Cartoonist and date unknown.
Many writers have labeled the protest at the 1968 Miss America beauty pageant as the founding event
of the women’s liberation movement. Identifying dramatic episodes as discrete beginnings creates a
discursive trope that lives on in collective memory. The civil rights movement is said to begin when Rosa
Parks wouldn’t give up her bus seat to a white man. The gay rights movement is said to begin when
patrons at the Stonewall bar resisted a police raid. Similarly with the 1968 Miss America pageant. All
these events were vivid and photogenic, and by attracting media coverage brought attention to the
movement, but to credit them with setting off mass movements is misleading. Rosa Parks was a member of
a group that had been planning action for several years. Gay rights advocates had been organizing for over
a decade. The women’s liberation movement had already conducted several national meetings and
invented consciousness raising before the Miss America event, and immediately afterward that protest
was criticized by other feminists for seeming to blame the women who entered beauty contests, without
spelling out how the mainstream culture socialized women into feeling that beauty was their most
important trait.
To get even an inkling of the range of feminisms, we could identify many founding events. Here are a
few. Every one of them illustrates a major area of women’s movement activism, every one energized
many further developments, and every one—in a style typical of the movement’s diversity—stimulated
disagreement, criticism, and new tactics.