Watching Women's Liberation, 1970

Feminism's Pivotal Year on the Network News

Bonnie J. Dow

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780252096488
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

In 1970, ABC, CBS, and NBC--the "Big Three" of the pre-cable television era--discovered the feminist movement. From the famed sit-in at Ladies' Home Journal to multi-part feature stories on the movement's ideas and leaders, nightly news broadcasts covered feminism more than in any year before or since, bringing women's liberation into American homes.In Watching Women's Liberation, 1970: Feminism's Pivotal Year on the Network News, Bonnie J. Dow uses case studies of key media events to delve into the ways national TV news mediated the emergence of feminism's second wave. First legitimized as a big story by print media, the feminist movement gained broadcast attention as the networks' eagerness to get in on the action was accompanied by feminists' efforts to use national media for their own purposes. Dow chronicles the conditions that precipitated feminism's new visibility and analyzes the verbal and visual strategies of broadcast news discourses that tried to make sense of the movement.Groundbreaking and packed with detail, Watching Women's Liberation, 1970 shows how feminism went mainstream--and what it gained and lost on the way.

CHAPTER 1

The Movement Meets the Press

The 1968 Miss America Pageant Protest

“Bra-burner” became the put-down term for feminists of my generation…. Had the media called us “girdle-burners,” nearly every woman in the country would have rushed to join us.

—Carol Hanisch (1998), member of New York Radical Women and participant in the 1968 Miss America Pageant protest (p. 199)

The Miss America Pageant was the first or second most popular television event for eight of ten years in the 1960s (Watson and Martin, 2004). In many families, mine included, watching it was an annual ritual, and presidential candidate Richard Nixon commented in 1968 that it was the only program that his daughters Tricia and Julie had been allowed to stay up late to watch (Cohen, 1988). The pageant’s visibility as a recurring referendum on American womanhood made it an ideal target for feminist intervention, as the members of NYRW no doubt realized when they searched for an outlet for their political energies. As Carol Hanisch (1970) recounted shortly afterward, the group conceived of the 1968 protest as a “zap action” that would “[use] our presence as a group and/or media to make women’s oppression into a conscious social issue” (p. 133).¹

The protest and the media attention to it accomplished that goal, and the events in Atlantic City on September 7, 1968, quickly became an origin story—inside and outside the movement—for the public emergence of women’s liberation ideas and activities. The protest’s occurrence and the images it produced became an enduring element of cultural memories of the second wave. Early print feature stories on the movement from 1969 would include photos of the Miss America Pageant protestors (e.g., Babcox, 1969), and images from that Saturday’s events would surface in multiple network news stories about the movement in 1970, when the event had gained a retrospective importance that warranted its inclusion in television news narratives about women’s liberation.

NYRW was the first radical feminist group in New York City, and it was formed in 1967 by several women who hoped to extend the critiques forwarded by other radical movements to include an analysis of women’s oppression. In fact, NYRW held its meetings at the offices of the Southern Conference Education Fund, a civil rights group with which Carol Hanisch was affiliated (Dicker, 2008). Many of the members of NYRW also were or had been active in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality, Students for a Democratic Society, and the Youth International Party (Yippies), organizations from which they were becoming increasingly alienated for reasons that included those groups’ dismissal of women’s issues and women’s leadership. Like radical feminism generally, NYRW did not have much of a public profile in 1968, but their attack on a cherished American institution would be the event that “marked the end of the movement’s obscurity” (Echols, 1989, p. 93).

Robin Morgan (1992), a member of NYRW (as well as Students for a Democratic Society, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Yippies) and a key organizer of the Miss America Pageant protest, called it “the first major action in the current wave of feminism in the United States” (p. 21). In the chapter of her memoir titled “The Origins of the Second Wave of Feminism,” Sheila Tobias (1997) perhaps put it most succinctly when she noted that the protest “both helped publicize and would later haunt the women’s movement” (p. 86).² As most accounts acknowledge, what “haunted” the women’s movement was the specter of bra burning. No bras were burned at the 1968 protest, and feminist historians, as well as participants and observers of the protest, have long attempted to dispel this misconception.³ Regardless, bra-burning became what Ruth Rosen (2000) calls “the most tenacious media myth about the women’s movement,” a “sexy trope” that “became a symbolic way of sexualizing—and thereby trivializing—women’s struggle for emancipation” (pp. 160–161). Contending that, post-1968, bra-burning became an “international icon of women’s liberation,” Hilary Hinds and Jackie Stacey (2001) concur that it was cast as “tame, domestic, and petty” and depicted as “a kind of self-indulgence similar to a ridiculous concern with sexual pleasure” (pp. 157–158).

Bras were only one of many items that were tossed into the Freedom Trash Can on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City on September 7, 1968—also included were girdles, high heels, cosmetics, eyelash curlers, wigs, and issues of Cosmopolitan, Playboy, and Ladies’ Home Journal. The rumor that the trash can would be ignited—and the later assumption that it had been—was begun by Robin Morgan’s interview with New York Post reporter Lindsy Van Gelder a few days earlier. In that conversation, Morgan identified herself as a member of the Yippies and drew connections between the Miss America Pageant action and other New Left protests. Seizing on these links, Van Gelder wrote a lead to her story that read as follows: “Lighting a match to a draft card or a flag has been a standard gambit of protest groups in recent years, but something new is due to go up in flames on Saturday. Would you believe a bra-burning?” Further heightening the effect, the Post gave the story a headline that read, “Bra Burners and Miss America” (quoted in Van Gelder, 1992, p. 81). The Miss America Pageant protest occurred less than two weeks after the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and, given that many members of NYRW had leftist movement experience, Van Gelder’s analogy to the burnings of draft cards and flags was not out of place.

Figure 1. Robin Morgan throws a bra into the Freedom trash can. From Saturday’s Child: A Memoir, courtesy of Robin Morgan.

On the other hand, the comparison did not bode well for a nascent movement that had little credibility with either the Left or with mass media, both of which viewed feminist claims with derision in contrast to the matrix of national and international political issues and events gripping the nation in late 1968. By that point, two beloved national political figures had been assassinated, a presidency had been brought down by controversy over the Vietnam War, black and white students had occupied several buildings at Columbia University, and riots had erupted in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic National Convention. Years later, Van Gelder (1992) recalled that she had been assigned to write a “humor piece” on the protest after her editors had a “thigh-slapping reaction” to the NYRW press release; in fact, she also noted that the Yippies’s Steering Committee had a similar reaction when Robin Morgan informed them of NYRW’s plans (p. 81).

Van Gelder, who would go on to become an active feminist and a regular writer for Ms., was sympathetic to the aims of the protest, and the bra-burning reference was part of her effort to make connections to other movements in which such public burnings had “moral weight” (p. 81). As she later put it, she was trying to “speak in a language that the guys on the city desk could understand” as well as “to speak in code to the radicals of our generation” (p. 81). The ultimate backfire of her good intentions portended the difficulty radical feminists would have in gaining traction for their critique of sexual politics, even when aided by supportive journalists. Bra burning quickly became a decontextualized (and fictional) trope that would function as shorthand for the frivolousness of feminist goals.

Van Gelder’s effort to link the protest to existing countercultural discourses cohered with the intentions of the protestors themselves, who brought the analytical skills they had learned in previous activism and had honed through CR to their critique of the pageant. In a CR session about the pageant, NYRW members concluded that the protest would be an ideal way “to unite women by taking on those issues that spoke to the oppression we all experienced in our daily lives” (Hanisch, 1998, p. 198). Robin Morgan’s (1992) description of the protest, originally written in 1968 and published in various New Left outlets, defended the pageant as an appropriate target because of its “perfect combination of American values—racism, militarism, capitalism—all packaged in one ideal symbol: a woman” (p. 25). In addition to the pageant’s propagation of the “Mindless Sex-Object Image,” a black woman had never been a finalist, the winner would entertain the troops in Vietnam, and “the whole million dollar pageant corporation is one commercial shill game to sell the sponsor’s products” (Morgan, 1992, p. 26). Participant Judith Duffett’s (1968) account of the protest was even more direct about the systemic nature of the feminist critique, maintaining that “our purpose was not to put down Miss America but to attack the male chauvinism, commercialization of beauty, racism and oppression of women symbolized by the pageant” (p. 4, emphasis in original).

The “No More Miss America” flyer distributed at the protest outlined the critique of racism, militarism, and capitalism; in addition, it argued that the contest promoted the “win-or-you’re-worthless competitive disease,” the ideal of women as “young, juicy, and malleable,” and the “Madonna-Whore combination” within which women must be both “sexy and wholesome.”⁴ It charged that the pageant encouraged women to be “inoffensive, bland and apolitical” because conformity was “the key to the crown,” and it claimed that “real power to control our own lives is restricted to men, while women get patronizing pseudo-power, an ermine cloak and a bunch of flowers.” Finally, the feminists contended that the pageant “exercises thought control … to enslave us all the more in high-heeled, low-status roles; to inculcate false values in young girls; to use women as beasts of buying; to seduce us to prostitute ourselves before our own oppression.”

But the coverage of the Miss America Pageant protest would feature almost none of the feminists’ analysis that connected the action to leftist concerns, and the New York Times’s multiple stories on the pageant, on the protest, and on the Miss Black America Pageant held the same day provide early examples of the problems of event-centered reporting that would plague feminists as they attempted to use mass media to bring attention to their issues. The tendencies for representing women’s liberation that emerged in the Times, the nation’s “newspaper of record” that was especially influential among the media elite, laid important groundwork for the narratives about the movement that took shape in later print and broadcast reporting.⁵ Although bra burning may be the most potent media-constructed cultural memory of this early feminist action, it has overshadowed other legacies important to understanding mass media framing of second-wave feminism for public consumption.

In the broadest sense, the Miss America Pageant protest coverage indicated how fundamentally mainstream news media and the radical movement were working at cross-purposes, even when sympathetic women reporters (from the Times’s Style section, no less) were involved. The protestors’ analysis of the political ills that the pageant symbolized received much less attention than did the spectacle of the protest itself, the demeanor and appearance of the protestors, and the conflict generated by the reactions of spectators and counterprotestors. While not overtly dismissive, the Times’s coverage did little to give the protest and its participants political credibility, framing the event as a motley collection of women who had creative tactics but an incoherent message. This interpretation was bolstered by reporters’ comparisons of feminist and civil rights protests that were precipitated by the juxtaposition of the Miss America and Miss Black America Pageants on September 7.

Providing early examples of the sex-race analogies that would become a recurring theme in reporting on women’s liberation, the Times’s stories demonstrated the vastly different levels of cultural authority attached to claims of sexism and racism in 1968, when racial discrimination was a recognized social problem in elite national media and sexism was a term often encapsulated by quotation marks. Although the politics of sexism received short shrift in the reporting on the events of September 7, the challenge to cultural gender politics that the protestors’ presence and behavior represented did not, and accounts of the protest and its aftermath showcase early manifestations of the persistent role that gender ideologies would play in reporters’ and spectators’ attempts to make sense of women’s liberation.

The Protestors and the Press

On September 8, the day after the pageant, the Times’s Sunday edition carried a lengthy account of the protest, headlined “Miss America Pageant Picketed by 100 Women” (Curtis, 1968a), along with a boxed sidebar on the results of the pageant. Titled “Illinois Girl Named Miss America” (1968), the pageant story indicated in its second paragraph that Judith Anne Ford was the first blond to win the title in ten years. When the new Miss America was asked for her reaction to the protest in the last paragraph of the brief story, she replied, “It was just too bad. I’m sorry it happened” (p. 81).

The first three paragraphs of the Times’s story on the protest itself managed to describe the scene at the action as well as to include brief snippets of the protesters’ critique of beauty politics, their labeling of the pageant as racist, and their intent to boycott pageant sponsors. Charlotte Curtis, the Times’s Style section editor, covered both the pageant and the protest. Curtis’s lead featured a description of the Freedom Trash Can and its contents (with no mention of burning bras) as well as noted that the women were “armed with a giant bathing beauty puppet.”⁶ She also described the chains encircling the puppet and included the feminists’ claim that they represented “the chains that tie us to these beauty standards against our will.” The story provided a vivid picture of the protest, describing the live sheep that the demonstrators crowned Miss America and noting that the women were peaceful and stayed behind police barricades.

Curtis’s story lacked overt editorializing; for instance, she did not label the demonstrators as “militant,” a tag that news workers would come to use repeatedly in reference to feminist protestors. Generally, her account is a good example of a standard “five W’s” formula (who, what, when, where, why) of event reporting. Describing the group as “mostly middle-aged careerists and housewives, with a sprinkling of 20 year olds and grandmothers,” she also detailed their geographic diversity and implicitly noted the reach of the movement when she wrote that some came from as far away as Bancroft, Iowa, and Gainesville, Florida. Curtis gave particular attention to the older women at the protest, including the grandmother of NYRW member Kathie Amatniek, who was chided by Amatniek for talking with a male spectator and who “promised to do better.”⁷ At another point, Curtis mentioned a sixty-eight-year-old member of the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, a women’s antiwar group, who threw a high-heeled shoe into the Freedom Trash Can. Such vignettes upped the human-interest quotient, and the implication of absurdity attached to the description of grandmothers at the protest brought the news value of deviance into play, but they gave little insight into the “why” of the events. The multiple mentions of television cameras and photographers in Curtis’s story implicitly offered simple attention seeking as a motivation for the action, and she explicitly observed at one point that the protestors “escalated their activities when the cameramen arrived.”

The absence of a leader to succinctly lay out the purposes of the protest resulted in a story that tacitly put Robin Morgan in that role, even as she was quoted as describing the protest as “a simultaneous cooperative effort conceived and executed by a number of people.” Of the NYRW members present, Morgan had the most presence in the Times report, in which Curtis described her as a “poet, former child actress, and a housewife” rather than as the experienced political activist that she was. Curtis noted that the protestors “belonged to what they called the Women’s Liberation Movement,” yet she gave no other details about their purpose or structure, and Morgan’s quoted comment that “we don’t want another Chicago” (in reference to the protestors’ promise to the Atlantic City mayor that they would be “orderly and quiet”) came closest to linking the demonstration with her (and other protestors’) leftist politics. In fact, Morgan was never quoted on the politics of the protest, only its logistics, and most of her discourse in the story focused on the concerns of the mayor, who was worried about the highly flammable boardwalk (which had caught fire just the week before), followed by her assurance that “just a symbolic bra-burning” was planned. Because she was quoted so extensively, and because Curtis gave more biographical information on her than on anyone else mentioned in the story, Morgan became the dominant voice of the demonstrators.

Reporters seek out the most recognizable figures present to give focus to a story, and Morgan fit that bill. She had acquired fame as a child because of her role on the popular television series I Remember Mama from 1950 to 1956; she was adept at speaking with the press; and she and Curtis were already acquainted (Morgan, 2001). In fact, Morgan was credited by other protestors for milking her media contacts from her famous past, thus ensuring ample coverage of the action. At the same time, her centrality to the resulting coverage did not go unnoticed within the movement; “some women felt Morgan took control of the action and resented her for that” (Echols, 1989, p. 95), and Carol Hanisch (1998) would later call Morgan “a bit of a press hound” (p. 199). Morgan’s role in the Times’s story appears to give credence to these charges, but attributing her visibility solely to her own choices is overly simplistic.

Consistent with their commitment to CR, a resolutely egalitarian process in which all participants were treated as experts, NYRW’s position was that any woman at the protest was as qualified as any other to talk about what it meant. Yet the varying responses this stance produced in Curtis’s story—which quoted different women decrying high heels, girdles, and dishwashing along with the “enslavement” of beauty standards—worked against message coherence for the action. Presumably, the protestors were united by their wish for an end to the Miss America Pageant (recall that the press release title was “No Mor...