No Sex Gap In Cancer Wards
“Women who smoke like men, die like men.”
This prediction, offered by Joseph A. Califano when he was secretary of health, education and welfare in President Jimmy Carter’s Administration, was frighteningly prescient.
Today, even as Americans grunt and groan at health spas, about one-third of the men and one-third of the women still smoke. But while men’s cigarette smoking is falling, women are puffing away--and dying from tobacco-related diseases at higher rates than ever. It seems that in the cancer ward there is no sexual gap.
However, a question keeps nagging: Where are the women’s groups in the midst of this public-health crisis? Feminist organizations as diverse as the National Organization for Women on the left and the Eagle Forum on the right have shared a disturbing silence over this issue, even though the feminization of smoking is arguably as alarming as pay inequities or high divorce rates.
While the percentage of males smokers has fallen from 52% in 1935 to 35% today, the percentage of women who smoke has climbed from 18% 50 years ago to 30% today. If trends continue, in 15 years more women than men will die from lung cancer. As a result, the lead in life expectancy that American women have traditionally held over men is likely to vanish.
Over the years I have favored many of the positions that NOW has taken, including its support of the equal rights amendment and free choice on abortion. It perplexes me, however, that NOW’s leaders have not spoken out on this issue. I do not understand why their traditional concern about women’s “role models” has not caused them to condemn the Women’s Tennis Assn., which is largely sponsored by Philip Morris, makers of Virginia Slims. Why is it that NOW, which fights hard for women in the workplace, continues to look away when the American Cancer Society shows that working women are stubbornly chronic smokers?
There are some things that NOW could do. Nobody knows whether women smoke as a sign of liberation, or as an appetite suppressant, or for other reasons. What is known is that 40% of young white women smoke, making them the most addicted group in the nation. NOW could mount an education campaign directed to these women or even take to the streets, as President Eleanor Smeal has encouraged her members to do.
A cynic might suggest that NOW is hooked on the money, albeit a paltry sum, that it gets from tobacco companies. Some might choose to believe it has become wedded to a steady source of income at a time when membership rolls have dropped significantly.
I suspect the reasons are more complex. NOW’s leaders may be so sensitive about individual freedom that they fear a crackdown on cigarette smoking would lead to restrictions of other liberties, like the right to an abortion. Yet that kind of libertarianism wilts under scrutiny. Just as we regulate driving (from drunk drivers to reckless drivers) without banning travel, so, too, can we regulate smoking without infringing on other rights.
As for the “family” groups on the right, I haven’t the slightest idea why they ignore the dangers of smoking. A staff person working for Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum laughed when asked whether their organization had ever taken up the issue. Why, I wonder. More than 75,000 women--mothers, wives, daughters--are estimated to have died of lung and breast cancer in 1985. If this isn’t a family issue, what is?
But from silence, consensus? Women’s smoking is one of the few family issues on which Phyllis Schlafly and Eleanor Smeal can agree. Imagine the political clout they could wield if they joined Surgeon General Everett Koop’s call “to make America a smokeless society by the year 2000.” Together, they just might muster enough Congressional support for a new war on cancer--which might include, for example, extra money for cancer research paid for by a deterrent tax on cigarettes. Such an effort would not only help to bind the scars caused by the heated debate over abortion and other social issues. It could also save the lives of thousands of American women.
