The Feminine Mistake

Mother’s Little Helper

Although hundreds of actresses and dozens of women athletes and society women appeared in cigarette advertisements in the the 1930s and 1940s—as well as women serving in all branches of the military and in factories on the home front during World War I—the post-war depiction of women in cigarette advertising was often as a romantic companion to her man, as a newlywed, or even, in one Philip Morris ad, as a young mother caressing her baby.