Big Tobacco's Spin on Women's Liberation

If you found Fresh's Tobacco Caramel and Etat Libre d'Orange's Jasmin et Cigarette advertising to be a tad bit more than just troubling, then this article will both interest you and likely increase your frustration. There is also a revealing slide show, In Old Ads, Doctors and Babies Say 'Smoke.'

New York Times City Room, 10/10/08 - Big Tobacco's Spin on Women's Liberation

An exhibit of old smoking ads went on display this week at the Science, Industry and Business Library at 34th Street and Madison Avenue.

(Image Courtesy of Stanford University,
tobacco.stanford.edu)

Why do nearly one-fifth of women in America smoke? The answer goes back to an event almost 80 years ago on Fifth Avenue, which is often regarded as one of the most successful P.R. stunts in American history.

This sometimes overlooked piece of history has surfaced again because of an exhibit of historic cigarette ads at the New York Public Library’s Science, Industry and Business branch at 34th Street and Madison Avenue.

The show, “Not a Cough in a Carload: Images Used by Tobacco Companies to Hide the Hazards of Smoking,” which opened this week, was curated by a doctor, Robert J. Jackler, whose mother, a smoker, died of lung cancer. (For more about the show, see Stuart Elliott’s Advertising column from Monday.) At the beginning of the 20th century, only women thought to have loose morals smoked in public. A New York Times article in 1901 warned that women’s smoking of cigarettes was “growing to be a menace in this country.” In 1904, a police officer stopped a car on Fifth Avenue because one of the passengers, a woman, was smoking inside. Smoking was considered a male domain. A 1919 New York Times article quotes a man saying:

I hate to see women smoking. Apart from the moral reason, they really don’t know how to smoke. One woman smoking one cigarette at a dinner table will stir up more smoke than a whole tableful of men smoking cigars. They don’t seem to know what to do with the smoke. Neither do they know how to hold their cigarettes properly. They make a mess of the whole performance

But the tobacco companies wanted to change this view. “The industry understood that they were half of humanity,” Dr. Jackler said. So in 1928, Edward Bernays, often considered the father of modern public relations, was retained by American Tobacco Company to help get women to smoke.

Recognizing that women were still riding high on the suffrage movement, Mr. Bernays used the equality angle as the basis for his new campaign. He convinced a number of genteel women, including his own secretary, to march in the 1929 Easter Day parade down Fifth Avenue and light up cigarettes in a defiant show of their liberation.

One woman who lit a Lucky Strike told the reporter from the New York Evening World that she “first got the idea for this campaign when a man on the street asked her to extinguish her cigarette because it embarrassed him. ‘I talked it over with my friends, and we decided it was high time something was done about the 'situation.' As described in Larry Tye’s biography of Mr. Bernays, “The Father of Spin,” the media ate it up:

Ten young women turned out, marching down Fifth Avenue with their lighted “torches of freedom,” and the newspapers loved it. Two-column pictures showed elegant ladies, with floppy hats and fur-trimmed coats, cigarettes held self-consciously by their sides, as they paraded down the wide boulevard. Dispatches ran the next day, on page one, in papers from Fremont, Nebraska, to Portland, Oregon, to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The Times published an article the next day on the Easter Parade, with headline saying in part, “Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of 'Freedom.' “Within a year, it became acceptable for woman to smoke outside,” Dr. Jackler said. The cigarettes became known as “torches of freedom.” Cigarette companies then started tailoring their messages to women. One of the most resonant themes was that smoking would keep women slim (even then, women thought thinner was better). Lucky Strikes ran a campaign pitching, “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet.” Other advertisements cast shadow images of plump women behind slim ones, implying that the difference was smoking.

Dr. Jackler said his mother came of age influenced by the ads. She started smoking in college in the 1940s at the University of Vermont. Her cancer had prompted his interest in that era of tobacco marketing. (Now, more women die of lung cancer than from breast cancer.) “She thought it would be smart and sassy thing to smoke,” Dr. Jackler said. “She thought it would make her elegant and mature and sophisticated.”

Documents from the files of the tobacco companies, released in 1998, indicated they had studied female smoking habits through research projects with names like “Tomorrow’s Female,” “Cosmo” and “Virile Female.” Marketing cigarettes for women continued with the introduction of Virginia Slims in 1968, which for decades used the theme “You’ve come a long way, baby” as an allusion to the feminist movement. “There is a bump in women’s smoking in the 1970s,” Dr. Jackler said. That increase has shown up now, he added, as more cases of “lung cancer and emphysema, because they started smoking in the ’70s because of the Virginia Slim ads.”

The restrictions of the tobacco companies’ 1998 settlement with the states circumscribed their use of cartoon characters like Joe Camel, outdoor advertising and certain magazines. The intent was to limit marketing to youth. But last year, R. J. Reynolds introduced Camel No. 9s, a feminine sounding brand whose name tries to evoke perfumes like Chanel No. 19, as well as a song about romance, “Love Potion No. 9.”

Camels No. 9 uses phrases like “light and luscious,” comes in fuchsia and teal packaging, and has flowers in its ads. Some say this blatant effort would be laughable if it weren’t so pernicious. The soft imagery, of course, is strikingly different from a woman featured in New York City’s antismoking advertisement — Marie, who has had 20 amputations because of her addiction to cigarettes.

(Image Courtesy of Stanford University, tobacco.stanford.edu)