You’ve heard it somewhere: Feminists burn their bras. But if you’re a feminist, you might be wondering why you’ve yet to be invited to a ceremonial bra-burning ritual. (Seriously, where’s my invite?)

The reason you haven’t seen this stereotype play out in real life is because the idea that all feminists burn their bras out of pure spite for the patriarchy is a myth.

This fabricated narrative dates back 50 years to a women’s-liberation demonstration, organized by a small group called New York Radical Women, outside of the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey on September 7, 1968. The women who showed up strongly disapproved of the competition.

The pageant was a target of women’s-lib activists because of its centering of the male gaze. According to author W. Joseph Campbell in Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism, approximately 100 women gathered and formed a picket line at Kennedy Plaza, right outside the Convention Center, in order to, according to one participant, “protest the degrading image of women perpetuated by the Miss America pageant.” Campbell added that protesters claimed the competition invoked a “Mindless-Boob-Girlie symbol” and “Madonna Whore image of womanhood” by placing “women on a pedestal/auction block to compete for male approval.” Additionally, by this point, the contest had never had a nonwhite winner, even after it stopped accepting only white contestants in 1940, according to Black Christian News.

Prior to this event, Campbell explained, the women’s-liberation movement was associated with the suffragette uniform of “long-skirted women in bonnets,” according to a study of the events of 1968 by writer Mark Kulransky — very different from today’s bra-burning-academic-lesbian-who-doesn’t-shave stereotype.

“Invoking bra burning was a convenient means of brushing aside the issues and challenges raised by women’s liberation and discrediting the fledgling movement as shallow and without serious grievance,” Campbell wrote.

While some bras were set on fire, Snopes explains, it only happened briefly, and bras weren’t the only items burned. An important piece of the puzzle — the centerpiece of the event, Campbell stresses — was the so-called Freedom Trash Can, “which protestors cosigned ‘instruments of torture,’ such as brassieres, girdles, high-heeled shoes, false eyelashes, and magazines such as Playboy and Cosmopolitan.” Campbell wrote that according to the The New York Times, one woman even “tossed a bottle of pink liquid detergent into the trash can and declared her opposition to ‘such atrocities as having to do the dishes.’”

So bra burning as the centerpiece of this demonstration is an exaggeration and false representation of the event. However, participant Alix Kates Shulman explained in The Washington Post, “It put us [the women’s-liberation movement] on the map in a way that was much larger than we had been before. I thought it was a triumph.”

“The use of language to police the boundaries of female self-expression has, unsurprisingly, found a particular target in women identifying as feminists,” according a post on the the Oxford English Dictionary’s blog. “These terms attempt to delegitimize agitation for women’s rights by associating it with militant extremism.”

In other words, in the ’60s, critics of the women’s-liberation movement described feminists as “bra-burning,” while today, anti-feminists use “feminazi” because these labels induce such an extreme reaction in people who aren’t well informed about the cause. While some may have thrown bras into a fire at a demonstration 50 years ago, but such a depiction is inaccurate as a general representation of feminists. The phrase, however, has been persistent in American culture ever since. Some critics of feminism, including far-right conservatives, continue to dismiss feminists as bra-burning man-haters. The Miss America pageant — which has influenced generations of young women since it began in 1921 — has changed since the demonstration in 1968, too. Earlier this summer, the Miss America Organization announced that the pageant would no longer include a swimsuit competition, a 96-year-old tradition until that point. On June 5, Gretchen Carlson, chairwoman of the board of directors for the Miss America Organization, made the big announcement on Good Morning America: “We will no longer judge our candidates on their outward physical appearance. That means that we will no longer have a swimsuit competition, and that is official.”

While Carlson is making efforts to make the competition about more than just physical beauty, Miss America wasn’t always this way.

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