Carmen and her like emerged in the days before industrialisation when cigar making was a delicate process that could only be done by nimble hands. Prior to 1829 no women had worked at a Seville cigar factory until the ever-astute fabrica (factory) owners decided that young single women were the answer and cigarrera was born.
They worked sitting on factory floors, thousands of girls crammed together in large sheds baking in the hot Seville sun. They worked naked.
There was no other way to cope with the heat in those stultifying conditions. Hence, their reputations as wanton harlots evolved and the idea that women who smoked were wayward took hold across the western world, in much the same way that tobacco addiction itself took hold, like a rampart fever.
Actually, that’s not true. It was the French who were responsible for the fever in the case of the cigarreras. Seville was the birthplace of the cigar in Europe and with it came the whole package of old world romanticism. Cigar smoking was for the machismo, the poetic, the player and the elite.
Cigar smoking earned its international cache due to its prestige amongst army generals and aristocrats but its European incarnation owed a lot to the Spanish culture of the bandolero. The bandoleros were smugglers who, much like today’s hash smugglers, hid tobacco up their bums and naturally the more they could carry, the more man they were. (Funny how men can totally dismiss any potentially homophobic connotations when it comes to drugs. I guess it comes down to priorities and needs must.)