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
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.
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 liberationists represented.
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.
But help us understand what Miss America meant to the country in 1968.
What was the story it was selling?
The Miss America pageant first happens in 1921 in Atlantic City, and it's originally designed as a vehicle for extending the summer season for an extra week beyond Labor Day weekend and as a way to keep crowds coming.
So it's interesting to think about it as originally it's a marketing device.
And it's a marketing device that is selling women in swimsuits and the access to women's bodies.
The original ones were much larger.
They involved beach parades.
There was a man who played King Neptune.
He arrived on a boat that was covered with women and shells.
It is.
It is complete.
Showing 41–60 of 374 · page 3 of 19
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