June 5, 2007
Smoking Is the New Smoking Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 12:45 PM EST Has anyone mentioned that Josh Zeitz has a new book out? Oh, they have? Well, I’ll do it again. The book is called White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar Politics, and it shows an exquisite understanding of the intertwining currents of religion, national origin, culture, and global affairs. The passage that caught my attention, though, has nothing to do with any of those things. It occurs during a discussion of the restrictive rules that governed college students’ personal lives in the 1960s: “At Barnard—Columbia University’s all-women’s affiliate—a man could visit a woman’s dormitory room at set hours, but three of the couple’s four legs had to be touching the floor at all times as a preventative against premarital sex.” Three legs on the floor? I’m not sure I can even picture that. And the rule seems pointless in any case, since you can get the job done with four legs on the floor if you use a little imagination. I asked our editor, Richard Snow, a 1970 Columbia graduate, whether he has any recollection of this rule. He says he doesn’t, though he also admits that he spent distressingly little time in Barnard dormitory rooms. The days of in loco parentis are long gone, of course. Today colleges give away condoms (to students paying $50,000 tuition) and hire speakers to demonstrate sex toys. You can bring anyone you want to your room and put all four legs on or off the floor, or even six, and the only thing that will get you in trouble is the cigarette afterwards. That’s because smoking is now completely prohibited in all Barnard campus buildings—and outdoors too, except in a couple of small, marked areas (though students usually just step onto the sidewalk outside the college’s gates). Back in the 1920s things were different. As explained a while ago in our “Time Machine” column (scroll down), in 1922 most colleges prohibited smoking by women. Even liberated Wellesley, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and Smith expelled students who smoked, with the punishment in all cases assessed by a tribunal of fellow students. (Josh Zeitz probably has a section on smoking in his book about flappers, but I don’t have a copy of that handy.) New York City actually enacted a law banning public smoking by women, though it was quickly abandoned. At Barnard, however, smoking was permitted without restriction. As late as the 1970s, the ideal of empowerment through tobacco formed the entire marketing approach of one pseudo-feminist cigarette brand, and a dangling cigarette was part of the Barnard uniform, along with the leather jacket, black velvet dress, and mesh stockings with a hole in one knee. But today on Barnard’s campus, you might just as well wear a Rush Limbaugh T-shirt as light up a smoke. Across the street at Columbia, things are more relaxed: You can smoke in most outdoor locations and even in your dormitory room. With etchings out of style, this freedom could provide a new pick-up approach for Columbia men, who, if Richard’s and my experience is any guide, need all the help they can get.
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