The year women refused to stay silent
Fifty years ago, feminists took to the streets to fight for equal rights
Everything was discussed, no topic deemed taboo: reproductive rights, abortion, orgasms, workplace inequality, financial disparity, relationships, rape, the harassment they faced daily walking down the street. The modern women’s movement began the way women have long come together, meeting in living rooms across the country to share their lives and issues. “Consciousness-raising groups” planted the seeds of protest. Women met monthly or weekly, the gatherings formed largely through word of mouth. Sometimes coffee and cake were served. Personal stories, always.
The groups often sat in a circle, each woman getting a chance to tell her story. Susan Brownmiller, who would write the seminal book on rape,
Against Our Will, told her group she had had three illegal abortions. Peggy Dobbins shared that, as an unwed mother, she had given up an infant for adoption. “The personal is political” became the message.
The year 1968 was the moment when women took the message and the movement out of their homes and onto the streets.
Abortion was illegal. The pill and the IUD made sex safer but also shifted the burden onto women to make sure they didn’t get pregnant. The working world remained largely separate and unequal.
The term “feminist” had yet to widely enter the vernacular. Neither had “sexist”; the invective of choice was “male chauvinist pig.”
In January of that combustible year, 5,000 women marched against the Vietnam War in Washington, calling themselves the Jeannette Rankin Brigade. Rankin, then 87, had been the first woman elected to Congress, in 1916 and again in 1940.
The brigade moved to the Shoreham Hotel for post-march meetings, where a group of about 200 younger, mostly college-educated women separated from the larger conclave. They complained that the protest had cast them in the roles of “tearful and passive reactors to the actions of men,” the late Shulamith Firestone wrote.
At the hotel, they carried a coffin symbolizing the “Burial of Traditional Womanhood.” Kathie Sarachild read an oration: “Yes, sisters, we have a problem as women all right, a problem which renders us powerless and ineffective over the issues of war and peace, as well as over our own lives.”
These women, many veterans of the civil rights and antiwar movements, had discovered that younger men, even the scruffy longhair radicals, were as opposed to gender equality as their fathers were.
“Our brothers in that world wanted us to make coffee, not policy,” says activist and writer Robin Morgan, a member of New York Radical Women.
Thus was born, nearly 50 years after women got the vote, the second wave of feminism.
How to make their message known?
“It popped into my head that the pageant might be something good to protest because it was very popular at the time and helped set appearance standards for all women,” recalls Carol Hanisch, also a member of New York Radical Women.
In 1968, Miss America represented the Super Bowl of beauty; almost two-thirds of all televisions in use were tuned to the pageant. It was the perfect event.
The protest was the movement’s first big media moment, and it was carefully planned.
Bev Grant, who would become a musical performer and remain an activist, took photos and shot film. Dobbins created a life-size Miss America puppet and strutted along the boardwalk like a carnival barker: “Yes, sirree, boys, step right up. How much am I offered for this No. 1 piece of prime American property? She sings in the kitchen, hums at the typewriter, purrs in bed.” Their signs read “Up Against the Wall, Miss America” and “We Shall Not Be Used.”
In Atlantic City, women threw — but, contrary to lore, did not incinerate — bras. Also girdles, makeup, high heels, girlie mags, all deemed “instruments of female torture.” They were tossed into the “Freedom Trash Can.” The protesters passed out leaflets while a large crowd gathered; some taunted the protesters, although Morgan recalls “how friendly the bystanders were.”
But the myth of bra-burning stuck. Critics jumped all over the idea, labelling the women hairy-legged and humourless. But the participants had a ball. “It felt very joyous and free,” Helen Kritzler says.
Miss America “was a way of reaching the whole country,” Shulman says, to show what the pageant represented: “The objectification of women, treating them as meat, treating them as sex objects. And the racism in the pageant.”
In the1930s, the Miss America pageant instituted a rule that “contestants must be of good health and of the white race.” Although the rule didn’t appear after 1950, almost two decades later the pageant had yet to include a single African American contestant.
Movements take time, the early feminists argue. “Radical change, creating gender equality, can’t occur overnight,” Dobbins says. “Lord heavens, it’s only been 50 years.”