What Does a Cigarette Mean to a Woman?

Torches of Freedom, Part 4 of 9. Here's the question that cracked the case, and the operation it produced. — Kiler Davenport

You know that feeling when an ad doesn't tell you anything about the product, but you walk away feeling something? A little lifted. A little more like the person you wish you were?

That feeling is not an accident. It's the product.

Bernays asked Dr. A.A. Brill, one of America's first Freudians, a single question: what does a cigarette mean to a woman? Brill's Freudian answer tied cigarettes to male power and said that a woman lighting one in public was challenging male dominance. Bernays had his lever. He didn't need to prove smoking was pleasant or healthy. He needed to call it liberation.

Then came the execution, and it was a piece of theater:

• The cast: young, fashionable, respectable women recruited through a contact at Vogue, told to hide Lucky Strikes and join the Easter parade on Fifth Avenue.
• The date: Easter Sunday, March 31, 1929.
• The press: tipped off in advance by a source who "heard" a women's rights demonstration was coming. Photographers were waiting.
• The line: the women told reporters they were lighting "torches of freedom."

And here's the part that should stay with you. Neither Bernays, nor Lucky Strike, nor the American Tobacco Company appears in that coverage. The New York Times ran it the next day as news. Readers saw a feminist event that had simply happened.

The hard truth: the manipulation worked because it was undetectable. Nobody who read that story felt sold to. That's the whole design.

Part 5: what it actually achieved, and what the legend gets wrong. Because even this story has been spun.

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