Still, women have come a long way since the mid-twentieth century, and it’s worth considering just how far-and just how far we have to go. Today, women and men die at similar rates from that disease. In all their advertising, smoking was equated with a set of traits meant to capture the essence of women in a new era of equality-independence, slimness, glamour, and liberation.Īs it happened, the only equality this campaign ended up supporting involved lung cancer. It had a brand-new slogan: “You’ve come a long way, baby.” The company plastered it on billboards nationwide and put it in TV ads that featured women of the early twentieth century being punished for smoking. In 1968, the Phillip Morris Company launched a memorable campaign to sell Virginia Slims, a new brand of cigarettes targeting women, itself a new phenomenon. This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. A cofounder and senior fellow of the Longview Institute, she writes for a wide variety of magazines and journals, including, The History News Network,, The American Prospect, Dissent, The Nation,, and is a regular contributor to the online political Web site Talking Points Memo Caf. She is a former columnist for the Los Angeles Times and editorial writer and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. She is the editor of The Maimie Papers and author of Prostitution in America. Ruth Rosen, a professor emerita at the University of California, Davis, teaches history and public policy at U.C. Using extensive archival research and interviews, Rosen challenges readers to understand the impact of the women's movement and to see why the revolution is far from over. Rosen's fresh look at the recent past reveals fascinating but little-known information including how the FBI hired hundreds of women to infiltrate the movement. Interweaving the personal with the political, she vividly evokes the events and people who participated in our era's most far-reaching social revolution. The Newly Revised and Updated Edition In this enthralling narrative-the first of its kind-historian and journalist Ruth Rosen chronicles the history of the American women's movement from its beginnings in the 1960s to the present.

The World Split Open by Ruth Rosen