Let's settle scores: you still can't tolerate women smoking? Well, this is for you

A common classist and casteist worldview can conclude that men from low-income backgrounds are the perpetrators of such judgment, but that would be a fallacy. The comments, stares and headshakes of disapproval are brought on just as much by savarna, privileged men who deem themselves the guardians of Indian sanksaar. Not to mention other women reinforcing this patriarchal notion, clicking their tongues at such abhorrent behaviour as well.

Torches of freedom & commercial gain

The tone of this article’s narrative suggests that women should have the right to choose for their own bodies when it comes to smoking, but this narrative isn’t new. It has long been a tool for big tobacco businesses to widen their consumer bases.

In the 19th century, big tobacco companies focused their advertising on their consumer base of men. The social stigma around women smoking made their share in the consumer market negligible, and the habit was often attributed to sex workers or women who society considered ‘immoral’. However, George Washington Hill, the president of American Tobacco Company, saw women as an untapped market opportunity to maximise profit. In 1929, the company organised a parade of women marching down New York City’s Fifth Avenue holding lit cigarettes that were coined ‘torches of freedom’. This location wasn’t a random choice, and was remnant of the 1915 Suffrage Parade march where tens of thousands of women marched across Fifth Avenue for the right to vote. The similarity drawn between these two marches posed smoking as ‘liberation’ and ‘emancipation’ for women, and the tobacco market grew.

Big tobacco company Philip Morris also rode the wave of feminism to the bank in 1968 with its marketing slogan ‘You’ve come a long way, baby’ for Virginia Slims. This represent a long trend of ‘feminisation of cigarettes’ with product variants that were extra slim, low-tar, low-smell, menthol and so on. And this trend of big tobacco companies using women’s liberation as a marketing tagline isn’t a solely American phenomenon.

‘You’ve come a long way, baby’ for Virginia Slims