Miss America ‘68, women’s lib, and the politics of beauty
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The midterms are coming, and that means the news cycle, which is already intense, is about to get more intense this fall. So this summer is a perfect time to make sure your news diet is calibrated. I'm Laila Fadil. On Up First, we unpack the three biggest stories every morning so you can stay informed and get on with your day in less than 15 minutes. Follow or subscribe to Up First today, wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley.
There she is.
America, there she is, your ideal. The dream of a million girls who are more than pretty can come true in Atlantic City.
For she may turn out to be the queen.
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 Mickey McElyea, writes in her new book, Liberation Summer, that the bra burning was a creation of the newspapers invented before the protests 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. 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. So take us to the protest. Can you tell us the three factions of women who were confronting one another?
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–13:32
2
Which three groups of women confronted each other on the Atlantic City boardwalk in September 1968?
13:32–19:04
3
How did newspapers invent the 'bra‑burning' myth before the 1968 Miss America protest?
19:04–39:59
4
What did the Miss America pageant symbolize in American culture by 1968?
39:59–46:34
5
When and why did beauty pageants become intertwined with patriotism and the military?
46:34–49:25
Speakers
7 identifiedMore from Fresh Air
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