I stumbled across this compilation of Virginia Slims commercials from 1969 as part of research for my final essay for Women & Power.
Here’s the excerpt from my paper that referenced these commercials as an example of consumer feminism:
Cigarette companies pushed their purse-sized cancer sticks onto women by advertising smoking as a way for women to show their liberation, not to mention the possibility of becoming thin and therefore beautiful like the anorexic models puffing away in the ads. Philip Morris marketed the first cigarette “for women only” in 1968 when they unveiled Virginia Slims with their “You’ve come a long way, baby” ad campaign.
Commercials told women that Virginia Slims were “slim cigarettes for women only, tailored for the feminine hand, slimmer than the fat cigarettes men smoke, with flavor women like – mellow, mild Virginia flavor, in slim purse packs.” The campaign included many different commercials but all carried the same theme. Images of suffragist parades would take over the screen with a male voice-over said, “men had all the rights, then at last women won their rights and one by one, they won them all.” Then the screen was filled with very thin women dressed in modern fashion with complete makeup, false eyelashes and hair done-up in 70s flair, and smoking away on her Virginia Slim cigarette. The male-voice over was replaced by a jingle sung by an all-male group: “You’ve come a long way, baby, to get where you got to today. You got your own cigarette now, baby, you’ve come a long, long way.” Now “liberated” women could purchase, display and even breathe their equality with cigarettes.
The ad’s message assumes all is equal now between men and women, all you have to do to be a part of it is buy and smoke cigarettes. And since sex and beauty ideals were also used to sell the cigarettes, not only could you embrace your equality, you could also get thin and catch a man. Virginia Slims continued this type of advertising through the 1990s when cigarette advertising was banned. Ad slogans included “It’s a woman thing” and “Find your voice” – both a variation on the theme of women empowerment, equality and liberation. Ruth Rosen pointed out the paradox posed by this pseudo-feminism, “ads appropriated the language of emancipation in order to sell women products that could harm their health” (Rosen, 2006).
Consumer feminism is a form of backlash since it ignores the systemic sexism and issues women face and focuses on what each individual woman can do to embrace her equality. This brand of pseudo-feminism is predicated on the belief that all things are already equal: women simply have to purchase and consume it. Consumer feminism also promotes unhealthy beauty ideals and this obsession with appearance “reinforced the very non-feminist idea that each woman was responsible for her own failure or success” (Rosen). In other words, equality is yours for the taking. If you fail to, it’s your fault, not the male-dominated, sexist culture in which you live.
Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America, (2006), 311, 313.
Filed under: advertising, women's health, advertising, beauty ideals, cigarettes, consumer feminism, marketing, Ruth Rosen, sexism, smoking, The World Split Open, truth in advertising, Virginia Slims, women
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