How the Myth of Feminist Bra Burning Spread

Few images are as relentlessly recycled as the portrait of “angry feminists” burning their bras in protest of the 1968 Miss America pageant held in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Inaccurate media publicity around that protest convinced many Americans that feminists, hostile to beauty and fashion, must be opposed in principle to attracting men—or to being attractive, period. This stereotype of feminists being deliberately unattractive and antisocial continues to haunt young women, many of whom deny any affiliation with the women’s movement by stating carefully, “I’m not a feminist, but...”

After 1968, critics of the women’s movement brought up bra-burning to mock the ideals of “women’s lib,” reducing feminist goals to a ban on beauty products. Bralessness also became a way of eroticizing young women, linking them to the provocative freedoms of the sexual revolution. The image of bra-burning convinced some Americans that radical women were becoming as destructive as radical men in an era when homemade bombs, the Weathermen, armed Black Panther brigades, and the slogan “Burn, baby, burn” were all combining to destabilize society. And not a few women of color and the working class puzzled over the feminist movement’s derision toward nice clothing and expensive cosmetics, items many poorer women longed to afford and which symbolized upward social mobility. But the truth is that no bras were burned in Atlantic City. So, how did the myth begin?

Throughout the 1960s, protests flourished best when paired with street theater, which attracted cameras and gave causes good publicity. From young men burning their draft cards to Karla Jay’s “ogle-in” (which turned the tables on harassing males near the Wall Street subway stop in New York), the public stage communicated ideas effectively in the decades before the Internet and social media. The Atlantic City protest began when members of New York Radical Women (NYRW) decided to make a statement about women being rewarded for appearance alone. Charging that real women were more than sex objects to be judged by the male viewer, NYRW decided to rally outside the popular pageant and discard symbolic items women were required to buy and wear to meet modern standards of beauty. Over two hundred women participated.

Yes, women threw girdles and curlers into a “freedom trash can.” However, the historic wooden boardwalk where feminists had assembled represented a real fire hazard, and Atlantic City’s anxious mayor and police requested that nothing be set aflame. Thus no bras were burned. Inside the actual Miss America event, activists unfurled a giant “Women’s Liberation” banner over the audience balcony. Protest organizer Robin Morgan’s comment to a New York Times reporter, “We wouldn’t do anything dangerous—just a symbolic bra-burning,” convinced TV viewers that bra-burning was the preferred activity of women’s liberationists.

The media’s relationship with feminism would remain fraught with these tensions. Mainstream broadcasts mocked feminist protests, leading women to produce and rely on their own newspapers and journals. Ironically, though it was responsible for manufacturing the stereotype of the “ugly” feminist, America’s media also granted ongoing exposure to feminists who fitted conventional white beauty standards, such as Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, Ti-Grace Atkinson, and Germaine Greer. By the early 1970s, Gloria Steinem and other editors at Ms. magazine would critique beauty products throughout the many forms of journalism the magazine made possible, from the famous “No Comment” section of sexist ads to investigative research on the health risks of feminine hygiene sprays. Legal challenges led by minority women would also help to redefine beauty and personal hygiene as individual and multicultural expression, asking: could a Black woman sport an Afro or dreadlocks and look “professional” at her place of work? Must female lawyers wear dresses or skirts to practice law? Could girls wear trousers to school? In an era where reform schools still punished young Black women for daring to maintain unstraightened natural hairstyles, beauty remained a contested issue. What the Miss America protest questioned, above all, was just who profited from making women and girls conform to a look that could be achieved only inauthentically, through discomfort, expense, and artifice.

“On September 7th in Atlantic City, the Annual Miss America Pageant will again crown ‘your ideal.’ But this year, reality will liberate the contest auctionblock in the guise of ‘genyooine’ de-plasticized, breathing women. Women’s liberation groups, Black women, high-school and college women, women’s peace groups, women’s welfare and social-work groups, women’s job-equality, pro-birth control and pro-abortion groups—women of every political persuasion—all are invited to join us. . . . We will protest the image of Miss America, an image that oppresses in every area in which it purports to represent us.”

“No More Miss America,” open letter, August 26, 1968, Robin Morgan papers, Duke University

From the outset, women’s demonstrations were both playful and creative in attempts to subvert the patriarchy. From America’s WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), whose members “hexed” Wall Street, to the 1968 Miss America protests, where girdles were thrown into a “freedom trash can,” to the the Miss World contest in November 1970 where protesters stood outside adorned with sashes that had slogans attacking the man-made world (Mis-Fit: Refuses to Conform—Mis-Laid: Demands Free Contraception—Mis-Governed: Demands Liberation), feminists rejected old limitations of body and mind.

Read more in The Feminist Revolution: The Struggle for Women's Liberation, which is available from Smithsonian Books. Visit Smithsonian Books’ website to learn more about its publications and a full list of titles. 

Excerpt from The Feminist Revolution © 2018 by Elephant Publishing Company Limited

Bonnie J. Morris | READ MORE

BONNIE J. MORRIS taught women's history for 22 years at both George Washington University and Georgetown, and is now a lecturer in the Gender and Women's Studies Department at UC-Berkeley. She is the award-winning author of 14 books.