PRESS RELEASE

A group of female performers will re-enact a publicity stunt originally designed to encourage women to start smoking. The performance will take place at 1pm in the Victoria Embankment Gardens opposite the British American Tobacco Association in Aldwych, London.

The performance, ‘The Smoking Suffragettes’, is based on Bernays’ PR event at the 1929 Easter Parade in New York City, where a group of debutantes were employed to demonstrate the equality of females through smoking in public.
He stood by ready to tell the media that these women were suffragettes smoking their “torches of freedom”.

Instead of smoking cigarettes these modern day suffragettes will smoke vibrators. By replacing the cigarette with a vibrator, the artist Lucy Panesar taps into Bernays’ psychoanalytical ideas about female sexuality.

The location of this performance, opposite the British American Tobacco Association, is significant as Bernays was employed by the American Tobacco Company to increase the sale of cigarettes to women.

This short performance is accompanied by music sung by another of Bernays’ clients, the opera singer Enrique Caruso.

“I was astounded when I first heard how Bernays exploited the suffragettes’ desire for liberation. So this performance is a way of presenting the story back to BAT, the company who originally initiated the campaign,” says Lucy Panesar.

For more information email lucypanesar@yahoo.co.uk

© Copyright Lucy Panesar 2007