Torches of Freedom: How Edward Bernays Tricked Women into Smoking

On Easter Sunday, 1929, the air on Fifth Avenue changed forever. Amidst the bonnets and the church bells, a group of young, wealthy debutantes reached into their garters, pulled out Lucky Strikes, and lit them up in front of the press.

The next day, the New York Times ran the headline: “Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of ‘Freedom’.”

To the public, it looked like a spontaneous act of feminist rebellion—a suffragette protest against the patriarchal rule that said only men could smoke in public. In reality, it was one of the most cynical and successful marketing stunts in history, orchestrated by a man who didn’t believe in “truth,” but in “perception.”

Meet Edward Bernays, the man who taught the world that you don’t sell a product; you sell an emotion. And to sell cancer sticks to women, he sold them feminism.

The Problem: “We are losing half the market”

In 1928, George Washington Hill, the President of the American Tobacco Company, had a problem. His brand, Lucky Strike, was selling millions, but he was hitting a ceiling.

“If I can crack that market, I can double my volume,” Hill told Bernays. “It’s like opening a gold mine right in our front yard.”

The “market” he was talking about was women. At the time, a woman smoking in the street was a social taboo comparable to public drunkenness. It was associated with prostitution and loose morals. Respectable women smoked only in the privacy of their boudoirs, if at all.

Hill wanted to break that taboo. He hired Bernays, who was already making a name for himself as a “Public Relations Counsel”—a term Bernays invented because “Propaganda” had gotten a bad rap after World War I.

The Insight: Uncle Freud and the Phallic Symbol

Edward Bernays had a secret weapon: his uncle was Sigmund Freud.

While other advertisers were listing facts (“Our tobacco is toasted!”), Bernays was reading his uncle’s books on psychoanalysis. He understood that human beings are driven by irrational, unconscious desires.

To solve the “woman problem,” Bernays consulted Dr. A.A. Brill, a prominent psychoanalyst and disciple of Freud. He asked Brill a simple question: What does the cigarette mean to the female subconscious?

Brill’s answer was pure Freudian theory: “Cigarettes are torches of freedom to women. They are trying to become more like men… The cigarette is a phallic symbol.”

Brill explained that if Bernays could position the cigarette as a challenge to male power—a way for women to own their own “penis,” symbolically—they wouldn’t just smoke it; they would fight for the right to smoke it.

The Stunt: Lighting the Torches

Bernays went to work. He knew that if he ran an ad saying “Women, please smoke,” it would fail. It had to look like a movement.

He hired his own secretary, Bertha Hunt, to pose as the leader of the protest. He then sent telegrams to a carefully selected list of debutantes—wealthy, high-society women who would look elegant in the papers, not “trashy.”

The instruction was simple: Join the Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue, and at a specific signal, light a Lucky Strike.

Bernays did one more thing: he tipped off the press. He told photographers that a group of suffragettes was planning a scandal. When the cameras clicked and the reporters asked what was happening, the girls delivered the line Bernays had scripted for them:

“We are lighting Torches of Freedom.”

It was a masterstroke. By calling them “Torches of Freedom,” he framed the act of buying a Lucky Strike as an act of liberation. Anyone who opposed it wasn’t just anti-smoking; they were anti-woman.

The “Green Ball”: Manipulating Fashion

With the social taboo broken, Bernays faced a second hurdle. Women still didn’t want to buy Lucky Strikes. Why? Because the pack was green.

Research showed that women found the forest-green packaging ugly and difficult to match with their outfits. George Washington Hill suggested changing the package color.

Bernays refused. “If you change the pack, you lose the brand identity,” he said. “Instead, I will change the fashion.”

Bernays launched a campaign to make green the “It” color of 1934.

• He organized the “Green Ball” at the Waldorf-Astoria, inviting society’s elite to wear green gowns.
• He lobbied French fashion houses to include green in their fall collections.
• He even wrote to interior decorators and department stores, tipping them off that “Green is the color of the season.”

It worked. Within six months, green dresses, green hats, and green gloves were filling the department stores. The Lucky Strike pack was no longer an eyesore; it was a matching accessory.

The Body Image Trap: “Reach for a Lucky”

Bernays had one final card to play: Vanity.

In the 1920s, the “flapper” era brought the thin silhouette into style. Bernays saw an opportunity to position cigarettes not just as a tool of freedom, but as a tool of beauty.

He launched the slogan: “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.”

He encouraged women to smoke whenever they felt hunger pangs. It was the birth of the cigarette diet. The campaign was so successful that candy sales dropped, and the sugar industry actually tried to sue the American Tobacco Company.

The Legacy

Edward Bernays lived to be 103 years old. In his later years, he expressed regret for his work with tobacco, especially as the link to cancer became undeniable.

But the damage was done. The “Torches of Freedom” campaign didn’t just double the market for Lucky Strike; it created a blueprint for modern manipulation. Bernays proved that you can get people to do almost anything—even poison themselves—if you can convince them that it is an expression of their own identity.

He taught the world that the best way to sell a product is to hide the salesman and make the customer believe it was their idea all along.