Fifty years ago, the swimsuit-wearing beauties of the Miss America pageant were confronted with a spectacle on the Atlantic City boardwalk: 100 feminists throwing bras, girdles, curling irons, false eyelashes and other “instruments of female torture” into a trash can labeled “Freedom.”

The protesters had planned to set the can on fire but could not get the right permits — so, alas, no bras were burned that summer day, though it is the origin of the term “bra burning.” They were condemning what even then they saw as an antiquated institution, which had mostly male judges scrutinize women’s bodies, women of color at one point not allowed to compete, corporations profiting on the event, and three in four American households watching it all happen on television.

“Everybody tuned into Miss America back then — this was like the Oscars,” said the author Alix Kates Shulman, 85, one of the organizers of that 1968 protest.