It is of course impossible to assign—or deny—definitive credit for something as complex as a change in social norms. Suffice it to say that contemporary reporting of the “Torches of Freedom” event was relatively thin. The New York Times buried its account of the protest halfway through its story on the presumably more urgent subject, the Easter Parade itself: “About a dozen young women strolled back and forth [on Fifth Avenue] while the parade was at its peak, ostentatiously smoking their cigarettes….One of the group explained that the cigarettes were ‘torches of freedom’ lighting the way to the day when women would smoke on the street as casually as men.” The Washington Post would not mention the demonstration until 1991, by which time the event had gathered significance by reason of the story’s propagation; in the end, Bernays’s signal triumph may have been the particularly good job he did capturing the attention of historians.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 240