Cultural shifts

[ashnistrike]

Okay, it's time to do a pass for smoking, and for the minefield that is women's choices of hats (or no hats) in 1949.

Does anyone know:

...whether smoking would have been permitted in a library--in this case an ivy league academic library?

...in bookstores?

My instinct is what the hell are you thinking, but I can only just remember what it was like to have everyone smoking inside in the first place?  (It sucked, that's what I remember.  But people mostly got used to it.)

Comments

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

As late as 1967, Widener Library at Harvard allowed smoking in its principal reading rooms, for the comfort of addicted scholars: http://tinyurl.com/ku3uq7m. They couldn't work otherwise. Even in the 1980s and 90s, as I recall, the occasional entitled emeritus would light up in his study, as he'd always done--wasn't it his home?--to the wailing of sirens, and have to be at once censured and mollified. "Think of the books, sir!"

“'I remember this vague sense of smoke in the building all the time,' she said of Widener Library. 'It’s never really gone.'”: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/5/23/smoking-ban-college/?page=single.

Nine

[erik]

Bookstores (especially used bookstores), yes certainly. I have many memories from even the 70s and 80s of bookstore owners with pipes.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Leaf through the Google Books archive of Life? Ads and fashion features for aspirational hats, news for the hats of the wealthy and powerful, alongside shots of more ordinary gatherings?

[savvyfan.livejournal.com]

Libraries, grocery stores, doctors' offices, hospitals, yes, yes, yes, yes.