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People in Movements: When Movements Focus on Single-Gender Concerns

Protesting the Miss America Pageant on the Atlantic City Boardwalk in September 1968.

Credit: Bev Grant/Getty Images

ATLANTIC CITY, September 7 (1968) - Women armed with a giant bathing beauty puppet and a "freedom trash can" in which they threw girdles, bras, hair curlers, false eyelashes, and anything else that smacked of "enslavement," picketed the Miss America Pageant here today.

The women pickets marched around the Boardwalk outside Convention Hall, singing anti-Miss-America songs in three-part harmony, carrying posters deploring "the degrading mindless-boob-girlie symbol," and insisting that the only "free" woman is "the woman who is no longer enslaved by ludicrous beauty standards."

They also denounced the beauty contest's "racism" (since its inception in 1921, the pageant has never had a Black finalist), and announced boycott of the sponsors (Pepsi-Cola and Toni and Oldsmobile) and refused to talk with males (including male reporters).

"Miss America pageant picketed by 100 women." Charlotte Curtis, Special to the New York Times

(September 8, 1968, p. 81)

This protest, by the organization New York Radical Women, a part of the women's liberation branch of the U.S. women's movement, was to become the source of many myths and misconceptions in the years to come, in part because it received extensive press coverage, such as the above special report in the New York Times, the day after the protest. The biggest misconception to emerge from the protest was the characterization of the activists as "bra burners," a stereotype of feminists that still lingers today. In reality, the activists did toss items such as bras and girdles into a "freedom trash can," but without a permit to start a fire, nothing was burned. According to activist Karla Jay who was at the protest, another myth was that the activists didn't talk to men (1999). Single-gender movements, particularly women's movements, have repeatedly been the source of negative myths and stereotypes. In the case of U.S. feminism, New York Radical Women were viewed as anti-male, hence the myth of not speaking to male reporters; and too radical, as encapsulated in the myth of "bra burners." While negative, there is some truth in these stereotypes of feminists. Radical feminists, such as the ones at the Miss America pageant, rejected the norms of hyperfemininity (i.e. excessive or extreme femininity) around dress, appearance, and demeanor. These young women specifically rejected the expected foundation garments - bras, girdles, hosiery - that defined women's shapes and styles in earlier decades. In doing so, they also were rejecting the idea of beauty contests where women were valued solely for their appearance (reflecting their value to the larger society). To illustrate the demeaning nature of being valued only for beauty, activists paraded a sheep to demonstrate how women were judged like animals at a county fair. Naomi Wolf (1990) later called this the "beauty myth," the idea that no woman can ever achieve or maintain cultural norms of feminine beauty. Wolf argued that trying to achieve this goal cost women time, energy, and resources that could be used for other more meaningful pursuits. By tossing girdles and bras into a "freedom trash can," activists rejected the control over their bodies, and by crowning a sheep "Miss America" they symbolically critiqued traditional femininity as passive and controllable.

While it is easy to assume that this was just a small group of activists and a one-time protest, these women were part of a larger, more complex women's movement focused on gender inequality. Indeed, historian Alice Echols (1989) argues that it was this demonstration that brought the emerging movement with all its factions into the public sphere. The U.S. women's movement, which emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was a complex movement with divisions by race, age, status, and most importantly, the focus on what needed to be changed in society. Taking the example of the Miss America protest, the women participating were predominantly white, young, college-educated, and with a history of being involved in student and anti-war protests. Overall, the history of the movement is one of political, social, and racial divisions that brought some avenues of change, collaboration, and often discord. Indeed, even the participants at the Miss America protest debated on the direction of their actions.

The Miss America protest, with its focus on gender norms and its connection to a larger movement, serves as an example of how people in predominantly single-gender movements specifically address what they perceive to be inequality. Here, gender is the source of movements, and they are often organized to change gender socialization, constraining gender norms and the resulting barriers by focusing activism on the societal institutions that uphold them. The Miss America protest, seen in the context of the larger movement, also illustrates an important dynamic of single-gender movements - where, how, and why of social change often varies widely between groups in the same movement. These differences are often forged from variations in age, race-ethnicity, education level, social class, as well as a myriad of other social identities and experiences. Overall, the work of achieving gender equality is rarely accomplished with a single collective mindset. An intersectional perspective reminds us that people experience the world differently due to their social statuses; the same is also true of their experiences and goals in social movements.

Because gender as a binary organizes and sorts people into two opposite categories (woman/man, feminine/masculine) in society, large numbers of people in a category can experience the same constraints due to gender and come to identify them as problems. Grievances are the personal troubles that people come to identify as social problems stemming from inequality. However, grievances alone are not sufficient to start a movement. Lots of people can identify the personal problems they experience, but do not consequently join social movements. Grievances need a push, or opening, in the political and cultural environment to translate them into activism. As such, grievances can exist for long periods of time without a movement emerging. For example, across the world women have been denied the right to vote for much longer periods of time than suffrage movements have been organized.

However, the articulation of grievances is essential to movements. They can serve as a common bond among participants, focus the goals and actions of leaders, and serve to recruit others to the movement. We can see this process of identifying gendered grievances most clearly in single-gender movements such as men's or women's movements. While men have been a part of women's movements and vice versa, the focus of these movements is on addressing issues arising from gender norms around masculinity or femininity, along with the perception that these norms are the source of gender inequality. So, if acknowledging grievances around gender norms is not enough to start a movement, then what is?

Holly McCammon and her co-authors argue that the acknowledgment of gender discrimination is not enough to start a movement. Instead they argue that "gendered opportunity structures" are also necessary for these types of movements to emerge (McCammon et al. 2001). A gendered opportunity structure is an opening in the social, political, or cultural environment that allows for a movement to form. Often this window of opportunity is a matter of timing where ideas about gender in society fluctuate enough, allowing people to find each other and organize. McCammon and her colleagues base this argument on their study of suffrage efforts in the United States. They find that it is not enough to want to right a wrong, such as being denied the vote, but that society has to be open to the challenge for change. They explain, ". changing gender relations altered expectations about women's participation in the polity, and these changes in gendered expectations increased the willingness of political decision-makers to support suffrage (2001: 51). Here it is the support of decision-makers that opens up the political system and allows activists to organize. In the case of the Miss America protests, feminists were able to draw attention to their claims about women's oppression largely due to being in a period of time where there was media interested in the emerging feminist movement and members had developed media contacts to call upon. Without an open opportunity structure, activists can struggle in vain to make change and recruit others to the cause.

Much of the research on single-gender movements examines people through the gender binary of man/woman and masculine/feminine to understand how the participant's gender category influences social movements. Although this ignores individuals outside the gender binary, feminist scholars pioneered this work by acknowledging that gender differences between men and women exist. They noted that ignoring gender doesn't make activists and movements gender neutral. Instead when gender is not examined, men become the "default human" and women become the "other" in social interactions....