Bernays "Torches of Freedom" Campaign Uses Feminism to Sell Cigarettes

Edward Bernays orchestrates his most famous propaganda campaign, hiring a group of young women to march in New York’s Easter Parade while smoking cigarettes and announcing to press photographers that they are lighting “torches of freedom” in a strike against male domination. The staged event, presented as spontaneous feminist protest, generates nationwide newspaper coverage and helps break the taboo against women smoking in public. American Tobacco Company’s Lucky Strike brand sales to women increase dramatically, demonstrating how corporate PR can hijack social movements for commercial purposes.

Bernays consulted psychoanalyst A.A. Brill, who advised that cigarettes represented phallic symbols of male power, and that women would embrace smoking as an act of sexual liberation and gender equality. The campaign targets the growing women’s rights consciousness while concealing its commercial origins. Participants are hired through modeling agencies and coached to appear as society debutantes, not paid spokesmodels. Press releases frame the event as authentic protest rather than advertising. Newspapers across the country run the story as news rather than recognizing it as manufactured publicity.

The Torches of Freedom campaign establishes the template for astroturf marketing that disguises commercial campaigns as grassroots movements. Bernays’ innovation is the use of manufactured news events that journalists cover as spontaneous phenomena, bypassing consumer skepticism of direct advertising. The technique spreads across industries: staged protests, front groups with populist-sounding names, and manufactured controversies designed to generate free media coverage. Meanwhile, American Tobacco conceals the emerging evidence of tobacco’s health effects for decades. The campaign demonstrates how public relations can simultaneously exploit progressive movements while advancing products that harm the constituencies those movements purport to serve. Women’s lung cancer rates, once negligible, will rise to epidemic levels in subsequent decades.