“Torches of Freedom” was the 1929 publicity campaign that encouraged women to smoke cigarettes publicly during New York’s Easter Parade.
The campaign was organized for the American Tobacco Company by public-relations adviser Edward Bernays. He recruited women to light cigarettes while marching in the parade and presented the act to journalists as a symbolic protest for women’s independence. The cigarettes were Lucky Strikes.
The event connected smoking with women’s rights and personal freedom, even though it was designed to sell tobacco. Bernays understood that a newsworthy public action could generate coverage beyond paid advertisements. Newspaper reports helped spread the image of women smoking as a modern, emancipated behavior.
The campaign did not single-handedly create women’s smoking, and women had smoked before 1929. Its historical importance lies in how deliberately it attached a commercial product to a social movement. The episode is now frequently discussed as an early example of engineered publicity and cause-related marketing.