What Is Cigarette Power?

At that time there was a taboo against women smoking. One of his early clients, George Hill, the president of the American Tobacco Corporation, asked Bernays to find a way of breaking it. So he called up Dr AA Brill who was a leading psychoanalyst in New York at that time. He told Bernays if he could connect cigarettes with the idea of challenging male power then women would smoke because then they would have their own penises. Why didn't you call your uncle? It seems in the animal. I said let me think about it.