Explores gender and other key issues related to smoking in Montreal, including the arrival of "big tobacco," first attempts to ban the cigarette, wartime tobacco funds, French Canadian smoking habits, rituals of manliness, and the respectability of women smokers.

A pioneering city-based study, it weaves western understandings of respectable smoking through Montreal's diverse social and cultural fabric. Rudy argues that etiquette gave smoking a political role, reflecting and serving to legitimize beliefs about inclusion, exclusion, and hierarchy that were at the core of a transforming liberal order.