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Jump to full article: New York Times Blogs, 2008-10-10
Author: Jennifer 8. Lee
Intro: 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. . . .
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.’” . . .
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. . . .
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." . . .
But last year, R. J. Reynolds introduced Camel No. 9s
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