In the broader temperance era, dominated by women reformers, tobacco was often seen as yet another corrosive vice, akin to alcohol or gambling in its corrupting influence on character. Reformers linked tobacco use to a deterioration of social and familial values, a habit that disrupted the sanctity of the home. It was a moral battle; tobacco was a barrier to men’s responsibility toward family and a threat to the moral fabric of society. These women—mothers, wives, and sisters—witnessed how men’s indulgence in tobacco and alcohol often led them away from family duties and down a path to moral and spiritual decline.
One such woman, mostly forgotten today though prolific of pen in her time, Margaret Woods Lawrence, championed the anti-tobacco cause. Recognizing the vital role women could play in the cause, she dedicated her book The Tobacco Problem (1885) in this way: “To you, my young countrywomen, I dedicate this book, because the solution of the tobacco problem lies very much in your hands.” By the time she wrote Tobacco Problem, Lawrence was already well known, though typically by her pseudonym Meta Lander, as author of sentimental, moral novels such as Marion Graham (1861; revision, 1890) and Esperance (1865) as well as hagiography such as Light on the Dark River (1853), a memoir of Henrietta Hamlin, a missionary in Turkey. Lawrence’s reputation and wide circle of correspondents and contacts ensured that her writings on tobacco and smoking reached a wide audience.
A friend and correspondent of Frances Willard and other reformers, Lawrence possessed an excellent genealogy, one of considerable moral authority, and was of a sisterhood of prominent writers. Born into American Calvinist nobility at Andover, her father was eminent clergyman and professor Leonard Woods, one of the first generation of faculty at Andover Theological Seminary. Though the seminary’s faculty and student body consisted entirely of men, the women who were connected to the place made even longer-lasting contributions to American letters and reform. Another writer of the day, Sarah Loring Bailey, wrote in her history of Andover: “There have been forty professors [in the history of the seminary], but their wives and daughters, six women, have published books which have had a circulation of at least a million copies.” No doubt, Bailey vastly under-represented the circulation of those women’s works (because one of them was Harriet Beecher Stowe), but she rightly emphasizes the wide readership of the reform works penned by the women of Andover.