The long, uneasy history of women, cigarettes, and freedom

From public menace to marketed freedom

Long before cigarettes meant freedom, women who smoked were treated as a public order problem. In early 20th-century America, a woman smoking in her own car could provoke official warning or social ruin. A 1914 Washington Post editorial claimed a man might date a smoking woman, but he would never marry her. In 1922, a New York alderman, Peter McGuinness, blamed women’s public smoking for making men “desert their homes… and even commit murder.”

The backlash reveals that the cigarette was seen as a moral accelerant, capable of dislodging women from prescribed roles.

In Women and Smoking Since 1890 (Routledge Series), social historian Rosemary Elliot writes, “The social meaning of smoking was gendered,” and that the act functioned as “a visible delineator of gendered social space.” In 1900, The Ladies Realm published a discussion titled ‘Should Women Smoke?’ — a question that itself signalled how unsettled the issue remained.

The First World War loosened norms. Women entered workplaces where men smoked openly, making the habit harder to confine to the home. The suffrage movement, culminating in the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, sharpened attention on gender inequality. Smoking began, tentatively, to operate as a visible sign of defiance.

The backlash was swift. That same year, the US Surgeon General warned that women’s smoking caused nervousness, insomnia and “ruined the complexion” — a medical admonition framed through the lens of feminine vanity. American suffragist Mary Garrett Hay protested New York laws that prohibited women from smoking in public. “Women should not be discriminated against in any way,” she argued.

It was into this conflicted social scene that corporate advertising, eager to tap into a whole new market, stepped in. They had already mythologised cigarettes for men. The Marlboro Man remains one of the most enduring advertising icons of the 20th century. For women, the symbolism required careful recalibration. Smoking had to be detached from moral decay and recorded as elegance.

In 1929, Edward Bernays, referred to as “the father of public relations”, staged one of the most memorable PR stunts of the century. He hired debutantes to march in New York’s Easter Parade holding cigarettes aloft, branding them “Torches of Freedom”, a direct echo of suffragette imagery.

Cigarette ads targeting women. (Source: Public Domain. Note: smoking is injurious to health)

Manufacturers slimmed down the cigarette, both literally and figuratively. Slogans like “Mild as May” and promises of weight control (“Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet”) tied smoking to elegance and self-control.

The advertisements juxtaposed contemporary, fashionable women against caricatured images of traditional women. By 1968, Virginia Slims was launched with the iconic tagline: “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

Gradually, young women, Emilee Gilbert, Associate Professor and Associate Dean Research in the School of Psychology, Western Sydney University, writes in ‘Performing Femininity: Young Women’s Gendered Practice of Cigarette Smoking’ (Journal of Gender Studies, 2007), learned to perform femininity through the act of smoking: how the cigarette was held, how the wrist was twisted, smoking a cigarette in hand, how ash was tapped, and how smoke was exhaled. Liberation became a performance, closely policed by aesthetic norms.

The market responded. According to the US government estimates, the number of women aged 18 to 20 who began smoking tripled between 1911 and 1925, and more than tripled again by 1939. Yet, Elliot notes, uptake did not erase inequality. Even at its peak, smoking prevalence among women lagged far behind men’s: between 36 and 45 per cent of women smoked in the post-war decades, compared to over 80 per cent of men.

The paradox of ‘liberation’

This marketed liberation concealed a stark paradox. As feminist scholars Zoi Triandafilidis, Jane M Ussher, Janette Perz, and Kate Huppatz write in Doing and Undoing Femininities (Feminism & Psychology, 2017), smoking served “both positive and negative functions” for women. It felt transgressive and empowering, yet also invited stigma and anxiety about respectability, a burden rarely placed on male smokers.

When medical evidence mounted in the mid-20th century, a grim divergence emerged. Men quit earlier and in greater numbers. Smoking rates became highest among the most constrained women: lone mothers, the working class, and those facing structural precarity. Giving up smoking remained a predominantly white male privilege. Smoking became a way of diffusing the conflicts of women’s social roles, particularly in caregiving and service work.

The global data reflects enduring inequality. In India, NFHS-5 (2019-21) data shows that 9% of women and 38% of men aged 15 and older use tobacco, with higher rates in rural areas (10.5% for women and 42.7% for men). Logistic regression showed that rural residents were 1.6 times more likely to smoke than urban residents. Age and gender significantly impact smoking patterns as females were 13 times more likely to smoke compared to males, and the awareness of health risks related to smoking also influences smoking behaviour.

Similarly, in parts of Australia, lesbian and bisexual women are approximately twice as likely to smoke as the general population.

As sociologist Barbara Jacobson argued in The Ladykillers: Why Smoking is a Feminist Issue, cigarettes often functioned less as expressions of freedom than as mechanisms for managing anger, exhaustion, and constrained lives. She issued a powerful critique of societal priorities, writing that “women were only valued as ‘receptacles for future generations’; and anti-smoking advertising aimed at women during pregnancy, for the sake of the baby, ignored the motivations of individual women to smoke.” The Ladykillers was a clarion call to women to take the issue of smoking seriously. Inspired by Susie Orbach’s Fat is a Feminist Issue, Jacobson brought her own experience as a smoking cessation counsellor to bear in a strong attack on what she saw as the tobacco industry’s exploitation of women through advertising and marketing.

The cinematic cliché

Popular culture soon absorbed the shorthand, flattening feminism into a visual trope of the smoking woman. In Hollywood and Bollywood, a smoking woman became a lazy shortcut to signal modernity, rebellion, or moral decay.

In Hindi cinema, female characters who smoke or drink are often framed as chaotic or in need of correction. Films such as Cocktail and Veere Di Wedding present “progressive” lifestyles only to discipline them through plot-driven humiliation or apology, while men who smoked were portrayed as macho or intellectual. This shorthand has measurable consequences. A 2009 study published in the British Medical Journal found that Indian adolescents with high exposure to tobacco use in Bollywood films were significantly more likely to report having used tobacco themselves.

The flame reclaimed

It is against this cluttered history that the images from Iran crackle with new meaning. In a theocracy that polices women’s bodies and behaviours, public smoking by women is itself transgressive. Burning the Supreme Leader’s image is another serious crime. Combining these acts — lighting a cigarette from his burning portrait — fuses political sacrilege with personal autonomy into a single, defiant flame.

This visual grammar of protest has appeared elsewhere. In India, a 2023 video showed Dalit rights activist Priya Das lighting a cigarette from a burning Manusmriti, a text critiqued for upholding caste and gender hierarchies. She clarified she doesn’t smoke; the act was purely symbolic, meant to burn “ideas of hypocrisy.”

The “torch of freedom” has come full circle, from a corporate PR stunt to a literal flame snatched from the icons of oppression. In Iran, the cigarette is no longer a marketed prop or a cinematic cliché. It has been reclaimed, however fraught its history, as a tangible spark of rebellion.

References

Blakemore, E. (2018, October 3). When smoking was a feminist act. The Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/10/03/when-smoking-was-feminist-act/

Elliot, R. (2005). Women and smoking since 1890 (1st ed.). Routledge.

Euronews. (2026, January 10). Protest creativity: Iranian women light cigarettes on burning portrait of the ayatollah. Euronews.
https://www.euronews.com/2026/01/10/protest-creativity-iranian-women-light-cigarettes-on-burning-portrait-of-the-ayatollah

Gilbert, E. (2007). Performing femininity: Young women’s gendered practice of cigarette smoking. Journal of Gender Studies, 16(2).

Michna, N. A. (2016). “You’ve come a long way, baby”: The evolution of feminine identity models on the example of contemporary language of advertising. The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, 41(2).
https://doi.org/10.19205/41.16.5

Sarkar, R. (2024). Regional and socioeconomic dimensions of tobacco consumption in India: What do NFHS-5 and GATS-2 data reveal? International Journal of Health Sciences and Research, 14(12).
https://doi.org/10.52403/ijhsr.20241232

The smoking feminist. (2008, October 14). Sociological Images, The Society Pages.

“The Smoking Feminist”

Today in feminist history: Women deserve to smoke in public too (March 27, 1922). (2020, March 27). Ms. Magazine.

Today in Feminist History: Women Deserve to Smoke in Public Too! (March 27, 1922)

Triandafilidis, Z., Ussher, J. M., Perz, J., & Huppatz, K. (2017). Doing and undoing femininities: An intersectional analysis of young women’s smoking. Feminism & Psychology, 27(4).
https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353517693030