The 19th Amendment maybe?

Andrew Sullivan links to this interview with PJ O'Rourke:

Anna Blundy interviews P J O’Rourke. One of her questions prompts a rant on government interference:

My grandmother was able to keep people from smoking indoors with one cold stare. Why would laws and parliaments and police powers and courts and all sorts of annoying and ugly signs everywhere be necessary? All this expense and exercise of power of one group of people over another – why is all this needed to achieve what my grandmother could achieve with one cold stare?

He offers the counterexample of spittons:

[U]p until some time in the 1920s or so, virtually every American male chewed tobacco and spat constantly. It went away because women put their foot down and said: ‘That’s disgusting!’ I suppose that all had to do with the changing role of women but there didn’t have to be any politician around to think of taking the credit for that, though I’m sure they would have been glad to.

I'm a little stunned that O'Rourke would throw out the date 1920's without thinking about what changed about women's role in society in that decade. If read a certain way it seems like O'Rourke is arguing that the entry of women into the formal political process has enabled the dreaded nanny state. However, unlike O'Rourke I do not pine for the days when women, like his grandmother, held no political power and had to rely on informal social shaming to accomplish their goals.

I also resent the implication that smoking bans represent "all this expense and exercise of power of one group of people over another..."

Let us please not forget that before all these bans smokers were forcefully exercising their power over us and our children by smoking in the workplace, on planes and in restaurants. If they want to kill themselves they can do it in the privacy of their own homes or outdoors but I'm not going down that path with them just because I want to grab a bite to eat or want to visit friends in California.