The Tobacco Wives by Adele Myers

The heroine of Wives faces an interesting conundrum: What do you do when you find out that the product (tobacco) that is keeping your whole community running can actually hurt people? The time is the 1940s, the setting is N. Carolina. Maddie is a teenager unceremoniously dumped on her Aunt Etta so mom (a war widow) can go off and find a rich husband. Etta is the town's premier seamstress and Maddie is her apprentice--until Aunt Etta gets sick and Maddie has to take over sewing the gowns for the Tobacco Wives (the wives of the big tobacco company execs) for their big gala.

She thinks the Wives have perfect lives until she starts getting to know them and realizes that a lot of them are smart and ambitious enough to want to be doing more than going to tea parties. But their husbands won't let them. And the husbands can't wait till the soldiers come home so they can kick the women out of the tobacco plant--jobs that the women are not so eager to give up. While preparing for the gala, Maddie stumbles upon a piece of information that indicates that tobacco use may be contributing to miscarriages and premature babies. With her aunt in the hospital and unsure whom to trust, she doesn't know what to do with that information but feels compelled to do something. That's a lot of stress for one teenage girl.

In notes at the end, the author relates how this book was inspired by her grandmother's stories about the tobacco wives from her perspective as their hairdresser. 

Good characters, good story, interesting setting.