1968 - Mark Kurlansky [180]
IT WOULD HAVE MADE little sense for the Miss America pageant to have gone off without a problem. This was, after all, 1968. Television viewers, after watching the Chicago riots, could take time out from the Soviet subjugation of Czechoslovakia, in between reports of burning villages in the Mekong, to see Bert Parks, the make-believe celebrity, explode onto the stage in white tie and tails like a flat-footed Fred Astaire, to shoo on the young, white, preferably blond, handpicked last virgins of America’s college campuses, competing for the crown of what was purportedly the ideal of American womanhood. To measure up, they would need to display such skills as answering questions without controversy and looking shapely, though not too shapely, in a swimsuit, all the while gleaming with a smile so wide it had gone rectangular—a carnivorous smile not unlike that of Hubert Humphrey. The pageant might have been challenged on race alone. Is the American feminine ideal always white? Would being black or brown or red or yellow be in itself less than ideal?
But that was not the thrust of the attack. In the best tradition of Yippie theater, on September 7 a group of one hundred women, possibly more, met on the boardwalk outside the pageant and crowned a sheep. When the press rushed to them—normally there are not many breaking stories at a Miss America pageant—the protesters insisted on speaking to women reporters only, who in 1968 were not commonplace.
Having gotten the media’s attention, the group, declaring itself the New York Radical Women, started throwing items into a trash bin labeled the “freedom trash can”—language, not by chance, from the civil rights movement. Into the freedom trash can went girdles, bras, false eyelashes, hair curlers, and other “beauty products.” About twenty of the Radical Women managed to stop the competition inside the convention hall for twenty minutes by gurgling the high-pitched Arab women’s cheer, which they had learned from the film The Battle of Algiers, and shouting, “Freedom for women!” while hoisting a banner that read “Women’s Liberation.”
For years after this watershed incident, radical feminists were labeled “bra burners,” although nowhere did they actually burn bras. The original bra burners said they were protesting “the degrading, mindless boob-girlie symbol” of Miss America.
The New York Radical Women who debuted with this action were largely experienced in the New Left or the civil rights movement, and most had worked on the organization of numerous demonstrations. But this was the first time any of them had been pivotal organizers in a protest. Robin Morgan, their leader, said, “We also all felt, well, grown up; we were doing this one for ourselves, not for our men. . . .”
There had been other women’s marches in 1968. In January five thousand women had marched on Washington to protest the war. The demonstration had been organized by the Jeanette Rankin Brigade, named after the first congresswoman, who at the age of eighty-seven was still a fiery activist. Despite turning out five thousand marchers dressed in mourner’s black, which should have been effective for television, the demonstration received very little press coverage. The New York Times managing editor Clifton Daniel explained in a television interview that the reason for the lack of coverage was that violence seemed unlikely. Those who worked in the civil rights movement had learned years earlier that the presence of women reduces the risk of violence and that a reduced risk of violence diminishes media coverage.
Morgan regarded the greatest success of the event at the Miss America pageant to have been their decision to speak only to women reporters. The idea, like so many protest ideas, came from SNCC. The Radical Women were more successful at sticking to this, perhaps because their movement was a new beat that newspapers had not been covering. Within a few years this became standard feminist practice, and news media automatically sent women reporters to feminist events. At a time when feminism