About Us
Archives for Action
Log in  \/ 
x
Register  \/ 
x

Selections
Features
Donate

 
No More Miss America!  Announcement and statement from Atlantic City, 1968

 1968-09 miss america protest replace with caption

Women's Liberation organizers disrupt the live telecast of the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City. (Photo source: Sisterhood is Powerful, 1970)

 

Women picket on the Atlantic City boardwalk.
(photo source: Wide World Photos from the Liberated Woman's Songbook, 1971)

"I also attended the Atlantic City Beauty Contest protest, which was the best fun I can imagine anyone wanting to have on any single day of her life. It was very brazen and very brash, and there were some arrestsPeggy Dobbins was charged with releasing a stink bomb. No bras were burned, though; that was a media invention..."

Flo Kennedy, Color Me Flo: My Hard Life and Good Times, 1976


 (Photo source: Color Me Flo: My Hard Life and Good Times, 1976)

 

 1968 09 07FloKennedyFlorikaSueSCG

Leah Fritz and Florika Remetier are to the left of the giant Miss America puppet. Florynce Kennedy, in a white pantsuit, is on the right, with Susan Silverman to her left. Carol Giardina is in the back holding the sign "Can make up cover the wounds of our oppression?" (Photo source: Tamiment Institute Library, New York University, Liberation News Service Collection)

Bonnie Allen was another African American participant in the 1968 Miss America Protest. She is interviewed in this New York Times coverage of the event on September 8, 1968. You can see her acting in the protesters' "guerilla theater" that day, with Peggy Dobbins as the auctioneer. Here it is at a link to a short clip from the 1968 Newsreel film "Up Against the Wall, Miss America".

 

The coverage was nationwide:

Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal & Times, Sept. 8, 1968.

 

Stirred by the spirit of the times, it turned out that two historic protests of the Miss America Pageant were held that day, independently of each other. The one organized by the "Women's Liberation Movement" challenged all beauty contests; the other, the Miss Black America Pageant, laser-targeted the official Pageant's white racism and showcased the beauty of black women.

Below is how Life Magazine covered both protests and the Pageant itself in its issue of September 20, 1968:

1968-09-20  Life 2 protests 1 2.jpg




SUGGESTED READING:
Carol Hanisch's criticism/self-criticism of the action, What Can Be Learned: A Critique of the Miss America Protest. A facsimile copy of Carol's paper, as it was first distributed on November 27, 1968 at a national women's liberation conference, is available on the Redstockings website in the packet called Redstockings First Literature List.





Listen to Redstockings veterans Carol Hanisch, Kathie Sarachild, and Alix Kates Shulman, along with NOW pioneer Jacqui Ceballos, talk about the Miss America Protest on two nationwide public radio shows marking the 40th anniversary of the incendiary year of 1968. Redstockings was formed in 1969, several months after the Protest.