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.
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.
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.
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 the 
minutest 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.
On this day in ...
On this day in ...
constructed as journal entries by a "hysterical" woman locked away by her husband. The author later separated from and eventually divorced her husband. She remarried, to a 1st cousin, in 1900, and took the name of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (above left). (photo credit) An author, human rights advocate, social reformer, suffragist, and feminist, she died by suicide in 1935, a few years after learning she had terminal breast cancer.
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:
... 1851, abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe (left) began publishing serial installments of Uncle Tom's Cabin: or Life Among the Lowly in a Washington weekly. Her account of slavery in the South was an instant bestseller when issued in book form the following year. President Abraham Lincoln is said to have declared on meeting Stowe in 1862, "So this is the little lady who made this big war? "
ntal "consequences to the economy of the United States," warned Marshall, 1953 Nobel Peace Prizewinner. "Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist." His tacit reference to the Soviet Union revealed a Cold War subtext: "Any government that is willing to assist in the task of recovery will find full cooperation," but all "which seek to perpetuate human misery in order to profit therefrom politically or otherwise will encounter the opposition of the United States."
