George Sand: The Woman with the Cigar

Paris, 1830s: a woman in men’s clothing sits in the salon smoking a cigar — in a city where women officially required a police permit to wear trousers. Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin, known as George Sand, did both in public — and never made an issue of the officially required permit. She wore the trousers for practical reasons and as a statement; she smoked the cigar because she enjoyed it — and because she knew what the sight provoked.

The scandal almost obscured the work. Sand was among the most prolific and successful authors of her century — over seventy novels, as well as stories, plays and a multi-volume autobiography. The caricaturists, however, preferred to draw the woman with top hat and Habano, and society reliably expressed its outrage: smoking in public was a male prerogative, and a woman who helped herself to this pleasure was calling more into question than a table manner.

Yet the cigar world was never as male as its salons pretended. At the very same time, thousands of Cigarreras in the Royal Tobacco Factory of Seville were rolling the cigars of Europe, and Cuba’s manufactories too depended on women’s hands — a century later the celebrated Havana manufactory El Laguito was established as a rolling school whose first Torcedoras were women. Women have always made the cigar; they were simply expected to remain invisible when it came to enjoying it.

Sand did not comply, and time proved her right. That a woman with a cigar need today be neither scandal nor statement, but simply pleasure, is also the legacy of those who claimed it when it was still both.