Miss America Protest - Protest Event

Protest Event

The feminists traveled to Atlantic City in cars and rented buses. On September 7, 1968, about 400 feminist-identified women and radical feminists from New York, Florida, Boston, Detroit, and New Jersey gathered on the Boardwalk outside the Miss America Pageant. They protested what they called, “The Degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol” and American society’s normative beauty expectations. During the protest, they marched with signs, passed out pamphlets, including one titled No More Miss America, and crowned a live sheep, comparing the beauty pageant to livestock competitions at county fairs.

They also symbolically threw a number of feminine products into a "Freedom Trash Can." These included mops, pots and pans, Cosmopolitan and Playboy magazines, false eyelashes, high-heeled shoes, curlers, hairspray, makeup, girdles, corsets, and bras, items the protestors called "instruments of female torture" and accouterments of what they perceived to be enforced femininity. Protesters saw the pageant and its symbols as an oppression of women. They decried its emphasis on an arbitrary standard of beauty. They were against the labeling, public worship and exploitation of the "most beautiful girl in America."

Sarachild, one of the protest organizers, reported that "huge crowds gathered for the picketing. People were grabbing our fliers out of our hands."