49 pages • 1 hour read
Adele MyersThe Tobacco Wives
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: The Significance of Tobacco Production in North Carolina
The use of tobacco in America dates back over 1,000 years when Indigenous Americans used it for smoking and chewing. After European colonization, tobacco became the most profitable cash crop exported from America. Harvesting tobacco was difficult and skilled work, and white plantation owners used the forced labor of enslaved African people to fund the enterprise. Prior to the mid-19th century, North Carolina’s economy was overshadowed by those of neighboring states like Virginia and South Carolina, who had more diverse agricultural industries like cotton and rice. While tobacco farming was widespread throughout many Southern states in the 1800s, those practices produced dark, heavy leaves that were not preferred by European customers. The climate and soil of the North Carolina Piedmont region provided ideal conditions for growing the desirable and aromatic yellow tobacco leaf that transformed the tobacco industry. Attributed through legend to an enslaved man named Stephen, a rapid curing process that used charcoal instead of wood resulted in this wildly popular bright yellow tobacco leaf. This flue-cured tobacco called “bright leaf” soon became one of the most popular varieties sold. Both small and large farms across North Carolina thrived because of the mounting popularity of tobacco, and soon manufacturers built large factories in cities, leading to industrialization and the employment of thousands of workers across the state.
In the late 1800s, advances in cigarette machinery replaced hand-rolling for many of North Carolina’s industry leaders like American Tobacco and R. J. Reynolds, and those companies began to invest heavily in advertising. The government supported farmers with subsidies and implemented a quota system for production. Harvest season in North Carolina was from August to early November, with towns hosting elaborate parades, exhibits, and festivals to celebrate the crop. Some events were lavish, black-tie affairs that drew guests from hundreds of miles away, which in turn benefited other local industries like saloons, retailers, and banks. After the Great Depression, manufacturing and production boomed again as soldiers were supplied with cigarette rations. Demand for cigarettes in the postwar US continued to grow until the 1960s, when the US Surgeon General released a report that linked smoking to medical problems like cancer. The decades since have seen a steady decline in the number of American smokers and increased restrictions on public smoking. The largest manufacturers left North Carolina and invested in foreign factories to lower costs.
Authorial Context: Adele Myers
Adele Myers is a North Carolina native and novelist who works in advertising in New York City. She was inspired to write her first novel, The Tobacco Wives, after hearing her grandmother, a hairdresser, tell stories about the fashionable Southern wives of the wealthiest and most influential tobacco tycoons of Winston-Salem, North Carolina in the 1940s. In the Author’s Note of The Tobacco Wives, Myers details the deep familial history related to the tobacco industry and explains how she drew upon the stories of her family members to craft this novel. She was also inspired by her other grandmother, a seamstress with whom she spent summers, and her grandfathers, both of whom worked with wealthy tobacco farmers in banking and construction.
From these conversations, Myers learned about the pride that people felt in making North Carolina “the tobacco capital of the South” (286), and she wrestled with the complications that lie within it: How would people feel once medical studies in the 1950s linked smoking to cancer, and how would someone reconcile the economic benefits of cigarette production with potential harm and danger? These questions inspired the main conflicts of The Tobacco Wives. Though she set her novel in a time period that preceded the biggest revelations of the harmful effects of tobacco in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the Epilogue, set in 1990, gives a glimpse into the reckoning that industry executives faced. Additionally, Myers drew on her expertise in advertising and public relations to develop the novel’s exploration of how clever marketing resulted in a positive public perception of tobacco.
