HOW THE 1968 MISS AMERICA PROTEST DISAPPEARED FROM ATLANTIC CITY
In hindsight: A statue of Miss America has become a defining feature of Atlantic City, but evidence of the 1968 protest of the pageant remains absent from the boardwalk.
On September 8, 1968, a hundred women gathered in Kennedy Plaza in Atlantic City, NJ, directly in front of Boardwalk Hall where that year’s Miss America pageant was being held. The women held signs, chanted, and created “freedom trash cans” into which they tossed items they felt represented female oppression: bras, make-up, and high heels. The original plan had been to burn the items, but the protesters were told by local officials, including the mayor, that doing so could risk another fire on the boardwalk, which had burned earlier that year. The mayor also worried that violence might arise from clashes between protestors, the police, and heckling crowds. The protesters agreed the demonstration would remain peaceful. Speaking to The New York Times, demonstrator Robin Morgan referenced the violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and explained, “We don’t want another Chicago.”[1]
The protestors in Atlantic City abandoned their plans to light up the cans. Nothing was ever set on fire. Yet as time wore on, a myth of “bra-burners” emerged nonetheless. The myth originated with a reporter from the New York Post, Lindsy Van Gelder, who used the phrase in an article. She was attempting to link the protester’s freedom trash cans with the contemporary Vietnam War protest of burning draft cards.[2] She intended for the comparison to be legitimizing. Yet other articles and pop culture references, such as Art Buchwald’s “The Bra-Burners” column in the Post, quickly turned the phrase into an epithet used against those agitating for women’s rights.[3] “Bra-burners” or “bra-burning feminists” were associated with women who were militantly feminist, anti-male, and unattractive. The events of the protest, considered influential inside the feminist movement, became reduced to a cliché.
Articles and pop culture references to “bra-burners” made an event that was considered influential inside the feminist movement become reduced to a cliché.
Past anniversaries of the Atlantic City demonstration have tended to focus on the existence--or not--of incinerated lingerie (see NPR and Smithsonian Magazine). But this year’s anniversary is an opportunity to examine the stories that Atlantic City has chosen to tell about that historic site on the boardwalk. Despite the importance of the protests, no markers or signs exist on Kennedy Plaza or Boardwalk Hall to commemorate it. Rather, a 2018 visitor will encounter a statue of Miss America along with a memorial to Atlantic City workers, a bust of John F. Kennedy, and a mini-golf course.
The Kennedy monument arrived first. In 1964, Atlantic City hosted the Democratic National Convention, and the plaza was renamed in honor of the recently slain president. For thirty-four years the Kennedy bust stood alone. Then in 1998, the local Central Labor Council of the AFL-CIO provided the funds for an Atlantic City Worker’s Monument to honor trade workers killed on the job since 1977. The monument wall contained names of the deceased, and in 2004 was joined by a bronze statue of a man holding a hard hat and gazing down at his “fallen brothers and sisters.” Another local union chapter, Local 54, which is part of the international union Unite Here, representing hospitality workers, erected similar markers commemorating unions and the civil rights movement.
The most recent addition to the plaza is a Miss America statue erected by the Atlantic City Alliance in 2014 to coincide with the return of the Miss American Pageant to New Jersey from Las Vegas. The statue is framed by several billboards and a corresponding computer terminal that offers a multimedia tour of Miss America’s past. The statue depicts a slightly larger-than-life woman wearing a crown. She holds another crown under which visitors can pose for a photograph.
Miss America reached the height of its national popularity and television viewership in the 1960s, which helps to explain why demonstrators saw it as a site of protest in 1968.
With the return of the pageant and the erection of the statue, Miss America has come full circle. Ninety-three years earlier, the pageant began as a way to extend the summer tourist season beyond Labor Day in order to generate more revenue. The answer was a beauty pageant that would be christened Miss America the following year. Over the ensuing decades, Miss America became a defining feature of Atlantic City and a representation of a particular version of American womanhood. The pageant reached the height of its national popularity and television viewership in the 1960s, which helps to explain why demonstrators saw it as a site of protest in 1968.
The protest comprised multiple elements. Not only did women gather on Kennedy Plaza, but some managed to enter the pageant and unfurl a banner bearing the words “Women’s Liberation” before being escorted out. “Women’s Liberation” referred to feminists’ desire for greater freedom for women, particularly privileged white women in education, the work force, in reproductive rights, as well as freedom from traditional gender roles and being consigned to the home. Writing for The New York Times on September 8, 1968, journalist Charlotte Curtis described the 100 women as “mostly middle aged careerists and housewives with a sprinkling of 20-year-olds and grandmothers in their 60s,” a contrast to the contestants inside.[4] Down the street, another protest was occurring: the country’s first Miss Black America Pageant. “There’s a need for the beauty of the black woman to be paraded and applauded as a symbol of universal pride,” said organizer J. Morris Anderson to the New York Times.[5]
The Miss America pageant has returned to Atlantic City in an era of when the women’s movement has enjoyed a rebirth due to the 2016 election and the #MeToo movement. In 1968, the protest at the Miss America pageant sought to transform the public conversation surrounding women’s rights. A monument to commemorate that event fifty years later would demonstrate that we are starting to hear what those women were saying.
Margaret “Maggie” Strolle is one of two inaugural History Communication Fellows at the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest.
[1] Charlotte Curtis, “Miss America is Picketed by 100 Women,” New York Times, September 9, 1968.
[2] Ariel Levy, “Lift and Separate,” New Yorker, Published November 16, 2009, accessed February 28, 2018.
[3] Art Buchwald, “The Bra Burners,” New York Post, September 12, 1968.
[4] Curtis, New York Times, 1968.
[5] Ibid.
