Bra-burning came to symbolize the feminist movement, but according to
this article at pressofAtlanticCity.com, the original 1968 bra-burning protest, that first associated bra-burning with feminism, never actually happened.
Members of New York Radical Women, upset by the Miss America Pageant's focus on women's physique and seeing an opportunity to publicize their cause, traveled to Atlantic City by bus. They wanted to burn things, as was in vogue then (people mad about other topics - such as the war in Vietnam - burned draft cards and flags), but city officials worried about the safety of the wooden Boardwalk asked the organizers not to burn anything, so they didn't.
Instead, the feminists dumped items like high-heeled shoes, bras, false eyelashes and issues of Ladies' Home Journal into a "Freedom Trash Can." They paraded a lamb outside Convention Hall and held up signs with such things as "Welcome to the Miss America Cattle Auction" written on them. Inside Convention Hall, demonstrators set off stink bombs during the pageant and unfurled a sign reading "WOMEN'S LIBERATION."
Newspapers helped fuel the fire. On Sept. 4, three days before the event, Lindsy Van Gelder of the New York Post wrote an article titled "Bra burners plan protest." In the Sept. 8 issue of the New York Times, protest organizer and former child actor Robin Morgan is quoted as saying the women would hold a "symbolic bra-burning." Open the next day's Atlantic City Sunday Press, and the headline jumps from page four: "Bra-Burners Blitz Boardwalk."
And so the bra-burning myth was born. Though I'm sure protesters must have burned their bras at some later point in time.
Comments
Several years later, I knew a lot of women who had been activists in the women's liberation movement circa 1968, and none of them reported ever having burned a bra, or ever having seen a bra burned. They were more concerned with things like equal job opportunities and reproductive rights. If it matters, most of them wore bras, too.
There weren't actually very many burnings of draft cards and flags in the Vietnam war protests, either, although a few of them were burned on a very few occasions.
So you can file "burning bras" along with "spitting on soldiers at airports" as icons of the "turbulent sixties" that never really happened.
This is a bit beside the point, but since bras are made of stuff like rubber and nylon, I would think that burning a few would smell horrible and make a nasty mess. It would be a sure way to keep people away from your demonstration.
(Hmm, that wasn't very PC, was it?) :lol:
Yay, and yes, to Big Gary: They were more concerned with things like equal job opportunities and reproductive rights. If it matters, most of them wore bras, too.
They did happen, just not commonly. There are contemporary reports of spitting on soldiers and I distinctly recall a picture of a woman holding a burning bra over a trash can.
(Ironically, though, people may have done these things because of the stories they heard. Thus myth triggered reality.)
Can you give us a link to a contemporary report of someone spitting on a soldier coming home Vietnam, please?
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_02_04-2007_02_10.shtml#1170928927
The author does NOT link to ANY contemporary press reports of soldiers returning from Vietnam being spat on. He links to a few other people talking about how they heard it happened, but that's second-hand at best.
He admits that he can't find any press accounts of it happening prior to 1981, years after the Vietnam war was over. That is NOT contemporary.
One of his links leads back to his own website.
If in fact American soldiers returning from Vietnam were spat on, it completely avoided any notice by the press at the time. Suspicious at best.
Did you read the article? He did link to contemporary reports of spitting events that did happen, albeit not at airports, disputing the original claim was that NO spitting events happened anywhere.
To assert that something like this NEVER happened is absurd since a single event, however minor, makes that assertion wrong.
My father-in-law, a [Navy] Vietnam vet, asserts quite strongly that it happened. I believe him.