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Writing Type: Book
His views on women who smoke.
Keywords: women, Santa Fe, smoking
Publisher: AMS Press
Archive: University of Warwick Library
Location Details: Vol.1, pp.199-200
Text: p.199
[In Santa Fe, Argentina, c1811]
Conceive how I must have been shocked to see, for the first time, a great proportion of the ladies, openly and undisguisedly, not only smoking, but smoking cigars of a size so large, that those of their male comparisons bore no comparison to them. Then followed that act, not to be named in ears polite, so generally connected with smoking. The maté and melon, the costume, the general coarsness of the scene, I could have overlooked; but the large cigar, in a female mouth, which were it ever so beautiful, could never, from that moment, be considered delicate, - oh! it was a terrible shock to my nerves, not then braced, by habit, to the endurance of a sight so unseemly.
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