Mickey McElya
speaker
374 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Mickey McElya’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.
My guest today is historian Mickey McElyea.
Her new book, Liberation Summer, revisits September 1968, when three groups of women converged on the Atlantic City boardwalk.
Feminists protesting the Miss America pageant, contestants in the first ever Miss Black America pageant, and women defending Miss America herself.
McElyea argues the collision that day created a politics of beauty that runs through the rise of the religious right, the Me Too era, and all the way to today.
She's a professor of history at the University of Connecticut, and her previous book, The Politics of Mourning, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
I think what's so fascinating in particular as you break down these individual characters and their roles is
and, um, leading up to this liberation summer and what goes on to happen is the line between the politics of beauty and what we're seeing today with the Trump administration.
And I, I think that knowing all of this history, um, and understanding that Trump, uh, he stepped into this world in the late eighties, early nineties and taking it farther back, um,
What were some surprises to you when you see that it almost looks like a straight line?
It almost seems inevitable that we would be here.
I would argue that it is.
That in 1968, in this moment when these three different forces, these three different forces who are all women, come together in that geographic spot on the Atlantic City boardwalk and come together around the Miss America pageant.
What is set off there is a politics of beauty where beauty is both highlighted as the terrain of power and female beauty is the currency of American politics.
And in 1968, you have –
women's liberationists challenging that objectification.
You have Miss Black America pageant, the organizers of the pageant and the contestants, but you have the Miss Black America pageant arguing that to be objectified as beautiful is
in a white supremacist society is itself a kind of privilege.
And that the struggle over beauty isn't about rejecting the pageant, but that to highlight black women's beauty is politically crucial.
And then you have the counter-protesters who literally are holding signs with Nixon for President buttons
Showing 181–200 of 374 · page 10 of 19
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