All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today

by Elizabeth Comen

The ad campaign resulting from Bernays’s conversation with Brill is an early, notable example of how doctors would lend their expertise—and sometimes even a medical stamp of approval—to marketing products that were the opposite of healthy. It also might be the first documented instance of the phenomenon known as “woke capitalism,” in which corporations sold products to women under the guise of helping to liberate them. The so-called protest, in which women smoked openly at the Easter parade, was actually a stunt staged by Bernays, based on the ideas articulated by Brill. Before the parade, Bernays strategically spread rumors that a group of suffragettes planned to demonstrate there by openly smoking cigarettes. He carefully selected the group of ten women who would light up alongside Bertha Hunt—herself an employee of Lucky Strike—noting that “while they should be good looking, they should not look too model-y,” lest ordinary women find the whole enterprise unrelatable. And before the parade, he enlisted the help of a committed feminist, Ruth Hale, whose invitation to her fellow activists to smoke at the parade could have doubled as ad copy: WOMEN! LIGHT ANOTHER TORCH OF FREEDOM! FIGHT ANOTHER SEX TABOO.