You've Come A Long Way Baby!

It’s Emma Lucy Brown, your Hosiery High Priestess here at Denim Star’s Podcast, “Socks and Sandals and Other Scandals: Morning Cuppa with Emma + Billie”. We want to celebrate International Women’s Day some more! We’ve come a long way baby since the feminist movement was gaining ground in strength and popularity back in the 1960s when the Phillip Morris Company capitalized on shifting attitudes. The ad campaign was for their new brand of ultra-smooth, Virginia Slims cigarettes, where they specifically targeted women, which was itself, said to be a new phenomenon at the time. Every ad put a woman front and centre, equating smoking Virginia Slims with being independent, stylish, confident and liberated: with the slogan “You’ve come a long way baby” speaking directly about the progress women all over, were fighting for at that time. Women indeed have come a long way since the ad first appeared in the 1960s. To this day “you’ve come a long way baby” remains one of the most famous advertising campaign lines in the United States. Now some 50+ odd years later, since the campaign took off, we still celebrate our progress with International Women’s Day every year as well as Women’s History Month every March in the US. We may not be lighting up as much now, thankfully, with our Virginia Slims in a phenomenal way, but, nevertheless, we’re still phenomenal in how far we’ve come, and who we are as women, nowadays, with no-one giving more credence to that motto, than African-American poet, educator, memoirist and civil rights activist, Maya Angelou, in her aptly named poem “Phenomenal Woman.” Here’s to us on this year’s, International Women’s Day, while we celebrate all our achievements, as we remember just how far we’ve come, and how much farther we have to go, on our progressive journey as women: Phenomenal Women! Come and listen in to Billie & I discuss March's hot topic.