RJR as a lesser donor), while the National Council for Research on Women, a New York-based alliance of 92 women's research and policy organizations, also counts Philip Morris among its benefactors. Catalyst, an organization that advances the cause of women in business, lists Philip Morris as a "member," and the company sponsored a 1998 Catalyst report.
The money doesn't stop there. The National Museum for Women in the Arts gets Philip Morris funding, as do various other organizations promoting women's involvement in the arts and sports. The latest popular venue for tobacco largess is domestic violence: Philip Morris boasts in its latest annual report that it is the largest private funder in America of programs serving battered women.
But tobacco funding isn't the only reason for the movement's puzzling lack of interest in the topic of smoking. NOW, to its credit, refuses to take industry money, and it does sponsor some anti-smoking programs. But even its advocacy has been a low-key exception to the rule that female leadership in the anti-smoking movement is largely confined to organizations of medical professionals or of working women (such as flight attendants, who successfully pressed to ban smoking on airplanes) for whom it is an issue of workplace safety. Another depressing possibility is that the movement has an elite bias against noticing the issue: Smoking is overwhelmingly, and increasingly, linked to social class. The high school students who will be dying of cancer 20 and 30 years from now are the ones who drop out or don't go on to college: Only about 10 percent of female college graduates are smokers, compared with 30 percent among women who have 9 to 11 years of schooling. In the words of the report, "Once a mark of sophistication among women in the social forefront, then adopted by middle-class women, smoking has increasingly become an addiction borne by women with the least resources in our society."
But it's only a small stretch to see that smoking is the quintessential feminist issue, because the industry so cynically targets female consumers here and abroad. It preys on girls' fears of being fat, and it borrows the imagery of women's liberation itself to sell their brands. Surgeon General David Satcher notes in his preface to the new report that Virginia Slims, which pioneered the slogan "You've come a long way, baby," more recently introduced the ad theme, "Find your voice."
It's time women's organizations turned the tables on the cigarette industry and did just that.
