Miss America ‘68, women’s lib, and the politics of beauty

**Tonya Mosley** (0:00)
This is Fresh Air, I'm Tonya Mosley.
There was a time when the Miss America pageant was the biggest show in America. Tens of millions of people gathered around their televisions every September, and for years, it was the highest-rated broadcast in the country.
Today, the Miss America pageant has become more like a relic. It doesn't even air on television anymore. But back in September of 1968, Miss America was a symbol of what a woman should be, and the target of a burgeoning women's liberation movement. That year, one of the most iconic moments in American history took place. Feminists on the Atlantic City Boardwalk setting fire to their bras. There's just one problem. The bra burning never actually happened. My guest today, historian Micki McElya, writes in her new book, Liberation Summer, that the bra burning was a creation of the newspapers invented before the protest even began. And that detail matters because it meant the women's liberation movement was defined by a caricature before it could define itself.
The real story, she says, is bigger than the myth. That same afternoon, three groups of women took a stand. Feminist protesters, contestants of the first ever Miss Black America pageant, and the women who came to defend Miss America herself. McElya argues, the fight that started that day never ended. That beauty in America has always been a fight over power when she traces through the rise of the religious right, the MeToo era, and what commentators now call Mar-a-Lago face, the strikingly uniform look of the women in President Trump's orbit. Micki McElya is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut. Her previous book, The Politics of Mourning, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Micki McElya, welcome to Fresh Air.

**Micki McElya** (2:21)
Oh, thank you for having me.

**Tonya Mosley** (2:23)
And thank you so much for this book. And I actually want to start with that remarkable detail from your book about this myth that these throngs of women were throwing their bras into like a bin that was on fire on the Atlantic City boardwalk. When you write, it was actually born in a newsroom days before the protest. Tell us how the press created the bra burner.

**Micki McElya** (2:48)
The figure of the bra burning feminist becomes a character in newspapers in the days leading up to the Miss America pageant protest, as the protest has been circulating through the press and as Women's Liberationists are using those stories to try to get more women to come to Atlantic City and protest the pageant. It is a comment, sort of a throwaway comment from one activist who says, maybe we could even burn our bras. But that is never something that actually takes place. It gets seized in that moment as the figure for headlines in syndicated stories across the country. So it isn't just in the New York Press, which is where these women are and where these stories originate, but UPI, the AP, all of these papers run versions of this story and local newspaper copy setters and copywriters do headlines that say, bras are burning, will be burning at the Miss America Pageant. And so by the time they get there, they are already bra burners.
When in fact, they throw bras into the freedom garbage can.

**Tonya Mosley** (4:02)
Right. And they don't set them on fire, but that detail just becomes kind of like the mark of that moment. It's the first version of history that then goes down in history.
So take us to the protest. Can you tell us the three factions of women who were confronting one another adjacent to the Boardwalk and on the Boardwalk on that night in 1968?

**Micki McElya** (4:24)
The first group of women are Women's Liberationists who were there to challenge the pageant in its objectification of women, in its relationship to militarism, its promotion of the war in Vietnam, and in the exploitative consumer frameworks in which Miss Americas were trapped and were put to for advertising.
The second group of people who were doing an entirely different pageant to challenge the racism of the Miss America organization and the exclusions of the beauty ideal that was represented there was the Miss Black America pageant. This was the first time that pageant was held, and it was held two blocks away in Atlantic City to make exactly that point. The third group of women were pageant contestants from earlier pageants and pageant fans who challenged women's liberation's representation of the pageant as being exploitation, as being negative and challenged the vision of womanhood that the women's liberation is represented.

**Tonya Mosley** (5:33)
I want you to take us back because we're in such a different world today in the way that we think about pageants and we watch pageants.