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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McElyea argues the fight that started that day never ended, that beauty in America has always been a fight over power, one she traces through the rise of the religious right, the Me Too era, and what commentators now call Mar-a-Lago face, the strikingly uniform look of the women in President Trump's orbit.
Mickey McElyea is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut.
Her previous book, The Politics of Mourning, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Mickey McElyea, welcome to Fresh Air.
Oh, thank you for having me.
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.
The figure of the bra-burning feminist becomes a caricature 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, you know, 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.
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 cans.
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.
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