1968 - Mark Kurlansky [181]
But Morgan had her regrets. The demonstrators appeared to be attacking the contestants instead of the contest, and in retrospect she thought it was a mistake to have protesters saying, “Miss America goes down!” and singing the altered lyrics, “Ain’t she sweet / Making profit off her meat. . . .” The contestants were supposed to be viewed as victims.
September 7, 1968, is often given as the date that modern feminism was launched. Feminists had been campaigning for numerous years, but like the New Left in the early 1960s when Tom Hayden first began writing about it, only a few had noticed until it got onto television. For millions of Americans, “women’s liberation” began in Atlantic City on September 7 with a sheep and a trash bin. Not far away, another group of protesters was holding a black Miss America contest to protest the racist nature of Miss America. But by then, black movements were old news.
It was not that Miss America was a revered institution. By the late sixties it had lost its luster and was widely thought to be racist or empty-headed and as faded as Atlantic City itself. Shana Alexander wrote in Life:
Talent being rarer than beauty in 18-year-old girls, the talent contest places the Smile under a ghastly strain. One girl, a trampolinist, smiled madly upside down. A ballerina smiled her way through “the dying swan,” somehow suggesting death in a frozen poultry locker. A third girl’s talent was to synchronize bubble gum chewing and the Charleston. At rhythmic intervals her smile was wiped out by a large, wet pink splat.
So many things seem wrong and boring and silly about the Miss America Pageant as it comes across on TV that one struggles to rank the offenses in order of importance. It is dull and pretentious and racist and exploitive and icky and sad. . . .
Morgan, who led New York Radical Women, was a child actress turned political activist. For her and everyone in her group, Atlantic City was their first act of radical feminism. Their thinking had clear roots in the New Left. Morgan said of the choice of targets, “Where else could one find such a perfect combination of American values—racism, materialism, capitalism—all packaged in one ideal symbol, a woman.” As for Miss America of 1968, which of course had to be the winning Miss Illinois, Morgan said she had a “smile still blood-flecked from Mayor Daley’s kiss.” To top it off, the contestant winner went on a tour of the troops in Vietnam.
But not all the passersby were sympathetic. Men heckled and denounced the demonstrators and suggested that they should throw themselves in the freedom trash can and strangely yelled, “Go home and wash your bras!”—once again buying into the idea that nonconformists are dirty. One outraged former Miss America contestant from Wisconsin quickly appeared with her own freshly painted sign that read, “There’s only one thing wrong with Miss America—She’s beautiful.” The former contestant, Terry Meewsen, surprised no one by wearing a “Nixon for President” button.
Before September 7 the common image of feminism was that it was a movement of long-skirted women in bonnets who fought from 1848 until 1920 to get women the right to vote. In 1920, with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, feminism, according to popular belief, had served its purpose, achieved its goal, and ceased to exist. In a 1956 special issue of Life magazine on women, Cornelia Otis Skinner said of feminism, “We have won our case, but for heaven’s sake let’s stop trying to prove it over and over again.” This idea was so entrenched that in 1968, when the press and the public realized that there was a growing contemporary feminist movement, they often referred to it as “the second wave.”
One of the first surprises of the second wave was when The Feminine Mystique, a book by Betty Friedan, a suburban mother of three and graduate fellow in psychology, became one of the most read books of the early