Today is Easter Sunday. In the past we've noted the day by reminding readers of the sometimes bittersweet origins of chocolate bunnies beloved by Eastertide children. This year we take a look back 80 years to the New York Easter Parade of 1929. There may be found a 2-edged tale:► of a Madison Avenue manipulation of women that's worthy of Mad Men from a more recent time; and
► of how the mores of the day worked to mask even an accomplished woman.
Our story begins in 1928, when the American Tobacco Co. retained publicity wizard Edward Bernays to figure out how to break entrenched taboos against women and tobacco. He did so by linking women's smoking to women's suffrage:
Recognizing that women were still riding high on the suffrage movement, Mr. Bernays used the equality angle as the basis for his new campaign. He convinced a number of genteel women, including his own secretary, to march in the 1929 Easter Day parade down Fifth Avenue and light up cigarettes in a defiant show of their liberation.
Interviewed by a New York Times reporter, 1 Easter Parader
explained the cigarettes were 'torches of freedom' lighting the way to the day when women would smoke on the street as casually as men.
That trend arrived within a year and hardly has let up since.
World Health Organization "statistics show that the number of women smoking will triple over the next generation with more than 200 million women dying prematurely from tobacco induced diseases." Here at home, nearly 1 out of 5 American women smokes -- and so runs extreme risks:
Smoking is directly responsible for 80 percent of lung cancer deaths in women in the U.S. each year. In 1987, lung cancer surpassed breast cancer as the leading cause of cancer deaths among women in the U.S.
In the end, then, Bernays' message of liberation seems to have meant that we were free to lose grandmothers, as well as grandfathers, to tobacco-related terminal illness.
A close look at coverage of this Easter Parade unearthed yet another way the message of women's freedom was Mad-ly mythical.
In the above 1929 photo, a thoroughly modern Manhattan couple eye one another as they march, he with his cigarette in his mouth, her with hers in the hand she's tucked into the crook of his arm. It's captioned as follows:
Mrs. Taylor-Scott Hardin parades down New York's Fifth Avenue with her husband while smoking 'torches of freedom,' a gesture of protest for absolute equality with men.
Much cyberdigging indicated that "Mrs. Taylor-Scott Hardin" was no shadow of her husband's self. Rather, it appears that she was a great-niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe, that she'd published her first story, "The Key Glorious," in the Boston Herald at age eleven, and that at the time of the photo she was a 21-year-old writer and assistant editor at Vogue. Within years she'd divorce her husband -- an aspiring writer whose career would never equal hers -- and become the 1st woman to report other than women's and society news for The New York Times. Often using the pen name Nancy Hale, this woman born Anna Westcott Hale would write many novels, newspaper and magazine articles, short stories, and children's books before her death in 1989. (credit for circa 1930s photo below right) According this website:
Her protagonists are most often women, usually rather well-to-do. As they go about their daily lives, skillfully drawn through careful attention to theminutest of details, these women come to an epiphany. Their moments of illumination bring better understanding of the patterns of their lives, but Hale's epiphanies confer what Hale's friend and sometime editor William Maxwell called 'a sad wisdom.' They are, in the words of Anne Hobson Freeman, 'penetrating portraits of women who may seem calm, and even satisfied, but beneath the surface are struggling to retain their self-esteem and individuality.'
That struggle no doubt resonated with many a women whose declaration of freedom was identified only by reference to the name of her husband.
