Torches of Freedom, and Edward Bernays
“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
Ratified on August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote and would herald the first wave of women’s liberation in the United States. Public relations pioneer Edward Bernays would give women their equal smoking rights in the 1920s.
His first cigarette campaign was for Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company’s Chesterfield cigarettes, which featured endorsements by opera singers that the brand was “kind” to their voices. To increase sales of American Tobacco Company’s Lucky Strike cigarettes, Bernays created a campaign that suggested smoking Luckies helped keep women from gaining weight, with slogans like “Avoid that Future Shadow” and “To keep a slender figure, reach for Lucky instead of a sweet.” While this campaign was successful, smoking was still considered risque for women to smoke in public. In 1929 Bernays challenged this convention by paying a group of women to smoke while walking in New York City’s fashionable Easter Parade.
“Because it should appear as news with no division of the publicity,” he wrote, “actresses should be definitely out. On the other hand, if young women who stand for feminism—someone from the Women’s Party, say—could be secured, the fact that the movement would be advertised too, would not be bad. . . . While they should be good looking, they should not be too ‘model-y.’ Three for each church covered should be sufficient. Of course, they are not to smoke simply as they come down the church steps. They are to join in the Easter parade, puffing away.”
