Miss America Protest
Feminists protested the 1968 Miss America pageant with a list of complaints about the use of women as objects in beauty contests. One of the complaints was the promotional aspect, what the protesters termed 'The Consumer Con Game.'
There She Is...Plugging Your Product
The Miss America protest was led by New York Radical Women. The feminist activists distributed pamphlets and press releases detailing their objections to beauty pageants, including the fact that the Miss America winner would be a "walking commercial" for the companies that sponsored the pageant.
"Wind her up and she plugs your product," Robin Morgan wrote in a press release. It was hardly the "honest, objective endorsement" it was claimed to be. "What a shill," the women's liberation group concluded.
Consumerism and Feminist Theory
It was important for women's liberation to examine how corporations and capitalist power structure benefited from idealized images of women, whether as beautiful pageant winners or ecstatic consumers. Earlier in the 1960s, Betty Friedan had written in The Feminine Mystique about how beneficial the happy housewife image was to manufacturers of household products and advertisers.
Feminists continued to spot the corporate conspiracy throughout the 1960s and 1970s, voicing their anger that women were denied independence and empowerment while being used by powerful men to make a profit. In 1968, Miss America was added to the list, another example of consumerist society's exploitation of women.