Technology Diary 3: Cigarettes

As a smoker who isn’t “trying to quit,” I do still think it’s important to challenge myself from time to time with scary facts about the tobacco industry that, if I don’t kick the habit right then and there, after learning the gruesome detail, will question my integrity and what I claim to value. And while it may be a stretch to call cigarettes technology, the historical gendering of the product, specifically the tobacco industry’s exploitation of feminist ideals, adds an interesting facet to the discourse around progress within women’s movements.

Prior to World War I, female smokers were associated with “loose sexual morality and even prostitution” (Marine-Street).  Thus, the only women who appeared in tobacco advertisements during this time were depicted as eroticized objects serving cigarettes to men, not smoking them themselves. Then, during the war, the shifting social atmosphere indicated to the tobacco industry the opportunity to loop in as consumers that hefty other half of the population: women. As women moved from the domestic sphere to the public sphere, filling in for all the men fighting abroad, their newfound (relative) mobility and independence made them a perfect target for tobacco marketing.

The association between smoking cigarettes and being independent has always, been a strong one. The irony therein, of course, is that cigarettes are highly addictive and consumers can hardly argue that smoking is an autonomous act. Regardless, the tobacco industry keenly took advantage of this link during and after the war, extending its application to growing and developing feminist values of the mid 20^th century. Natalie Marine-Street, in her article “Stanford Researchers’ Cigarette Ad Collection Reveals How Big Tobacco Targets Women and Adolescent Girls,” emphasizes this very point:

To vanquish remaining cultural taboos, [tobacco companies] appropriated individualist and feminist messages and presented smoking as a way for women to demonstrate their liberation from confining traditions. In an ironic echo of the giant suffrage parades of the prior decade, one enterprising company marched cigarette-smoking women in flapper-style dress down New York’s 5th Avenue. They called the cigarettes the women’s ‘torches of freedom.’ (Marine-Street)

Another point of attack that tobacco marketers used to hook women on their product was to manipulate female’s insecurities around body image. By encouraging women to “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet,” for example, they purported the idea that women could and should maintain a thin figure by smoking cigarettes (Marine-Street). This campaign has only grown over the years, despite current knowledge about the massive health risks involved in the habit. In the 1970’s, tobacco companies invented “Slims” and “Thins” as a type of cigarette to reinforce their efforts to exploit women’s ideas about beauty and their bodies. Today, we have certainly not overcome such demeaning and underhanded tactics; instead, women are now free to smoke “Superslims.”

More Tobacco Ads targeted towards Women

Works Cited

Marine-Street, Natalie. “Stanford Researchers’ Cigarette Ad Collection Reveals How Big Tobacco Targets Women and Adolescent Girls.” The Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Stanford University, 26 Apr. 2012. Web. 24 Oct. 2013.