Miss America protest
Date | September 7, 1968 |
---|---|
Duration | 1 pm to 12 midnight |
Venue | Miss America 1969 |
Location | Atlantic City, New Jersey Boardwalk |
Also known as | No More Miss America |
Cause | Women's liberation |
Target | Miss America 1969 |
Organised by | New York Radical Women |
Participants | New York Radical Women, Jeannette Rankin Brigade, National Organization for Women, American Civil Liberties Union |
The Miss America protest was a demonstration held at the Miss America 1969 contest on September 7, 1968, attended by about 200 feminists and civil rights advocates. The feminist protest was organized by New York Radical Women and included putting symbolic feminine products into a "Freedom Trash Can" on the Atlantic City boardwalk, including bras, hairspray, makeup, girdles, corsets, false eyelashes, mops, and other items. The protesters also unfurled a large banner emblazoned with "Women's Liberation" inside the contest hall, drawing worldwide media attention to the Women's Liberation Movement.[1][2]
Reporter Lindsy Van Gelder drew an analogy between the feminist protesters throwing bras in the trash cans and Vietnam War protesters who burned their draft cards. The bra-burning trope was permanently attached to the event and became a catch-phrase of the feminist era.[3]
Origins
The
Hanisch said that she got the idea to target the Miss America contest after the group, including Morgan,
Purpose
In a letter on August 29, 1968, to the city mayor, Morgan requested a permit. She explained that the purpose of the protest was to demonstrate their objections to the pageant's focus on women's bodies over their brains, "on youth rather than maturity, and on commercialism rather than humanity".[9]
Organizers and participants
In her letter requesting a permit, Morgan named the sponsor of the protest as "Women's Liberation", a "loose coalition of small groups and individuals".[9] She was the key organizer of the protest.[10] The advisory sponsor was Florynce Kennedy's Media Workshop, an activist group she founded in 1966 to protest the media's representation of African Americans. Other members of New York Radical Women were involved in protesting and documenting the event. Bev Grant, a musician and filmmaker / photographer with Newsreel who part in the protests, also shot film and took photos of the protests and of the pageant itself. Peggy Dobbins, a performer and activist, created a life-sized Miss America puppet which she displayed on the boardwalk in the guise of a carnival barker auctioning her off.[3] Participants also came from National Organization for Women, the feminist Jeannette Rankin Brigade and the American Civil Liberties Union.[11] Men were barred from taking part.[9]
The press release for the event[12] contained sentiments that resonated well beyond the movement, such as “Miss America is a walking commercial for the pageant's sponsors. Wind her up and she plugs your product…” and “last year she went to Vietnam to pep-talk our husbands, fathers, sons and boyfriends into dying and killing with a better spirit…"[13]
Protest event
Atlantic City boardwalk
About 200 members of the group
Freedom Trash Can
They threw a number of feminine products into a "Freedom Trash Can". These included mops, pots and pans, copies of Cosmopolitan and Playboy magazines,[7] false eyelashes, high-heeled shoes, curlers, hairspray, makeup, girdles, corsets, and bras;[17][18] items the protesters called "instruments of female torture"[19] and accouterments of what they perceived to be enforced femininity.[20]
Protesters saw the pageant and its symbols as oppressing 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." Sarachild, one of the protest organizers, reported that "huge crowds gathered for the picketing. People were grabbing our fliers out of our hands."[7]
Protest inside pageant
Along with tossing the items into the trash can and distributing literature outside, four protesters including Kathie Sarachild and Carol Hanisch bought tickets and entered the hall. While the outgoing 1968 Miss America, Debra Barnes Snodgrass, was giving her farewell speech, the women unfurled a bedsheet from the balcony that said "Women's Liberation" and began to shout "women's liberation!" and "No more Miss America!" They got out a half-dozen shouts before they were quickly removed by police.[7] While TV cameras at the event didn't show them, newspapers all around the country covered the protest. "I think it kind of made the phrase 'women's liberation' a household term," Sarachild says.[21] "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."[7][22]
Outgoing Miss America Snodgrass said that the protesters were diminishing the hard work of thousands of competitors who were attending school and had put a lot of effort into developing their talents.[7]
Origin of "bra-burning"
The dramatic, symbolic use of a trash can to dispose of feminine objects caught the media's attention. Protest organizer Hanisch said about 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 Lindsy Van Gelder in the New York Post carried a headline "Bra Burners and Miss America". Her story drew an analogy between the feminist protest and Vietnam War protesters who burned their draft cards.[23] Individuals who were present said that no one burned a bra nor did anyone take off her bra.[7][22][24]: 4
However, respected author Joseph Campbell found a local news story reporting that articles were in fact burned, and a witness corroborating the news story. The article and the witness contradicted the feminists' statements, stating that lingerie was in fact burned at least briefly that day. An article on page 4 of the Atlantic City Press reported, "Bra-burners blitz boardwalk". It stated, "As the bras, girdles, falsies, curlers, and copies of popular women's magazines burned in the Freedom Trash Can, the demonstration reached the pinnacle of ridicule when the participants paraded a small lamb wearing a gold banner worded Miss America." A second story in the same newspaper written by Jon Katz did not mention burning lingerie, but Campbell interviewed Katz. Katz, who was present that day, confirmed that bras and other items had been set on fire: "...the fire was small, and quickly was extinguished."[25] The feminists insisted afterward that the story was wrong.[26][27]
The parallel between protesters burning their draft cards and women burning their bras were encouraged by organizers including
Deborah J. Cohan, an associate professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina, Beaufort, believes that bra-burning has become negatively associated with feminism.[30]
When people say, 'Are you one of those bra-burning feminists?' — and yes, I have been asked this many times — the people who ask this are doing so from a pre-existing place of hostility toward feminism.
Historical precedent
The bra-burning trope echoed an earlier generation of feminists who called for burning corsets as a step toward liberation. In 1873 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward wrote:
Burn up the corsets! ... No, nor do you save the whalebones, you will never need whalebones again. Make a bonfire of the cruel steels that have lorded it over your thorax and abdomens for so many years and heave a sigh of relief, for your emancipation I assure you, from this moment has begun.[31]
Backlash
Author and feminist Bonnie J. Dow suggested that the association between feminism and bra-burning was encouraged by individuals who opposed the feminist movement. "Bra-burning" created an image that women were not really seeking freedom from sexism, but were attempting to assert themselves as sexual beings. This might lead individuals to believe, as she wrote in her article "Feminism, Miss America, and Media Mythology", that the women were merely trying to be "trendy, and to attract men".[32][33][34][35][36]
Women associated with an act like symbolically burning their bra may be seen by some as law-breaking radicals, eager to shock the public. This view may have supported the efforts of opponents to feminism and their desire to invalidate the movement.
No More Miss America protest !
The protest planners produced a press release before the event that was afterward turned into a pamphlet titled No More Miss America!.[40] The pamphlet called on women to help "reclaim ourselves for ourselves".[41] Written by Robin Morgan, it listed ten characteristics of the Miss America pageant that Morgan believed degraded women.[42][41]
Morgan wrote that the pageant contestants epitomize the "Degrading Mindless-
She wrote that Miss America is a walking commercial for the pageant's sponsors, making her a primary part of "The Consumer Con-Game". It deplored the win-or-you're-worthless competitive disease, which it described as "Competition Rigged and Unrigged". The authors criticized "The Woman as Pop Culture Obsolescent Theme", which they described as the promotion of women who are young, juicy, and malleable, but upon the selection of a new winner each year, are discarded.[42]
She compared the pageant to Playboy's centerfold as sisters under the skin, describing this as "The Unbeatable Madonna–Whore Combination". The writers accused the competition of encouraging women to be inoffensive, bland, and apolitical, ignoring characteristics like personality, articulateness, intelligence, and commitment. They called this "The Irrelevant Crown on the Throne of Mediocrity". The pamphlet said the pageant was "Miss America as Dream Equivalent To", positioning itself as the penultimate goal of every little girl, while boys were supposed to grow up and become President of the United States. Men are judged by their actions, women by appearance.[42]
Morgan wrote that the pageant attempted
Legacy
A six-minute documentary, Up Against the Wall Miss America (1968), concerns the Miss America protest.[45][46]
The demonstration was largely responsible for bringing the women's liberation movement into the American national consciousness.[47] The event "'marked the end of the movement's obscurity' and made both 'women's liberation' and beauty standards topics for national discussion".[48]
"No more Miss America! Ten points of protest" was included in the 1970 anthology
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. African Americans and civil rights activists gather 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.[50]
Born to a middle-class family, she aspired to a career in
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.[50]
The competition, organized by civil rights activist J. Morris Anderson, was held at the Ritz Carlton a few blocks from
The Miss Black America protest and the NYRW protest were driven by fundamentally different motivation. NYRW protested the very idea of beauty standards and the pageant that upheld them. The Miss Black America protesters had no grievances with the idea of beauty standards, but with the fact that they strongly favored white women. While NYRW wanted to dismantle the whole idea of beauty, Miss Black America protesters wanted to expand notions of beauty to include all races.[52]
Feminist protester and organizer Robin Morgan said "We deplore Miss Black America as much as Miss White America but we understand the black issue involved."[51]
See also
References
- ISBN 978-0-252-03189-2.
- ISBN 9781598843576. Retrieved August 1, 2012.
- ^ a b Heller, Karen. "The bra-burning feminist trope started at Miss America. Except, that's not what really happened." Washingtonpost.com, 7 Sept. 2018. Academic OneFile
- ^ PassportMenu for ... DownOpenDown. "Public Broadcasting Service". PBS. Retrieved June 8, 2018.
- ^ Hanisch, Carol. "Carol Hanisch of the Women's Liberation Movement". Retrieved February 6, 2012.
- ^ Shulamith Firestone (1968). "Women and Marxism: Shulamith Firestone". Women and. Retrieved June 24, 2010.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j Greenfieldboyce, Nell (September 5, 2008). "Pageant Protest Sparked Bra-Burning Myth". NPR. Retrieved February 6, 2012.
- ISBN 978-0-8130-3456-0.
- ^ a b c "Letter from Robin Morgan to Richard S. Jackson, Mayor of Atlantic City, Aug. 29, 1968". Duke Digital Collections. Retrieved September 13, 2018.
- ^ "Robin Morgan". Jewish Women's Archive. 2005. Retrieved March 14, 2012.
- ^ From Robyn Morgan to Atlantic City Mayor Richard Jackson, 28 August 1968: seeking a permit for a peaceful protest. In Morgan papers, Duke University; see http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/wlmpc/
- ^ "No More Miss America!". Redstockings. August 22, 1968. Archived from the original on November 2, 2023.
- ^ Tanenbaum, Laura; Engler, Mark (September 7, 2018). "How 'No More Miss America' Announced a Feminist Upheaval". The Nation. Archived from the original on May 28, 2023.
- ^ Rowbatham, Sheila. A Century of Women Penguin Books, New York. 1997
- ^ Morgan, Robin. "No More Miss America", Redstockings, 22 Aug. 1968. Web. 2 Feb. 2012.
- ^ "It Happened Here in New Jersey: Miss America" (PDF). Kean University and the New Jersey Historical Commission. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 28, 2015. Retrieved March 5, 2015.
- S2CID 143094250.
- ^ "Press release and open letter inviting women to attend the Miss America protest". Duke Digital Collections. August 22, 1968. Retrieved September 13, 2018.
- ^ Duffett, Judith (October 1968). WLM vs. Miss America. p. 4.
{{cite book}}
:|work=
ignored (help) - ^ "Nimia". app.nimia.com. Retrieved September 13, 2018.
- ^ a b "Red Hot Mamas (bra-burning)". Snopes.com Urban Legends. November 27, 2000.
- ^ a b Collins, Gail (2003). America's Women. New York: HarperCollins.
- ^ Van Gelder, Lindsy (September–October 1992). "The truth about bra-burners". Ms. pp. 80–81.
- ^ Duffett, Judith (October 1968). WLM vs. Miss America.
{{cite book}}
:|work=
ignored (help) - ^ a b Campbell, Joseph. "Uncovering new detail about the bra-burning legend". UC Press Blog. Retrieved May 2, 2020.
- ^ Boucher, John L. (September 8, 1968). "Bra-Burners Blitz Boardwalk". (Atlantic City) Press.
- ISBN 9780520262096.
- ^ a b "Rush Blasts Greenstone". Radio Equalizer. September 14, 2006.
- ^ a b "The so-called "Ginsburg standard"". heuriskein. January 9, 2006.
- ^ Webster, Emma Sarran (November 30, 2018). "Why You Don't Have to Wear a Bra". Teen Vogue.
- ^ Phelps, Elizabeth (1873). What to Wear. Boston: Osgood. p. 79.
- S2CID 143094250.
- ^ Loughran, Jane (January 11, 2005). "You don't have to be a bra-burning feminist to want to keep your name". News & Star. Archived from the original on September 27, 2007. Retrieved February 8, 2012.
- ^ Williams, Ginny (October 1996). "Women of Goodwill". Vol. 1, no. 4. MENZ Issues.
- .
- S2CID 145446215.
- ISBN 978-0847693337.
- ^ Lee, Jennifer Feminism Has a Bra-Burning Myth Problem June 11, 2014 Time
- .
- ^ "No More Miss America!". Red Stockings (Press release). New York City. August 22, 1968.
- ^ a b "Press release and open letter inviting women to attend the Miss America protest (maddc01009) - Women's Liberation Movement Print Culture - Duke Libraries". Library.duke.edu. Retrieved June 8, 2018.
- ^ a b c d e "No More Miss America!". The Feminist eZine. Retrieved February 8, 2012.
- JSTOR 40543887.
- ISBN 978-0-415-99477-4.
- ^ "Up against the Wall Miss America". rozsixties.unl.edu. Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. April 4, 1968. Retrieved April 16, 2023.
- ^ "10 Great Women's History Films To Watch This Or Any Month". Nonfics.com. March 24, 2014. Retrieved June 8, 2018.
- ^ Hanisch, Carol (2009). "What Can Be learned: A Critique of the Miss America Protest". Carol Hanisch. Retrieved February 2, 2012.
- ^ Confronting the "Bra-Burners": Teaching Radical Feminism with a Case Study, Beth Kreydatus, The History Teacher, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Aug., 2008), pp. 489-504
- OCLC 96157.
- ^ a b Klemesrud, Judy. "There's Now Miss Black America". New York Times, 8 Sep. 1968: 81. Print
- ^ a b Curtiss, Charlotte. "Miss America Pageant is Picketed by 100 Women", New York Times 9 Sep. 1968: 54. Print.
- JSTOR 40543887.
External links
- "It Happened Here in New Jersey—Here She is: Miss America and the Protest of 1968" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on September 5, 2015.
- 1960s Bra Burning Video footage of protest