- The summer of 1968 has long been associated with protest and counterculture; but today's guest takes us to one particular moment in September of that year when feminism, the Civil Rights Movement, and conservative politics all began to change, with the results we're still navigating today.

She's Micki McElya this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(mellow orchestral music) (mellow techno orchestral music) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Micki McElya, a professor of History at the University of Connecticut, she was a Pulitzer finalist in 2017.

Her new book is "Liberation Summer: The Moment That Changed the Women's Movement and the Future of American Politics."

Micki, welcome to the show.

- Oh, thank you so much for having me.

- I've gotta tell you, "Liberation Summer" is a monumental achievement.

Do you wanna give- - Thank you.

- The audience who maybe hasn't read it yet just a quick 30,000 foot overview?

- So "Liberation Summer" looks at both the summer of 1968 and the Miss America pageant protest by women's liberation, a protest that many people know about, it's potentially the only thing they know about women's liberation in second-wave feminism, and has come to really stand in for the movement.

So I delve into the deep history of that protest, of the pageant itself, the role it's played in the United States, but also that night was the first Miss Black America pageant staged as a protest to the racism and the segregation of the Miss America pageant.

And then I also look at the reactions of conservative women who were participants in the pageant, were there as viewers, but one would go on to be a Miss America herself later who protested the protestors on the Boardwalk that night, and then used that as a way to think about the larger history of second-wave feminism and its relation to our politics.

- I mean, that is a substantial body.

I mean, you start with one day in Atlantic City on the Boardwalk, as it were, but you're really talking about the history of an era and then some.

As a historian, how do you get your arms around that much history and distill it into a book like this?

- This is the first time that I've written specifically this kind of narrative history.

So this project is the first time I've published with a trade press.

I was thinking about audience and narrative and how to tell this complicated historical story without falling back sometimes on the ways we present things for academic audiences or the ways that we're able to sort of dwell on the analytical in minute ways, sometimes at the cost of story.

And so, there were a number of things I was doing here.

I mean, the archive is so rich and so good.

I think if anything that arguably a lot of people could say, "Are we really gonna have another book about 1968?"

(Jim chuckles) But I can say, being in these archives, we need more- - Yeah.

- Because the stories that we have, the history that we have, is excellent, but is so incomplete, and that I think is something that I really understood.

The more I worked on this project, the more astounded I was at what I hadn't known before and what I was discovering and that I wished I could share.

I don't know, you know, volume two, three, and four, I was ready to keep going.

(Jim and G. Wayne laughing) - So Micki, talk about the Miss America pageant in the late 1960s.

Two-part question here: what did it represent, and what was its history?

I mean, it had been on the American scene for many, many years, long before TV actually.

- Yes.

- So... - Yeah, so the Miss America pageant first happens in 1921 in Atlantic City.

It's designed by the large hotel interests and resort businesses in Atlantic City as a way to extend the summer season for an extra week, so to get beyond Labor Day.

And it is hugely successful.

It is hugely successful the first year, largely because they get for the weekend of the pageant, which was a part of a whole variety of spectacles; I mean, it's sort of astonishing how many different events they had, there was a parade of everyone who was in Atlantic City.

So the pageant was just one part of this larger sort of festival-like atmosphere, but it was the key part, it was really the selling point.

And the thing that they advertised the most going into it is that the sensors were not going to be on the beaches that weekend and that restrictions on swimsuits would be lifted, and so that women could show their bare legs.

And so, "The New York Times," everyone covering it, mainly talked about not only were the beauty pageant contestants showing their legs, but the entire resort could wear smaller swimsuits.

And so, it was an event of spectatorship and female beauty.

Through the 1920s, it's very popular, although you start to have a number of people who are saying, "Is this really good for the morals of America?

Is this really how women should be treated?"

I think something that may be less familiar to viewers is there were a large number of religious communities, very active religious communities, along the Jersey Shore that were persistently challenging the pageant, and that grew into some national responses.

But when you hit the Great Depression, the pageant, like other things, it folds and tries to come back, but it takes a while to get its legs.

And what really helps it come back as a major national event is the start of World War II, and the mobilization of so many men.

Atlantic City becomes a site for the mobilization of troops headed to the European theater, they're using all the hotels, they're using the large convention center to process people, and they're using the Miss America pageant to entertain people and to give them a sense of what they're fighting for.

And so, it's World War II that really begins this era of not only the pageant representing America, but representing patriotism, the best the country has to offer, the most ideal woman who is supporting ideal men, that it starts to take on that significant cultural prominence.

And then TV happens, and that just expands it incredibly in the 1950s.

So by the 1960s, in 1969, the Miss America pageant estimated that a billion people would've watched a telecast- - Wow.

- By that time.

I mean, this is such a different media environment; you only have a few network channels, and they're showing the Miss America pageant, that's what there is to watch.

- So the Miss Black America pageant comes into play.

Tell us about that, and what was happening in that year, 1968?

- So Black people and Black organizations in the country had been protesting the segregation of the pageant for years already.

There was persistent activism in part because the pageant itself was such a strong cultural platform, to make a case against it was to also broadcast your own politics, it's very smart politics.

Starting in the 1950s, you have a number of Black women who are attempting to break into the pageant by participating in integrated local pageants that will eventually feed into it.

But as of 1968, there had never been a Black finalist to walk the stage of the Miss America pageant, that wouldn't happen until 1970.

So the Miss Black America pageant was organized as a way to both showcase Black beauty and to make specific arguments about the importance of recognizing Black women's beauty, Black women's contributions in very complicated ways.

One of the things that became very clear to me was that contestants had very different ideas about what they were doing from the men who had created, largely the man who had created the Miss Black America pageant, but then his partners who also, one of them worked for the NAACP, which led to a lot of confusion, many people "accused" the NAACP of holding this pageant, which was not, and they specified that involvement later.

But Miss Black America wasn't crowned the night of the finals until about 3:30 in the morning because they held the pageant after the Miss America pageant, so journalists who were there could walk up a couple of blocks on the Boardwalk and go to the Miss Black America pageant.

- You know, Micki, so much of the book is really focused, as you mentioned, on second-wave feminism, and there's a complex history between feminism and beauty pageants.

Let's unpack that a little bit 'cause that's central to what's happening here.

But then I wanna tie back in the Miss Black America because it's a different set of dynamics, and I wanna tease some of that out.

So could you sketch out for us sort of the perspective of feminism and the women's movement in the late 1960s on beauty pageants like Miss America?

- So the 1960s represents, we often shorthand it as second-wave feminism, which is in relation to the first-wave, which was considered the suffrage movement, that speciously, the popular narrative is that the first-wave ended with the success of the suffrage movement, at least as far as white women were concerned, and the expansion of the vote.

Now, I say specious because women's organizing, women's rights and feminism in particular, doesn't go away between 1920 and the 1960s, but those struggles have been largely glossed over, sometimes just basically emitted from the dominant narrative of American history.

So in the 1960s, you have this resurgence that's in part fueled by changes in the culture, changes politically; the new left is a big part of this, activism is a big part of this, just the dramatic transformations of the post-World War II United States, the kind of upheaval that represented, but also the very quick return to dominant gender expectations, to really even new standards for beauty, far more critical.

There are now so many products in the 1950s that one can purchase to try to make themselves more beautiful, so the market economies of beauty, all of these things are just supersized in the 1950s.

And so, by the 1960s, you have Betty Friedan in 1963 publishes "The Feminine Mystique."

Now, at the time, she is an expert on women, she's presenting herself as an expert on the situation that women are confronting in the United States.

But in the process, she becomes an advocate, she becomes the primary voice.

1966 is when the National Organization for Women is founded, and Betty Friedan is the first president, founded because the new mechanisms of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission are not being used to address women's workplace discrimination.

And they believe that the only way to really put teeth in the EEOC and put pressure on it is to have what they called an NAACP for women, and that's what NOW was designed to be.

But the vision of liberalism, of integration into the American system as it was, NOW's deep belief, at least initially, the women who founded it, their belief that the American system was the best system for human thriving, that the problem was that it wasn't inclusive, and that if women could be included, that would dramatically transform things.

You have a number of women, some young, some middle-aged, the gender gap argument of the '60s is both true and far more complicated.

A number of the women I write about were middle-aged women at the time, a number of the young feminists who were brought to women's liberation.

The two who actually sparked the Miss America pageant protest, Bill Price, a middle-aged journalist, who had covered the Civil Rights Movement and then was in New York City, he was the guy who introduced them to women's liberation and connected them with the movement.

So, you know, this field is just so much more complicated, and they start to really challenge the liberal integration model of NOW and say, "We need more radical transformation."

And they hold onto the Miss America pageant as they believed at the time a way to access so many of this set of complex problems that women faced that they could attack them all at once with this one event.

- So it was less overall critique of pageants, if I'm hearing you right, and more an opportunity to get at sort of the intersectionality of so many of these different issues embodied in the Miss America pageant.

Is that an accurate summation?

- Absolutely.

Now, they're definitely challenging dominant beauty standards, and both the judgment that the Miss America pageant represents, the fact that Miss America is vocally supportive of the war in Vietnam, and is sending Miss Americas to entertain troops, and those relationships with American global power, with capitalism, with discrimination against women, with the profoundly limited expectations for women's futures, one of the lines of their 10 points of protest was that little boys in America can dream in the future of being the president, and all little girls get is Miss America.

- Hmm.

- You know, that dynamic of what's expected of people.

But they really are... This is supposed to be a consciousness raising action, an event to challenge the mindset of American women broadly.

They're trying to start a mass movement of women, they believe that the platform of Miss America is the way to do that, that they will get those eyeballs.

And they do, and in some instances, they're hugely successful, and in other instances, they're frustrated by what comes in the aftermath of the pageant protest.

- So Micki, what was the status of American women in 1968?

You've hit on a few points here, but economically, culturally, politically, what was the status of women in 1968?

- So thinking about the status of women, I would say the first thing we have to do is think about the status of different kinds of women in this moment, so that you have... There are a set of women who are successfully professionalizing and gaining some limited access to the professions; I'm talking attorneys, doctors, people who are getting access to not necessarily the boardrooms, but are getting closer to it.

But the vast majority of women are working as clerical support, are working as teachers, are working as nurses, are working as flight attendants, although they're still called stewardesses in that moment.

Flight attendant organizing was a huge part of second-wave feminism and the labor movement in an attempt to try to change those rules.

In 1968, some airlines still hosted businessmen-only flights, and that is one of the things that was being challenged.

Some flight attendants were fired if they got pregnant, they were fired if they got married, and they were weighed constantly, and could be fired for being too fat by the standards of whatever the airline required of them.

So this kind of public policing, this kind of expectation that this was just how life was, but also flight attendants were almost uniformly white.

There were some Black women and other women of color who were breaking through, but that was consistently difficult, and they faced other kinds of challenges.

So a flight attendant or a teacher who chose to wear her hair natural, who was Black, who chose to wear an Afro, could be fired from her job.

Those were some of the challenges that the EEOC ultimately took up.

So we're looking at different gradations, we're also looking at some of the formative experiences of women's liberationists who are going to college in the early 1960s and mid-1960s and are having to meet curfews every night at their dorm.

Carol Hanisch, who is the woman who came up with the idea for the Miss America pageant protest, went on to work for Anne and Carl Braden.

And the first time she ever saw Carl Braden, who's a civil rights activist in Louisville, Kentucky, but they did an enormous amount of work aligning with the Civil Rights Movement, the first time she saw him speak, she had to leave before the Q&A was over at her university because she had to go sign in for curfew, all the women got up at once and had to leave.

And that kind of experience of being treated so differently and their expectations, it really mobilized people, a lot of them had their first experiences with activism challenging the curfews at different universities.

Radcliffe at Harvard had a curfew, you know, this was something that many of them challenged.

- What were the challenges, again, in the greatest society that... Or give us more actually, please, facing women of color and indigenous women.

Did you get into that in your book at all?

- Absolutely.

And one of the things that I think was one of the most interesting aspects for me doing the research, that I didn't really understand until I got deeper into the project, is how consistent indigenous women's pageants were across this time period and how they intersected with the Miss America pageant in such interesting, but also really problematic ways.

There was initially in the 1920s, the Miss Indian Princess pageant, which was actually run by various... It was a part of a local Western tourism scheme to bring people in, but it was Bureau of Indian Affairs officials that were crowning these pageant winners.

And she came in the 1920s, and then again in the 1950s and early 1960s, the winners of these pageants would come as guests of the Miss America pageants.

So they were never competitors, they were guests.

But it was actually the activism of indigenous women challenging the rules of the Miss America pageant that said you had to be, quote, "of the white race" to participate in the pageant.

It was indigenous women that first challenged that, which presented really one of the only opportunities we have for an extended public discussion from the director of the pageant at the time, Lenora Slaughter, about why rule number seven around whiteness was in place.

She argued that it actually included indigenous women, that they could participate, and this was in 1948, that it was really, she specified, this is about Black women, so we have that on the record.

But again, you have this official pageantry that seems so steeped in white supremacy and empire, but so many of the women who are contestants are treating this very differently.

And as you have indigenous women who are guests of the pageant, they're also appearing in clothing that represents their tribal communities, of clothing that represents their histories, you know, they're creating moments of visibility.

So it's complicated, but it is undoubtedly shaped by white supremacy and the restrictions of those things.

- You know, just in the interest of time, Micki, I wanna move forward just a little bit in time, because you talk about how the Miss America pageant becomes almost a beacon for conservative women.

And I'm wondering if it's the pageant itself or just the legacy of some of the winners of the pageants in those years who go on to become visibly conservative activists, particularly in the evangelical mode.

- Right.

I would say it's both.

I mean, you have women who are very successful as political voices, either on the religious right or the conservative right.

I mean, one of the people in the book, exploring Gretchen Carlson, who may be most familiar to viewers today as an original "Fox & Friends" host in the morning, she was very prominent on Fox News.

And then she is the woman who sued Roger Ailes for sexual harassment and became a really critical part of the Me Too movement in that time, and would go on to be the first Miss America ever to run the pageant herself.

It was under her directorship that the pageant no longer has a swimsuit contest; so made sort of significant changes.

People like that really saw the pageant as a platform for becoming evangelical political voices, culture warriors, Carlson and others really described themselves that way.

The pageant itself was and remains very conservative and tied to more conservative politics.

And so, you saw that already, it made them a natural space for women who felt similarly.

So when I talk about the protestors that show up to protest the women's liberation activists, Terry Anne Meeuwsen, who in 1972 would go on to be Miss America herself, and then later, and today still, is a leading face of the Christian Broadcast Network and was very involved in politics in the 1970s, she showed up with a sign that said, "The only thing wrong with Miss America is she's beautiful," and she had a huge "Nixon for President" pin on- - Yeah.

- At the same time.

- I mean, those things were so combined for her.

And so, you can really see how it seemed like a natural fit for many people.

We see the places where it wasn't a natural fit are some of the most interesting, they really highlight the dominant conservatism of the pageant when you see them reacting to a contestant who is vocal about her anti-war position, or a contestant who pushes back against some of the strictures of the pageant.

- Quick question here, and we don't have a whole lot of time left.

The heart of the Miss America pageant historically was how a woman looked.

Has that changed today in the era of social media, and I'm thinking particularly of younger people, that people still judge women by how they look, at least initially?

- [Jim] You got about 90 seconds, Micki.

- Oh, absolutely.

I think probably the greatest line to come from the Miss America pageant protest came in a television talk show after the protest actually happened.

Ros Baxandall said, "Every day in a woman's life is a walking Miss America contest; that the experience of being viewed and judged is constant."

I think one of the things we're seeing now is how this applies to men.

I mean, think about the conversations we've been having around looksmaxxing; but the very idea that we have this term "looksmaxxing," that we're not talking about men's beauty, we're not talking about beauty strictures, but we've got something that seems like a combination of, you know, double Xs, race car driving, everything you can imagine as hyper-masculinity, that is embedded in that judgment.

So patriarchy is still the operative mode here.

- And, 30 seconds, what's your assessment of the Miss America pageant and its role in American society today?

- You know, so on September 6th, Miss America was crowned this year, but crowned in West Palm Beach, Florida.

I think the Miss America pageant is moving closer to the orbits and to the beauty politics of the Trump administration and finding those alliances which appear to be sort of natural to them.

Micki McElya, the book is "Liberation Summer," it's a terrific read.

But that is all the time we have this week.

If you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit salve.edu/pellcenter where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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