WHAT THE MISS AMERICA PROTEST DID FOR FEMINISM
A demonstrator and a contestant look back on a galvanizing moment
On Sept. 7, 1968, a group of women, maybe 200 in all, converged on Atlantic City in New Jersey to protest the 42nd Miss America pageant. They marched along the boardwalk outside Convention Hall carrying signs that read, “All Women Are Beautiful” and “If you want meat, go to the butcher,” railing against the pageant because, in their view, women were judged mostly on their looks. The protesters, organized by the New York Radical Women, didn’t want to simply end the annual beauty contest.
They called out the pageant for its commercialism, for supporting the Vietnam War by sending winners to entertain the troops and for racism because it had not crowned a black Miss America. (As it happened, the first Miss Black America was crowned at a separate pageant down the street that same night.)
Because millions of viewers watched the pageant, the event gave the women’s liberation movement unprecedented media coverage and, along the way, fed the image of feminists as bra burners, though in reality, no bras were burned.
For many, it was the start of a new wave of feminism.
Fifty years later, two women who had been on opposite sides of the protest, activist and writer Kathie Sarachild and Judith Ford, who was crowned Miss America 1969 that night, can look back on what happened and still feel the excitement and the fear, and they can see how it changed their lives.
It was a pivotal year for the country, and for each of them, one a pro- tester, one a participant. For all their differences that day, the women would find common ground.
The young contestant
Judith Ann Ford was 18, a lifeguard in Belvidere, Illinois, population 12,000. She competed in diving and gymnastics and on the trampoline.
Ford was coaxed into the Miss Boone County Fair pageant by the manager of the SuperValu store, the father of one of her friends. She won, advanced to the state fair pageant, won that and then Miss Illinois.
State pageant officials harbored doubts about her chances in Atlantic City. For the talent competition, Ford would flip on the trampoline. Miss America didn’t sweat, they told her.
The activist
Kathie Sarachild was in high school when she discovered “The Second Sex” by French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir on her mother’s bookshelf.
In it, Sarachild read about cultural restraints on women and societal ideas of what a woman should do.
Sarachild studied history at Radcliffe College at Harvard University, graduated in 1964 and joined Freedom Summer, a campaign to register black voters in Mississippi.
In the fall of 1967, she joined a group of women, most of them in their 20s, many of them active in the civil rights and anti-war movements. They took the name New York Radical Women.
At the group’s first public action, a mock burial of traditional womanhood at Arlington National Cemetery, Sarachild gave a speech in which she used the phrase “Sisterhood is powerful.”
It became a rallying cry for the women’s liberation movement.
The pageant protest
Activists came to Atlantic City from as far as Michigan and Florida. Sarachild, then 25, was delighted.
As the protest began, women dropped bras, girdles, mops, pots and pans, hairspray and mascara and copies of Playboy and Cosmopolitan into a trash can.
It was the trash can that gave rise to the myth of the bra burning. An earlier New York Post story suggested protesters would burn bras, like anti-war protesters burned their draft cards.
Police asked the women not to set anything on fire because the boardwalk was made of wood. They didn’t.
Inside Convention Hall, the contestants heard about the protest, and during rehearsal, when their chaperones were distracted, they ducked out a side door to see what was happening.
Ford didn’t understand why they were protesting. Her mother worked while she was growing up. Her parents never told her she couldn’t do anything because she was a girl.
She had just finished her freshman year at the University of Southwest Louisiana, where she was the only woman on the men’s gymnastics team and the first woman to earn a varsity letter in any sport.
“If you don’t want to enter a pageant, that’s fine,” she thought. “If I want to enter a pageant, then that’s my prerogative.”
At least 17 protesters entered Convention Hall, dressed in skirts, wearing nylons and heels.
Sarachild was one of four women who made their way to the front row of the balcony, where they unfurled a bed sheet banner that read, “Women’s liberation” over the edge.
It took police and security less than a minute to reach the women. They were hustled downstairs and out a side door.
“We pulled it off,” Sarachild shouted.
Bert Parks and the question
On stage, Ford heard the shouting from the balcony, but, blinded by the spotlights directed at the stage, she couldn’t see what was happening.
Host Bert Parks called the names of the five finalists. Ford, much to her amazement, was the last.
Each contestant would answer a question before the judges made their final decision.
“In your own questionnaire, you said that the most important thing that you could do to make America a better place to live was to help people to learn to live together happily and peacefully,” Parks asked. “In what specific way would you try to accomplish this?”
Ford was silent for eight seconds before answering.
“In order to make people live together more peacefully, I think that a person has to learn that he is no better than his neighbor and that all people are equal and should be given equal opportunity for all things. Thank you.”
Ford barely heard Parks announce her name as Miss America 1969.
Ford spent the year after winning Miss America making appearances across the country, traveling 20,000 miles a month for openings, races and community events. Often, there were protesters who insisted she was being exploited.
In August 1969, Ford went to Vietnam for three weeks on a USO Tour. The men lined up for autographs and thanked her for coming. She visited soldiers in the hospital, sitting at their bedsides.
Unlike her other appearances, this felt meaningful. This felt important.
A movement grows
Sarachild was exhilarated by the protest.
Meetings of the New York Radical Women were packed. Mail poured in. One housewife wrote, “I’ve been waiting for you all my life.”
Women’s liberation journals, mostly mimeographed newsletters, exploded across the country.
The New York Radical Women expanded, then fell apart. Groups splintered off, and the women joined those.
For Sarachild, it was Redstockings, conceived as an intellectual study group.
Sarachild is 75, still with Redstockings, writing and advocating.
“Maintaining the feminist movement is like housework,” she said. “You wish you didn’t have to do it, but it is one of those things that has to be done.”
In 2015, Sarachild noticed that New York’s subways seemed covered in sexist advertising, from breast enhancement to lingerie sales.
Members of Redstockings revived stickers that read, “This oppresses women,” pasting them on the ads as they had in 1969. The ads were removed.
“My point is maintenance,” Sarachild said. “If you maintain the base to keep up the fight, whenever this stuff rears its head, it will go away.”
‘Not equal footing yet’
Ford grew up quickly in that year after winning Miss America.
As she got older, she better understood why protesters targeted the pageant. But it still had been her choice, and she is grateful for the opportunities it brought her.
Ford, 68, still gets letters from soldiers she met in Vietnam.
It was important. It was meaningful. She said she understands that what the protesters were doing was important and meaningful, too.
Because there is something she and Sarachild agree on:
“Things are changing, though not fast enough,” Ford said. “It’s not equal footing yet.”