What Can Be Learned: A Critique of the Miss America Protest

By Carol Hanisch

The protest of the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City in September of 1968 told the nation that a new feminist movement is afoot in the land. Due to the tremendous coverage in the mass media, millions of Americans now know there is a Women’s Liberation Movement. Media coverage ranged from the front pages of several newspapers in the United States to many articles in the foreign press.

The action brought many new members into our groups and many requests from women outside the city for literature and information. Many letters said, “I've been waiting so long for something like this.” So have we all, and the Miss America protest put us well on our way.

But no action taken in the struggle for our liberation will be all good or all bad. It is necessary that we analyze each step to see what we did that was effective, what was not, and what was downright destructive.

At this point in our struggles our actions should be aimed primarily aat doing two inter-related things: 1) awakening the latent consciousness of women about their own oppression, and 2) building sisterhood. With these as our primary immediate goals, let us examine the Miss America protest.

The idea came out of our group method of analyzing women's oppression by recalling our own experiences. We were watching Schmearguntz, a feminist movie, one night at our meeting. The movie had flashes of the Miss America contest in it. I found myself sitting there remembering how I had felt at home with my family watching the pageant as a child, an adolescent, and a college student. I knew it had evoked powerful feelings.

When I proposed the idea to our group [New York Radical Women], we decided to go around the room with each woman telling how she felt about the pageant. We discovered that many of us who had always put down the contest still watched it. Others, like myself, had consciously identified with it, and had cried with the winner.

From our communal thinking came the concrete plans for the action, We all agreed that our main point in the demonstration would be that all women are hurt by beauty competition—Miss America as well as ourselves, We opposed the pageant in our own self-interest, e.g. the self-interest of all women.

Yet one of the biggest mistakes of the whole pageant was our anti-womanism. A spirit of every woman “do her own thing” began to emerge. Sometimes it was because there was a conflict about an issue. Other times, women didn't say anything at all about disagreeing with a group decision; they just went ahead and did what they wanted to do, even though it was something the group had definitely decided against. Because of this egotistic individualism, a definite strain of anti-womanism was presented to the public and harmed the action.

Posters which read “Up Against the Wall, Miss America,” “Miss America Sells It,” and “Miss America Is a Big Falsie” hardly raised any woman's consciousness and really harmed the cause of sisterhood. Miss America and all beautiful women came off as our enemy instead of as our sisters who suffer with us. A group decision had been made rejecting these anti-woman signs.

A few women made them anyway. Some women who had opposed the slogans were in the room when the signs were being made and didn't confront those who were making the anti-woman signs.

A more complex situation developed around the decision of a few women to use an “underground” disruptive tactic. The action was approved by the group only after some women said they would do it anyway as an individual action. As it turned out, we came to the realization that there is no such thing as an “individual action” in a movement, We were linked to and were committed to support our sisters whether they called their action “individual” or not.

It also came to us that there is at this time no real need to do “underground” actions. We need to reach as many women as possible as quickly as possible with a clear message that has the power of our person behind it. At this point women draping a Women's Liberation banner over the balcony that night and yelling our message was much clearer. We should have known, however, that the television network, because it was not competing with other networks for coverage, would not put the action on camera. It did get on the radio and in newspapers, though.

The problem of how to enforce group decisions is one we haven't solved. It came up in a lot of ways throughout the whole action. The group rule of not talking to male reporters was another example.

One of the reasons we came off anti-woman, besides the posters, was our lack of clarity, We didn't say clearly enough that we women are FORCED to play the Miss America roll—not by beautiful women, but by men we have to act that way for and by a system that has so well institutionalized male supremacy for its own ends.

This was not too clear in our guerilla theater either. Women chained to a replica red, white and blue bathing-suited Miss America could have been misinterpreted as against beautiful women. Also, crowning a live sheep Miss America sort of said that beautiful women are sheep. However, the action did say to some women that we are viewed as auction-block, docile animals. The grandmother of one of the participants really began to understand the action when she was told of the sheep, and she ended up joining the protest.

There is as great a need for clarity in our language as there is in our actions. The leaflet that was distributed as a press release and as a flyer at the action was too long, too wordy, too complex, too hippy-yippee-campy. Instead of an “in” phrase like “Racism with Roses” (I still don't know exactly what that means), we could have just called the pageant RACIST and everybody would have understood our opposition on that point. If we are going to reach masses of women, we must give up all the “in-talk” of the New Left/Hippie movements—at least when we're talking in public, (Yes. even the word FUCK!) We can use simple language (real language) that everyone from Queens to Iowa will understand and not misunderstand. Most swear words are anti-woman, and that's probably one reason why our mothers objected to them so much.

We should try to avoid the temptation to say everything there is to say about what is wrong with the world and thereby say nothing that a new woman can really dig into and understand. Women's Liberation itself is revolutionary dynamite. When other issues are interjected, we should clearly relate them to our oppression AS WOMEN.

We tried to carry the democratic means we used in planning the action into the actual DOING of it. We didn't want leaders or spokesmen. It makes the movement not only SEEM stronger and larger if everyone is a leader, but it actually IS stronger if not dependent on a few. It also guards against the time when such leaders could be isolated and picked off one way or another. And of course many voices are more powerful than one.

Our first attempt at this was not entirely successful. We must learn how to fight against the media's desire to make leaders and some women's desire to be spokesmen. Everybody talks to the press or nobody talks to the press. The same problem came up in regard to appearances on radio and television shows after the action. We theoretically decided no one should appear more than once, but it didn't work out that way.

The Miss America protest was a zap action, as opposed to person to person group action. Zap actions are using our presence as a group and/or media to make women's oppression into a conscious social issue. In such actions we speak to men as a group as well as to women. It is a rare opportunity to talk to men in a situation where they can't talk back. (Men must begin to learn to listen.) Our power of solidarity, not our individual intellectual exchanges will change men.

We tried to speak to individual women in the crowd and now some of us feel that it may not have been a good thing to do. It put women on the spot in front of their men. We were putting them in a position which we choose to avoid ourselves when we don't allow men in our discussion groups.

It is interesting that many of the non-movement women we talked to about the protest had the same reaction as many radical women. “But I'm not oppressed,” was a shared response. “I don't care about Miss America,” was another. If more than half the television viewers in the country watch the pageant, somebody cares! And many of us admitted watching it too, even while putting it down.

It's interesting, too, that while much of the Left was putting us down for attacking something so “silly and unimportant” or “reformist,” the Right saw us as a threat and yelled such things as “Go back to Russia” and “Mothers of Mao” at the picket line. Ironically enough, what the Left/Underground press seemed to like best about our action was what was really our worst mistake—our anti-woman signs.

Surprisingly and fortunately some of the mass media ignored our mistakes and concentrated on our best points. To quote from the Daily News, “Some women who think the whole idea of such contests is degrading to femininity took their case to the people. … During boardwalk protest, gals say they're not anti-beauty, just anti-beauty contest.” Shana Alexander wrote in a Life magazine editorial that she “wished they'd gone farther,” Together, Life and the Daily News reach millions of Americans.

 We need to take ourselves seriously. The powers that be do. Carol Giardina of Gainesville, Florida was fired from her job because of her activities in women's liberation and her participation in the protest. Police cars were parked outside the planning meeting one night. The next day we got a call from the mayor of Atlantic City questioning us about just what we planned to do. Pepsi Cola is withdrawing as a sponsor of the pageant. They produce a diet cola and maybe see themselves as next years special target.

 Unfortunately the best slogan for the action came up about a month after the contest when Ros Baxandall came out on the David Susskind show with “Every day in a woman's life is a walking Miss America contest.” We shouldn't wait for the best slogan; we should go ahead to the best of our understanding. We hope all our sisters can learn something from our first foray. We did.