How can cigarette smoking be "effeminate" if women are not allowed to smoke cigarettes? It was an activity that females were not allowed to do, so how can that activity be associated with femininity? Makes no sense.
Re:
" How can cigarette smoking be "effeminate" if women are not allowed to smoke cigarettes?"
Yes, that does seem to be a bit of a paradox - but remember, that was Victorian America, and things were quite a bit "different" back then.
As near as I can tell, France was the center of fasion and trendiness in the occidental World for most of the Victorian period; French men were beginning to strut their "cool" by smoking their new-fangled cigarettes (litarally French for "little cigar").
American men apparently thought Frenchmen to be a bit "swishy" for some reason - kind of like "Girlie Men" I suppose, and did not slavishly follow their fashion lead quite as much as the ardent female reader of the Godsey Lady's Book fashion periodical tried to emulate the Ladies of gay Paris.
The French influence did show up in places like Louisiana though, and period drawings of Confederate Louisiana "Tiger" Zouaves show them smoking primative (probably hand-rolled) cigarettes, and the habit seems to have spread to the Southwest by the end of the Civil War or shortly thereafter.
I don't see a lot of cigarettes being consumed in the American Northeast until the beginning of the 20th Century, really, pipes and chewing being the preferred manner of nicotine consumption.
But thousands of men who didn't smoke before WW-I often picked up the habit as "Doughboys" in the trenches of France, and it really took off in America after that.
During the tuburculosis outbreaks of the 1920s and 30s, menthol cigarettes were actually prescribed as a medicinal "treatment" at many of the Sanitoriums where sufferers of TB were quarantined. Some of the patients liked them so much that demand for mentholated cigarettes has continued to this day.