A beauty pageant may provide a friendly "big sister" guide to new contestants to help them through the process, like a sorority does - but that is not how feminists meant it in 1968 when they described Miss America as "Big Sister watching you."
Judging Bodies, Controlling Thoughts
New York Radical Women led activists in a protest of the Miss America pageant in September 1968, with a demonstration and a list of criticisms. One of their 10 points was "Miss America as Big Sister watching you." They saw the relentless pressure on women to focus on physical beauty as an enslaving kind of thought control, akin to Big Brother in 1984 by George Orwell. In that dystopian novel, of course, the authoritarian messages end up controlling people as much as the actual authorities do.
Image or Accomplishments
Robin Morgan and other NYRW feminists described Miss America as trying to "sear 'the Image' onto our minds, to further make women oppressed and men oppressors." The women's liberation movement's critique of Miss America described the pageant as a continuation of the most stereotypical images of women. A beauty contest was a dangerous way of replacing assertiveness, individuality, achievement, education and empowerment with false hopes, consumerism and "high-heeled, low status roles."
It had been five years since Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was published. That bestseller rapidly spread the message about media-created "happy housewife" ideals and the "sexual sell" that defined a woman's role in life as serving or pleasing a man. During the late 1960s, feminist theorists and organizations such as the National Organization for Women tackled the issue of images of women, such as with the NOW Task Force on the Image of Women in Mass Media.
Inside a Woman's Own Head
While the corporate product sponsorship, competition, racism and militarism of the pageant were societal grounds for complaint, the idea of "Big Sister watching" was something that reached inside a woman's self. The Miss America pageant and other impossible standards seduced women "to prostitute ourselves before our own oppression," according to the NYRW critique.
The women who protested on the boardwalk that day cried "No more Miss America!" because they saw how common it was for women to succumb to society's demand that women care about Miss America and all the trappings of beauty and body mystique that went along with it.