They pointed to the consumeristic nature of corporate sponsorship of the pageant and the valuing of beauty as a measure of a woman’s worth. They also protested the military-industrial complex and the role of Miss America as a “death mascot” in entertaining the troops. “Nor has there ever been a true Miss America-an American Indian,” they wrote. One contention was “the degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol.” Another was racism, since a woman of color had never won-and there had never been a black contestant. The organizers also issued a document offering ten reasons why they were protesting, with detailed explanations-a womanifesto, if you will.
Members of New York Radical Women met in the office of the Southern Conference Educational Fund to plan their Miss America protest. Male reporters would not be allowed to interview protesters, which remains one of the loveliest details of the protest. They would “protest the image of Miss America, an image that oppresses women in every area in which it purports to represent us.” The protest would feature a “freedom trash can” into which women could throw away all the physical manifestations of women’s oppression, such as “bras, girdles, curlers, false eyelashes, wigs, and representative issues of Cosmopolitan, Ladies’ Home Journal, Family Circle, etc.” The organizers also proposed a concurrent boycott of companies whose products were used in or sponsored the pageant. On August 22, the New York Radical Women issued a press release inviting “women of every political persuasion” to the Atlantic City boardwalk on September 7, the day of the contest. To Hanisch and the other protest organizers, the pageant was an obvious target. There was even a “Rule 7,” abandoned in 1940, that stated that Miss America contestants had to be “of good health and of the white race.” The winner spent the year doing community service, but also peddling sponsors’ products and, later, entertaining U.S. The kind of beauty the pageant wanted to reward was very specific and very narrow-that of the demure, slender-but-not-too-thin woman, the girl next door with a bright white smile, a flirtatious but not overly coquettish manner, smart but not too smart, certainly heterosexual.
That same year, the pageant chose to limit eligibility to single, never-married women between the ages of 18 and 28.
The talent competition was introduced in 1938 so that perhaps the young women could be judged on more than just their appearance, but with that small bit of progress came regression. Since its inception, the pageant has evolved in some ways and not so much in others. Women’s beauty-white women’s beauty-was a tool. Newspapers across the country held contests judging photographs of young women, and the winners came to Atlantic City for a competition where they were evaluated on “personality and social graces.” There was no equivocating. Held in Atlantic City just after Labor Day, it started in 1921 as a way for newspapers to increase their circulation and for the resort’s businesses to extend their profitable summer season. Like so many things, the Miss America pageant began as a marketing scheme. The 1968 uprising was conceived by a radical feminist named Carol Hanisch, who popularized the phrase, “The personal is political.” Disrupting the beauty contest, she thought, in the summer of that year, “just might be the way to bring the fledgling Women’s Liberation Movement into the public arena.” As women organized the first protest against Miss America, they were responding not only to the pageant and its antiquated, misogynistic attitudes toward women and beauty, but also to how the United States, as a whole, treated women. The Miss America pageant has never been a progressive event, but in 1968, it sparked a feminist revolution. Women gleefully threw objects symbolizing oppression into the Freedom Trash Can, but they didn’t burn bras.
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