Above Photo: Getty Images/ David Fenton
Fifty years ago, feminist organizing in the United States entered a vibrant new phase of activity. While pinning down an exact starting date is a controversial endeavor, several major events in the late 1960s heralded the birth of what is often called second-wave feminism. The year 1966 saw the establishment of the National Organization of Women, or NOW, while 1967 featured both the introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment into the Senate and groundbreaking pickets at the New York Times opposing sex-segregated job ads. Then, in 1968, protests at the Miss America pageant set off a whirlwind period that marked the movement’s most intensive use of direct action. It also announced the existence of radical feminism, a branch of the movement with an agenda and attitude distinct from the organizing of liberal groups such as NOW.
In the decades since, our society has been transformed by feminism. Changes wrought by the movement have afforded new generations the freedom to transgress once-rigid gender roles, and they have provided hundreds of millions of women with opportunities for personal fulfillment, degrees of independence, and professional accomplishment that were routinely denied their forebears. That said, the vision of equality and liberation promoted by radical feminism is still far from being fully realized.
It is no small irony that, in 2017, Donald Trump, the former owner of the Miss USA franchise and an infamous fount of sexist behavior, will become the nation’s president.
The elevation of Hillary Clinton to the White House was meant to be a high point for American women. Instead, the 2016 election pointed to the need for a renewed vision of radical feminism — one that goes beyond corporate feminism’s focus on the presence of women in executive suites and high political office, and that instead speaks powerfully to women who work multiple jobs for low wages and who may lack adequate health care, decent housing and affordable childcare.
Many progressives are rightly dismayed at what Trump’s presidency might suggest about the persistence of sexism 50 years after the emergence of the women’s liberation movement. What will be significant in facing the horrors of the Trump administration will be whether this dismay can be channeled into a revitalized grassroots movement to confront the sexism and racism that Trump embodies, the newly emboldened threat to reproductive rights, and the coming attacks on the social safety net.
The fact that upwards of 100,000 people are expected to attend the Women’s March on Washington, taking place the weekend of Trump’s inauguration — and that tens of thousands more plan to participate in parallel marches throughout the country — suggests that such a movement can find a energetic base of support. Those organizing this base should draw lessons from the upheaval of 50 years ago — the history of which is too little known, even among progressives.
Looking back at this period of revolt, we can ask: How did it erupt? Why did it end? And what did it accomplish?
Banner dropping Miss America
On September 7, 1968, nearly 400 members of a group called New York Radical Women famously disrupted the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. Judith Ford, the former Miss Illinois — who had performed on a trampoline earlier in the competition — was being crowned the new Miss America. Just as she began giving her acceptance speech, the action started. Feminists who had snuck inside the pageant hall unfurled a banner reading “Women’s Liberation.” Meanwhile, on the boardwalk outside, hundreds of women symbolically deposited “instruments of female torture” — including bras, high heels, mops, and pots and pans — into a large trash bin to express their view that the pageant commodified women for the profit of men. Flo Kennedy, an African-American activist and lawyer who handled legal defense for the women arrested, fought to include the pageant’s racism in the protest and arranged for support from a local black-owned resort, which served as a staging ground for the disruption.