Light a Torch for Freedom!
New attitudes toward women and smoking had helped sell more cigarettes in the period after the first world war. But for the head of American Tobacco Company, George Washington Hill, those gains were not enough. He saw the female audience as "a gold mine right in our front yard" which they were not properly exploiting due to some (Brandt 82) Lingering stigmas against women smoking in public seemed and barrier to sales, and Hill wanted to find ways to remove that stigma and encourage more women to smoke in restaurants or on the street. Hill believed women would smoke more if they could smoke everywhere:
How can we get women to smoke on the street? They're smoking indoors. But damn it, if they spend half the time outdoors and we can get 'em to smoke outdoors, we'll damn near double our female market. (Brandt 83)
Hill hired a leader in the emerging field of public relations and marketing, Edward Bernays. During World War I, Bernays worked for the Committee on Public Information where he developed his views on creating effective propaganda. A nephew of Freud, Bernays sought to use psychology to shape public opinion. He believed that only using advertising was not a good enough tactic--people needed to believe that they totally exercised free choice in deciding to smoke, and should feel they came to the decision on their own without influence. (Brandt 87). Bernays recognized that he could create a relationship between the desire of women for equal rights, and the right to smoke in public. Wishing to establish this more widely in the minds of women without overtly advertising, he devised a staged "news" event to have women at the annual New York City Easter Parade light up Lucky Strikes.. He enlisted the help of a committed feminist, Ruth Hale, who invited women to come to the parade to smoke, urging:
Bernays and Hale successfully recruited a few prominent women to appear in the parade smoking.Women!
Light another torch of freedom!
Fight another sex taboo.
(Brandt 85)
It's now a matter of some debate how successful the stunt truly was in promoting smoking in public for women. Bernays claimed that it was a hugely successful and seminal event, but perhaps this was part of his own publicity in shaping of his reputation.
Modern historians have started to doubt his claim, and have shown that coverage was more modest than Bernays claimed in his memoir. The New York Times did cover the parade and included a mention of the women smoking, but not in an extensive way. As a master of public relations it is possible that the story of "Torches for Freedom" as a great victory for cigarette sales was an example itself of fake news. (Murphree 258-281)
As seen in the advertisement below, Lucky Strikes cigarettes emphasized the event and celebrated the freedom of women to smoke anywhere.
The theme of equality for women was revisited in the Virginia Slims advertising of the 1965's-1980's.
While it is not possible to look back and measure how successful (or not) advertising and publicity campaigns were, it is clear that cigarette consumption took off after the 1920's, largely through increased sales to women. Cigarette manufacturers also heavily promoted their product in movies and television.