Pedro Fequiere for BuzzFeed

By Michael Boucher
Spiritus Christi, January 28, 2018

The year was 1968.  Almost five hundred women from the feminist and civil rights movements had gathered outside of Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey to protest the Miss America pageant.  The organizers of the protest were opposed to the objectification and mistreatment of women and saw the Miss America pageant as an embodiment of so much that was wrong in our culture.  But they also saw the pageant being linked to other major social ills like racism (no woman of color had been allowed to participate), war (the Miss America winner would go ‘visit the troops’ in Vietnam) and materialism (because of all of the products that women were encouraged to buy to be ‘beautiful’).  So they literally crowned a live sheep Miss America to represent how women were being treated like livestock, threw objects of female oppression – like girdles, curlers and tweezers – into trash cans (no bras were burned, for the record, but women got blamed for it anyway!), they sang songs, and even secretly made their way into the actual Miss America pageant and unfurled a banner from the balcony that read “Freedom for Women”.   Their actions caused quite a stir to say the least. Continue reading →