Miss America protest

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".[8]

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".[8] She was the key organizer of the protest.[9] 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.[10] 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.[8]

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]

About 200 members of the group New York Radical Women traveled to Atlantic City in cars and chartered buses. On September 7, 1968, about 400[7] feminists from New York City, Florida, Boston, Detroit, and New Jersey[14] gathered on the Atlantic City Boardwalk outside the Miss America Pageant. They protested what they called "The Degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol" and American society's normative beauty expectations.[15] They marched with signs, passed out pamphlets, including one titled No More Miss America, and crowned a live sheep—comparing the beauty pageant to livestock competitions at county fairs, including an illustration of a woman's figure marked up like a side of beef.[7][16]

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]

Demonstrators from the National Women's Liberation Movement picketing the 1968 Miss America 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]

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]

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.[37] Some feminist activists believe that anti-feminists use the bra-burning myth and the subject of going braless to trivialize what the protesters were trying to accomplish that day and the feminist movement in general.[38][39][21] Joseph Campbell described the reaction that ensued as "serving to denigrate and trivialize the objectives of the women’s liberation movement."[25]

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-Boob-Girlie Symbol". The runway parade is a metaphor of the 4-H Club county fair, where the animals are judged for teeth, hair, grooming, and so forth, and where the best specimen is awarded the blue ribbon. Since its inception in 1921, only Caucasian contestants had been accepted as finalists, so the authors derided the contest as "Racism with Roses". They criticized the "cheerleader" tour taken by the winner to visit troops in foreign countries as "Miss America as Military Death Mascot". Her support of troops personifies the "unstained patriotic American womanhood our boys are fighting for".[42]

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 thought control, creating the illusion of "Miss America as Big Sister Watching You". It attempted to enslave women in high-heeled, low-status roles, and to inculcate values in young girls like women as beasts of shopping.[42] "No More Miss America!" was the very first public pamphlet of the time to share the movement's ideals; therefore, complaints about the Pageant, recorded in the pamphlet, outlined and predicted numerous problems these women might have to overcome in their battle for equality.[43] The pamphlet became a source for feminist scholarship.[44]