That Time Feminists Descended on the Miss America Pageant
Unless they are on RuPaul’s Drag Race and referring to a fellow contestant as Miss Thing, does anyone even use Missanymore? The term may have been consigned to the dustbin of history, but this Sunday, 52 women will still take the stage in Atlantic City, as they have since 1921, for the Miss America Pageant, a weird survivor, a relic from the past, that, though it struggles mightily to be more progressive and up-to-date—Miss Missouri is an out lesbian! It’s really, truly a scholarship pageant!—remains mired, like a dying mouse on a glue trap, in its sticky past.
But the pageant also occupies a special place in feminist history. Forty-eight years ago this week, a few hundred women arrived on the Atlantic City boardwalk and staged the infamous bra-burning protest. (Men were allowed to drive them to the event, but not to participate: “Male chauvinist-reactionaries on this issue had best stay away, nor are male liberals welcome in the demonstrations. But sympathetic men can donate money as well as cars and drivers,” the organizers instructed.)
As it turns out, no underwear was actually burned. A giant trash can was erected on the boardwalk into which were tossed mops, pots, copies of women’s magazines andPlayboy, false eyelashes, high heels, hair rollers, cosmetics, and, of course, girdles, and bras, and there were erroneous reports in the press that this ignominious heap, this hot mess, was set ablaze. But fire or no fire, this group of activists—some with nerves of steel managed to get inside the hall and unfurl a bedsheet from the balcony that readWomen’s Liberation before getting thrown out—brought the issue of women’s rights to riveting attention across the country.
It is hard to convey how important the pageant was in American culture decades ago, how people relished the campy talent, how unironically we reviewed and rated these young women in their ball gowns, their bathing suits. (Sad, shameless confession—when I can, I still watch this! I remember recently, when the genial plastic host asked contestants about the first thing they planned to do, win or lose, after the show ended, and most of them said: “Have something to eat!” It didn’t occur to me until that moment that these people were starving.)
“It should be a groovy day on the boardwalk in the sun with our sisters,” the 1968 manifesto stated. This brilliant document contains a 10-point litany of grievances, with section titles decrying “Miss America as Military Death Mascot,” “The Woman as Pop Culture Obsolescent Theme,” “The Irrelevant Crown on the Throne of Mediocrity,” and “The Degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol.”
But if the struggle to be treated as more than a Mindless-Boob-Girlie is far from over, it didn’t begin in the 1960s. Almost a hundred years earlier, in 1873, feminist author Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward picked up her quill pen and lit the spark: “Burn up the corsets! . . . No, nor do you save the whalebones, you will never need whalebones again,” she wrote. “Make a bonfire of the cruel steels that have lorded it over the contents of the abdomen and thorax so many thoughtless years and heave a sigh of relief, for your emancipation, I assure you, has from this moment begun.”
http://www.vogue.com/13474342/feminists-desecended-on-the-miss-america-pageant/
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