As both the first and most popular female-specific cigarette brand, Virginia Slims wants women to believe that smoking will help lead them on the road to independence and empowerment. At the height of the Women's Liberation Movement, Philip Morris launched Virginia Slims with the slogan "You've Come a Long Way, Baby!"
Just six years after the introduction of Virginia Slims and other female-targeted campaigns, the smoking rate of 12-year-old girls increased by 110 percent.
Using imagery of young, beautiful women in its advertising, Virginia Slims portrays smoking as part of a glamorous, thin, independent and healthy lifestyle. But the promises in the ads contradict the reality of the product. Cigarettes are addictive and render their users dependent. Smoking causes disease and death, not a healthy lifestyle. Yet, despite decades of evidence that link smoking to death and disease, Philip Morris has continued to promote Virginia Slims with the same campaign messages and images for over four decades.
The result of Virginia Slims and other female-targeted campaigns is clear: more women now die of lung cancer than breast, ovarian and cervical cancers combined. Each year, an average of 175,000 women in the US will die from a tobacco-related disease. And, countless others will suffer from spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, low birth weight babies, and infertility.
Today, while the tobacco industry continues to target women in the U.S., it has also set its sights on unsuspecting women in developing nations where basic education, let alone tobacco education, is often non-existent or denied to women.
