Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the social debate on women, health and smoking in the New York Times from 1870 until 1929. The paper aimed to establish whether smoking for women was a form of oppression and whether it was publicly known that smoking is harmful in decades preceding the “Torches of Freedom” campaign run by Edward L. Bernays. This criticism for engineering women’s smoking, and thus harming women’s health up to today causes harm to the reputation of the public relations (PR) industry.

Design/methodology/approach

Articles were analysed per decade and a total of 294 articles from the New York Times was analysed. The coverage was analysed using two themes, smoking and health and women and smoking and discourse analysis have been carried out on articles in these themes to explore what was known of smoking and whether the social perception of women smoking was oppressive and could be seen as a woman’s issue that “Torches of Freedom” addressed.

Findings

Findings show that it was not known that cigarettes were harmful to health and that smoking can be seen as constituting part of women’s oppression in the US before the “Torches of Freedom” campaign. The oppression of women who smoked intensified during the 1920s and Bernays’ Torches of Freedom campaign directly addressed an existing social issue rather than engineering a campaign and manipulating women to start smoking.

Practical implications

The paper highlights the revolutionary potential in Bernays’ campaign. This could inspire researchers and consumers to keep on critically reflecting on PR campaigns while still appreciating any progressive agenda they might contribute to. Simultaneously, PR practitioners may take away from the article that a message of social relevance may just be more memorable than the advertised brand itself.

Originality/value

This paper engages with the coverage of the New York Times, a newspaper that is often mentioned in the context of the “Torches of Freedom” campaign success and explores in detail what the debate on smoking, health and women were in nearly 60 years preceding the much-criticised campaign.

中文翻译：

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从纽约时报报道（1870-1929 年）的角度分析伯奈斯的“自由火炬”运动之前的吸烟辩论

目的

这篇论文的目的是分析纽约时报从 1870 年到 1929 年间关于女性、健康和吸烟的社会争论。这篇论文旨在确定吸烟对女性来说是否是一种压迫，以及吸烟是否为公众所知在 Edward L. Bernays 发起的“自由火炬”运动之前的几十年里，这是有害的。这种对工程女性吸烟的批评，从而危害女性健康直到今天，对公关（PR）行业的声誉造成了损害。

设计/方法/方法

每十年对文章进行分析，总共分析了来自纽约时报的 294 篇文章。使用两个主题对报道进行了分析，吸烟与健康和女性，并对这些主题的文章进行了吸烟和话语分析，以探讨人们对吸烟的了解以及女性吸烟的社会观念是否具有压迫性，是否可以被视为一种“自由的火炬”所解决的女性问题。

发现

调查结果显示，在“自由火炬”运动之前，人们并不知道香烟对健康有害，吸烟可以被视为构成美国女性压迫的一部分。1920 年代对吸烟女性的压迫加剧，伯内斯的自由火炬运动直接解决了现有的社会问题，而不是策划一场运动并操纵女性开始吸烟。

实际影响

该论文强调了伯奈斯竞选活动的革命潜力。这可以激励研究人员和消费者继续批判性地反思公关活动，同时仍然欣赏他们可能为之做出贡献的任何进步议程。同时，公关从业者可能会从文章中了解到，与社会相关的信息可能比广告品牌本身更令人难忘。

原创性/价值

本文涉及《纽约时报》的报道，该报纸经常在“自由火炬”运动取得成功的背景下被提及，并详细探讨了在“自由火炬”运动成功之前的近 60 年中，关于吸烟、健康和女性的辩论是什么。备受批评的竞选活动。