Miss America protest

The Miss America pageant protests were characterized by two separate demonstrations on September 7, 1968: one feminist, the other for civil rights.

The Feminist Protest

On September 7, 1968, second wave feminists gathered outside the annual Miss America Pageant, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to protest what they called, “The Degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol” and American society’s normative beauty expectations. The feminist activist group New York Radical Women organized the demonstration, which was largely responsible for bringing the Women’s Liberatio\ch.org/CHwritings/MissACritique.html</ref> Led by Robin Morgan and also attended by other radical feminists, Kathie Sarachild, Carol Hanisch, and Alix Kates Shulman, the event “‘marked the end of the movement’s obscurity’ and made both ‘women’s liberation’ and beauty standards topics for national discussion.” Journalists covering the protest drew an analogy between the feminist protest and Vietnam War protesters who burned their draft cards, and the phrase bra-burning became a catch-phrase of the feminist era.

The New York Radical Women, organized in the fall of 1967 by by former television child star Robin Morgan, Carol Hanisch, Shulamith Firestone, and Pam Allen, was searching for a suitable way to draw attention to their movement. One of the group's members, Carol Hanisch, said the group wanted to incorporate the techniques successfully used by the civil rights movement and adapt it to the new idea of women's liberation. , and radical feminists from New York, Florida, Boston, Detroit, and New Jersey.

Hanisch said that she got the idea to target the Miss America contest after her group, including former television child star Robin Morgan, Kathie Sarachild, Ros Baxandall, Alix Kates Shulman, Patricia Mainardi, Irene Peslikis, and Ellen Willis, watched a movie that depicted how beauty standards oppressed women. It included clips of Miss America parading in her swimsuit. "It got me thinking that protesting the pageant might be a good way to launch the movement into the public consciousness," Hanisch said. "Because up until this time, we hadn't done a lot of actions yet. We were a very small movement. It was kind of a gutsy thing to do. Miss America was this 'American pie' icon. Who would dare criticize this?"

Protest

The feminists traveled to Atlantic City in cars and rented buses. About 400 women gathered on the Boardwalk outside the Miss America Pageant. During the protest, they marched with signs, passed out pamphlets, and crowned a live sheep, comparing the beauty pageant to livestock competitions at county fairs. What drew the media's attention was the "freedom trash can". They symbolically threw a number of feminine products into the container. These included mops, pots and pans, Cosmopolitan and Playboy magazines, false eyelashes, high-heeled shoes, curlers, hairspray, makeup, girdles, corsets, and bras, items the protestors called "instruments of female torture" and accouterments of what they perceived to be enforced femininity. Protesters saw the pageant and its symbols as an oppression of women. They decried its emphasis on an arbitrary standard of beauty. They were against the labeling, public worship and exploitation of the "most beautiful girl in America".

Origin of "bra-burning"

Hanisch said of the Freedom Trash Can afterward, "We had intended to burn it, but the police department, since we were on the boardwalk, wouldn't let us do the burning." A story by Lindsay van Gelder in the New York Post carried a headline "Bra Burners and Miss America". It drew an analogy between the feminist protest and Vietnam War protesters who burned their draft cards. In fact, there was no bra burning, nor did anyone take off her bra.

These parallels were encouraged by organisers such as Robin Morgan. The phrase became headline material and was quickly associated with women who chose to go braless, following Germaine Greer's comments. Feminism and "bra-burning" then became linked in popular culture and Greer became a metaphor for bra burning.

It has been suggested that the association between feminism and bra-burning was encouraged by those who opposed the feminist movement, because it created an image less of women seeking freedom from sexism, appearing more as though they were attempting to assert themselves as sexual beings. This might lead to the assumption that, as Bonnie J. Dow wrote in her article "Feminism, Miss America, and Media Mythology," they were merely trying to be "trendy, and to attract men."

The association between "bra-burning" and the feminist movement has led to somewhat of a misrepresentation of the movement and the actual purpose of the "freedom trash can." By being associated with an act like bra-burning, feminists may be seen, by those less knowledgeable of the movement, as law-breaking radicals, eager to shock the public, aiding the efforts of those against feminism to invalidate the movement. Since then anti-feminists have used "bra burning" and "braless" as a way of attempting to trivialize the feminist movement.

Protest inside pageant

Along with tossing the items into the trash can, four women bought tickets and entered the hall. While 1967 Miss America, Debra Barnes Snodgrass, was giving her farewell address, the protestors unfurled a bed sheet from the balcony that said "Women's Liberation" and began to shout "women's liberation!" and "no more Miss America!" They were quickly removed by police but the entire protest drew coverage by newspapers from across the United States. "The media picked up on the bra part," Hanisch said later. "I often say that if they had called us 'girdle burners', every woman in America would have run to join us."

The Civil Rights Protest

Also on September 7, 1968, in Atlantic City, a separate civil rights demonstration took place in the form of a beauty pageant as African Americans and civil rights activists gathered to crown the first Miss Black America. The winner, nineteen year old, Philadelphia native, Saundra Williams had been active on the civil rights scene prior to the competition. As a student at Maryland State College, she helped organize The Black Awareness Movement with her classmates and staged a sit in at a local restaurant, which refused to serve African Americans.

Born to a middle class family, Williams aspired to a career in social work and child welfare. She explained her motivation for running in the pageant: “Miss America does not represent us because there has never been a black girl in the pageant. With my title, I can show black women that they too are beautiful . . . There is a need to keep saying this over and over because for so long none of us believed it. But now we’re finally coming around.”

The competition, organized by civil rights activist J. Morriss Anderson, was held at the Ritz Carlton a few blocks from Convention Hall, where the Miss America pageant took place the same evening. Unlike the Miss America contenders, the Miss Black America contestants, prior to competition, rode in a convertible motorcade through the streets of Atlantic City and were greeted with cheers and applause, especially from members of the Black community.

Feminist protestor, Robin Morgan said, in reference to the competition itself, “We deplore Miss Black America as much as Miss White America but we understand the black issue involved.”

See also

• No More Miss America
• Feminist Sex Wars