Suffragette Cigars

(National Cigar History Museum) Some of the most interesting cigar boxes of the 1870s focussed on issues, hoping to attract a smoker’s eye by depicting one of the day’s more newsworthy controversies. Issues boxes are rare and a thrill to find. Poltics and social issues were natural targets.
... The 1872 election pitted Republican Grant against Democratic newspaperman Horace Greeley, but the real attention-getters were the nominees of the newly formed Equal Rights Party: feminist Victoria Woodhull and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Woodhull didn’t win one state, largely because not one state allowed women to vote. Interestingly, Woodhull couldn’t have served had she been elected not because she was a woman, but because she didn’t meet the minimum age requirement of 35.
“Women’s Rights” included the right to smoke in public, a hotly debated issue since Puritan days. Continued