In Their Growing Affection for Cigars, Women Turning Over a New Leaf : Tobacco: Stogies no longer are a male bastion, author tells crowd at an all-women ‘smoker.’

The 45 or so women gathered at the Alfred Dunhill store looked like the sort of serious networkers who do all their shopping at nearby Union Square.

At home amid the tasteful luster of the upscale shop, they chatted amiably, each with a glass of wine in one hand.

And a big stogie in the other.

Women? Smoking cigars?

Yes, indeed. Dunhill Valverdes. Royal Jamaican Corona Grande Maduros. Serious cigars for women serious about smoking.

Women, in fact, who had come out one recent evening to be inculcated into the mysterious rites of expensive hand-rolled tobacco from faraway lands.

The all-woman “smoker,” as these events are called, was organized by real estate broker Molly Gleason. She wanted to give her friends the chance to learn cigar lore and puff away to their heart’s content.

“Here, they can just hold them, feel them, smell them and taste them for themselves, with no men around,” Gleason, a longtime cigar smoker, said.

The evening began with black-suited waiters serving wine and savories of roast duck and crab cakes. At the front of the store, Giuseppe Scimeca presided over an impressive array of cigars and paraphernalia.

A cluster of women eagerly accepted cigars, then let him snip off the end “cap” with a gold clipper and light them.

“This is a great job. I’ve corrupted about 14 so far,” he said.

One woman at the back of the circle, cigar in hand, called out, “Does it make you high?”

The Dunhill employee adroitly allowed it might have that effect if the smoker wasn’t used to “chemical enhancements.”

The evening’s speaker was Richard Hacker, author of “The Ultimate Cigar Book.” He dubbed the event, which he said was the first-ever women’s smoker, “historic in the annals of cigar smoking.”

Cigars, once a bastion of male bonding, no longer are the exclusive property of men, he said.

“You can’t put a sexist shackle on the pleasures of cigar smoking. It is a symbol of freedom--especially because it’s so politically incorrect, but also because it’s so enjoyable,” he said.

As the women puffed on their chosen brands, Hacker told them how cigars are made as he slowly took one apart, passing the “wrapper” (the thin outer leaf) around the room, then the “binder” (the coarse inner leaf), and finally the “long filler” that makes up the cigar itself.

He waxed poetic on the various grades of leaf, the soil they grow in, and the beauty of the red clay valleys in Honduras where some of the finest tobacco is grown.

The women lapped up the information.

“It’s like getting your first bra--all the details, how do you hold it, how do you do it. Who would ever have guessed there were all these little things to learn?” said Debra Sassenrath.

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Each stage of smoking--from cutting the tip to lighting to whether or not to remove the band--was covered in loving detail. The requisite off-color jokes were made, by society women who didn’t seem the type. Mostly, clouds of smoke were sent up as the air slowly turned blue.

Shelly Cartier’s interest in stogies began the night she and Gleason went out for a night on the town--cigar case in tow.

“The responses at the restaurant to two women lighting up at the bar were wonderful,” she said.

The smoldering rolls of tobacco acted like a magnet, as the men just couldn’t stay away.

“That’s why I started doing it,” she said.