I don’t know much about Burma. I know that women historically did smoke cheroots. I could be wrong, but my sense is that today only elderly women smoke cheroots, and that young women don’t smoke at all. Perhaps some youth in places like Rangoon do. I’m not sure.

In any case, in recently looking through a newpaper from Burma in the 1960s, I was surprised to find quite a few adds for cigarettes which target women.

These adds were in an English language paper, so they could be for Western women who were the wives of Western businessmen in the country.

However, some of these women look “racially ambiguous.” Are they Western? Burmese? Both? Was this an advertising strategy, to present images of women which women from different groups could simultaneously identify with?