ATLANTIC CITY, Sept. 7 - Women armed with a giant bathing suit puppet and a freedom trash can" in which they threw girdles, bras, hair curlers, false eyelashes, and any thing 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 de grading 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), announced a boycott of the sponsors (Pepsi Cola, Toni and Oldsmobile) and refused talk with males (including male reporters).
"Why should we talk with them?" said Miss Marion Davidson, a New Yorker. "It's impossible for men to understand."
CHIDES GRANDMOTHER
Miss Kitty Amatnick, one of the younger women, caught her 65-year-old grandmother, Mrs. Martha Berlin, talking with a male observer and shouted at her to stop.
"You mustn't do that," Miss Amatnick cried.
Mrs. Berlin, a gray-haired housewife in a red-and-yellow dress with a pale yellow hat, promised to do better. She had joined the group of nearly 100 demonstrators, she said, "because of injustices to women."
Television and news photographers were allowed and even encouraged to photograph the pickets, however, and the women - mostly middle-aged careerists and housewives with a sprinkling of 20-year-olds and grandmothers in their 60's--escalated their activities when the cameramen arrived.
They paraded a ram in yellow and blue ribbons while singing "There She Is, Miss America." They ripped up a Playboy magazine before dumping it into the trash can. And they danced around shouting "Liberation now!"
 |
"Down with these shoes," cried 68-year-old Mrs. Clara DeMiha, a member of the Jeannette Rankin Brigade [and VFA], as she tossed a high-heeled shoe into the container.
"And down with bound feet!" shouted Jacqui Ceballos amid cries of "Tell it like it is."
One woman threw her bottle of pink-liquid detergent into the heap. She said she was against "such atrocities as having to wash the dishes." Peggy Dobbins held a girdle high over the trashcan, reciting, "No more girdles, no more pain. No more trying to hold the fat in vain."
The Miss America puppet, introduced as "the best scapegoat yet invented for men," had chains hanging from her red, white, and blue bathing suit. The women said she represented "the chains that tie us to these beauty standards against our will."
The demonstrators, all of whom belonged to what they called the Women's Liberation Movement, were from New York, Washington, New Jersey and such places as Detroit, Gainesville, Florida, and Bancroft, Iowa. Among them were Kate Millett, Flo Kennedy and Kathy Sarachild. They did their protesting behind police barriers that separated them from about 650 generally unsympathetic spectators.
"They're vulgar" Joseph Schaefer of Philadelphia said of the demonstrators. "They're protesting the pageant and yet they have signs like that." Mr. Schaefer was referring to posters inscribed with slogans like "Miss America Sells It," and "Up Against the Wall, Miss America." Another man told the pickets to "go home and wash your bras."
"Why don't you throw yourselves in there," one man shouted as the women tossed away their possessions. "It would be a lot more useful."
After an hour or so, three counterpickets appeared among the spectators. They were led by Miss Terry Meewsen, a runner-up in the 1967 Miss America contest and a former Miss Green Bay from Wisconsin. She wore a hand-painted sign that read "There's Only One Thing Wrong With Miss America. She's Beautiful." The placard was pinned to her dress with a Nixon-For-President button.
"The television people wanted to know what time to send their cameras," said Miss Robin Morgan, a demonstrator in a black-and-white pajama suit.
Miss Morgan, a poet, former child actress and a housewife who uses her maiden name, was among the 65 pickets who came from New York in buses driven by male drivers.
 |
She called the demonstrations "a simultaneous cooperative effort conceived and executed by a number of people" and said her group had talked with Mayor Richard S. Jackson of Atlantic City before picketing began.
"He was worried about our burning things," she said. "He said the boardwalk had already been burned out once this year. We told him we wouldn't do anything dangerous -- just a symbolic bra-burning."
Mayor Jackson, who was also assured there would be "no heavy disruptive tactics," asked if the women were going to be "orderly and quiet." They told him they would sing, and they did. But the sound didn't carry very far over the boardwalk's usual noises.
"We don't want to incite or provoke," Miss Morgan said. "We don't want another Chicago."
The picketing, which began shortly after 12 P.M., continued all afternoon and evening, with only one dinner break, was not the only protest going on here today.
Several blocks from Convention Hall, where the all-white Miss America finals were being held, the country's first Miss Black America Pageant was in progress at the Ritz Carlton Hotel. Its sponsors called it "a positive protest."
'BEAUTY OF THE BLACK WOMAN'
