VCU news

By Tom Gresham

Fifty years ago, protests at the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey, attracted widespread national attention and sparked intense debate, drawing condemnation and support from a country in turmoil.

Beth Kreydatus, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Focused Inquiry of the University College at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the protests proved to represent key milestones for both the women’s liberation and civil rights movements. Kreydatus, whose research interests include 20th-century American social and cultural history, has studied and written about the protests and their enduring influence. She answered questions from VCU News about the protests and their place in the history of social activism in the U.S.

Can you tell us about the 1968 Miss America pageant protest and why it attracted so much attention?

There were actually two protests at the 1968 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, and both are very significant. The women’s liberation protest followed the model of new left and civil rights activism. Participants included some of the leaders of second-wave feminism (Carol Hanisch, Robin Morgan, Florynce “Flo” Kennedy and Jo Freeman), and it was the first significant protest of the women’s liberation movement. The New York Radical Women — the chief group organizing the protest — strived for a protest that would be a “Boardwalk theater event.” They submitted permits to the mayor of Atlantic City to burn “women garbage” (including bras, girdles, curlers, high-heeled shoes and other “instruments of torture to women”). Because the permits were denied, activists were restricted to a “Freedom Trash Can,” but nevertheless, the myth of the “bra burners” was born. They also staged a “cattle auction” and marched with posters outside the convention center, and as the outgoing Miss America was giving a speech, they unfurled a banner calling for “women’s liberation.”

The second protest also was deeply, socially significant. It was a counter-pageant — a Miss Black America pageant organized by a leader of the local NAACP (Phillip Savage) and a black businessman (J. Morris Anderson). The Miss Black America pageant proudly celebrated black beauty, crowning 19-year-old Saundra Williams after she performed a monologue titled “I Am Black” and an African dance. Williams was a member of the NAACP and started a black awareness group at her university. She also wore her hair in a natural hairstyle. This pageant is a great example of the growing black pride movement, and it was the first in an annual event — this organization continues to host black pageants today.

What were the protesters hoping to accomplish?

Both of the protests were intended to critique the racism of the Miss America tradition. While the rules no longer officially excluded women of color, practically speaking, no African-American women were recognized at the pageant until 1970, when Cheryl Browne won a spot as Miss Iowa. For the women’s liberationists, they also objected to the consumerism and especially the objectification of women that they saw glorified at the Miss America pageant. They compared it to an auction block. In particular, they pointed to the hypocrisy of the swimsuit contest — a part of the pageant that has only been ended this year. 

While these protests were challenging the pageant traditions, both the women’s liberationists and Savage and Anderson believed that by critiquing the pageant, they could challenge a broader culture — one which they believed was marked by sexism and racism.

Did the protests make a significant impact on the era’s feminist movement?

The women's liberation protest faced virulent criticism. Crowds on the boardwalk screamed insults, calling the women’s liberationists communists and lesbians. In the news over the following days, the media continued to deride the protestors. New York Post editorialist Harriet Van Horne lashed out, saying, “If they can’t be pretty, dammit, they can at least be quiet!” Even today, “bra burner” is a common epithet to denigrate feminists, so the events of Sept. 7, 1968, made a significant mark. One of the biggest challenges women’s liberationists faced, a challenge that emerged at this specific protest, was the challenge of critiquing an institution or cultural system like beauty culture or beauty pageants without seeming to critique the women who are affected by that culture. Carol Hanisch, a participant in the protests, wrote a famous essay after the protest pointing to the problems created by signs reading “Miss America Sells It” or “Miss America is a Big Falsie.” These signs seemed to go after the pageant contestants, rather than the pageant itself. This problem shows how complicated it is for a second wave to challenge sexism.

For the Miss Black America participants, they did get some relatively positive press the day after the pageant — a story ran about Saundra Williams in The New York Times, for instance. But contestants for Miss Black America were tasked with participating in a protest by employing the politics of respectability, and to receive even minimally positive press, Miss Black America was expected to distance herself from second-wave feminism. While the Miss Black America pageant clearly rebuked the Miss America pageant for its racism, it did so by creating a duplicate pageant, one which embraced many elements of the Miss America pageant. In other words, Savage and Anderson’s event did nothing to challenge the consumerism, or especially the sexism, of pageants. The Miss Black America pageant's heyday was probably 1969, when the annual pageant had as many as 4,300 people in the audience and was judged by black activists such as Betty Shabazz, widow of the late Malcolm X; Shirley Chisholm; and Floyd McKissick, former chairman of CORE [the Congress of Racial Equality]. But for the most part, the Miss Black America pageant has been ignored by mainstream media.

What is the long-term legacy of the protest and the counter-pageant? Do you see parallels or echoes in today’s activism?

These protests still matter today, especially from the vantage point of the MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter. Journalists at the time, and some historians, have suggested that there was little common ground between women’s liberation and the Miss Black America pageant, and have emphasized the divisions between these two groups. This wasn’t entirely off base; certainly for African-American women dealing with double oppression (sexism and racism) complicated their participation in both black and feminist organizations, and this problem continues today. It’s likely that the Miss Black America pageant would have benefited from black female leadership, and the women’s liberation movement should have done more to include and prioritize black women’s voices. Recently, historian Georgia Paige Welch has argued, convincingly, that these protests shared more common ground than historians had previously acknowledged — a shared set of goals, strategies, and especially, a shared media landscape. She’s pointed to Flo Kennedy, the legendary black feminist and civil rights advocate leading the women's liberation protest as evidence of connection between these two protests.

Also, all of the activists in 1968 were demonstrating their belief that through collective action they could change not just institutions, but the very culture they lived with. Here we are in 2018, 50 years later, still mired in a culture war, with racism and sexism central to national disputes. I find the optimism of this earlier generation of activists to be deeply inspiring. This year, the Miss America organization has been in uproar. The male CEO of the organization was replaced last December after he was exposed for using virulently sexist language to refer to contest winners. Gretchen Carlson, who currently leads the board of directors, has promised to shift the focus of the pageant away from appearance and to end the swimsuit contest. But the organization has been in turmoil, with state and local leaders challenging Carlson’s authority and these plans. It’s unclear whether the Miss America pageant will survive these changes, or how it could successfully re-envision itself. Also, while there have been a growing number of women of color in the pageant in recent years, Nina Davuluri faced tremendous racism and xenophobia as the first Indian-American Miss America in 2014. The Miss Black America pageant continues today, and has flatly refused to consider abandoning the swimsuit pageant. In short, the issues that were raised in 1968 seem as present and as intractable today.