Cautionary Tales from the Sexual Revolution: Freedom Gained and Lost in 1970s Novels, Films, and Memoirs

Abstract

Miss America pageant debuted in Atlantic City on 8 September 1921 as a gimmick by local businessmen to extend the summer tourist season beyond its traditional Labor Day demise. Despite the obvious commercial interests that motivated the event, one can hardly ignore the coincident history that may also in part explain the pageant's origins-or at least its initial tremendous popularity: a year earlier, the nation had ratified the nineteenth amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote, and a decade of relaxed sartorial and rules had just begun. At this moment, a group of male business leaders and, to be sure, a large contingent of mixed audience members (not to mention the enthused contestants themselves) seemed to seek reassurance in images of traditional femininity on display for general consumption. In other words, no sooner had women staked out for themselves a measure of political, personal, and freedom then they found it recouped to their detriment by those exploiting female sexuality for public commercial and private psychological gains.Just as ironically, the 1968 Miss America pageant provided the stage whereupon the second-wave feminist movement impressed itself on the national consciousness for the first time. A group called the New York Radical Women (NYRW) marched on the Boardwalk, carrying signs that read Let's Judge Ourselves as People and Cattle Parades are Degrading to Human Beings; in keeping with their meat theme, they crowned a live sheep as Miss America. They also filled up a Freedom Trash Can with instruments of female torture (Morgan, No More 584), including false eyelashes, copies of Playboy and Ladies Home Journal, high heels, make-up, and the pneumatic (Greer 39) of midcentury repute. Although they were denied the necessary permits to ignite the toxic, plasticky load into a stinky blaze, so expected was the conflagration that would conclude the stunt that the appellation bra-burner was born then and there and attached pejoratively to the second-wave women's movement from then on. Thursday following the event, Art Buchwald's column The Bra-Burners lamented the protesters' misguided decision to give up the accoutrements that drew men's attention; without them, he comically averred, they would all come to resemble the eccentric musical performer of the era, Tiny Tim. Buchwald's column thus fanned the flames, so to speak, regarding the second wave's pyromania with respect to female foundations; as Ruth Rosen has observed, bras seemed to mean a great deal to those journalists who couldn't tell the difference between the revolution and women's (160); Rosen adds, 'bra-burning' became a symbolic way of sexualizing-and thereby trivializing-the women's struggle for emancipation (161). With due respect to the basic truths of Rosen's assessment, progressive, radical/revolutionary women's liberation and potentially recuperative, exploitative freedom were as intertwined and interdependent for some (see, e.g., Ehrenreich et al. 40) as they were mutually exclusive and cross-canceling for others. And for all involved, the payout was complex indeed: note for instance how the Radical Women's entirely legitimate complaint against confining, painful, denaturalizing bras, corsets, and girdles-and the myriad cultural confinements keyed to their presence on the public stage-could not but pale in comparison, as an overdramatized bra-burning, in the crisis-laden landscape of money-burning (by the Diggers of late 1960s San Francisco), draft card-burning, and crossburning of that era.The conundrum is exemplified once more in this famous photo from the 1968 Atlantic City protest (Figure 1):Despite the militancy of the demonstrating women, not to mention the clearly political intention of the poster itself, it is doubtful that the beefy, scornful viewer of this display has women's equality in mind. To be sure, the poster image, with its attractive, nude, alluringly posed model, sending clear signals with her flirtatious cowboy hat and sultry, over-the-shoulder glance, helps matters not at all, and one might puzzle forever regarding the motivation that led the protesters to make their statement with the aid of this particular image: clearly it exploits the very sexual sell that the Radical Women came to the Boardwalk to critique, and the look at me theatricality essential to all such protest actions from the period is just as difficult to distinguish from the feminine spectacle transpiring at the pageant inside. …