The Bra-Burning Myth: Atlantic City, September 1968

The bra-burning myth comes from the Miss America protest of September 7, 1968, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where about 200 women from New York Radical Women threw bras, girdles and other items into a Freedom Trash Can on the boardwalk. The organizers said nothing was set alight, because the police would not allow a fire on the wooden boardwalk. Within days, newspaper columns across the country were describing burning brassieres, and the phrase "bra burners" outlived almost everything the protesters actually said.

The permit and the pamphlet

The protest was planned in New York. Robin Morgan, the key organizer, wrote to Atlantic City's mayor, Richard Jackson, on August 29, 1968, asking for a permit. The objection, she wrote, was to a pageant that judged women on their bodies over their brains, "on youth rather than maturity, and on commercialism rather than humanity." Men were barred from taking part.

A press release of August 22 became the pamphlet No More Miss America!, which listed ten charges against the contest. The first was "The Degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol." Others were "Racism with Roses," because no Black woman had been a finalist since the pageant began in 1921, and "Miss America as Military Death Mascot," aimed at the winner's tours to entertain troops in Vietnam.

What happened on the boardwalk

The women marched with signs and handed out the pamphlet. They crowned a live sheep, comparing the pageant to a county fair livestock show. Into the Freedom Trash Can went what they called "instruments of female torture":

• bras, girdles and corsets
• high-heeled shoes, false eyelashes, curlers and hairspray
• mops, pots and pans
• copies of Cosmopolitan and Playboy

Inside Convention Hall, four protesters with tickets, among them Kathie Sarachild and Carol Hanisch, unfurled a bedsheet reading "Women's Liberation" from the balcony during the outgoing Miss America's farewell speech. They managed about half a dozen shouts before police removed them. Television missed it. Newspapers did not.

Earlier versions of this exhibit put the crowd at 400. Most accounts give about 200, the number of New York Radical Women who came down by car and chartered bus.

A headline in the New York Post

The phrase came from Lindsy Van Gelder's story in the New York Post, which ran under the headline "Bra Burners and Miss America." Van Gelder compared the trash can to the draft cards that Vietnam War protesters were burning. In the September-October 1992 issue of Ms. she returned to the subject in a piece titled "The truth about bra-burners."

Other writers took the comparison literally. Harriet Van Horne, a Post columnist who was not in Atlantic City, wrote that the women "with screams of delight" had "consigned to the flames such shackling, demeaning items as girdles, bras, high-heeled slippers, hair curlers and false eyelashes." The syndicated humorist Art Buchwald wrote that "the final and most tragic part of the protest took place when several of the women publicly burned their brassieres." Buchwald's column ran in newspapers nationwide, and the image stuck.

The Atlantic City Press account

One contemporary report complicates the story. On September 8, 1968, the Atlantic City Press ran a piece by John L. Boucher on page 4 headlined "Bra-burners blitz boardwalk," which described the items burning in the trash can. Decades later the media historian W. Joseph Campbell interviewed Jon Katz, a young reporter who had been there. Katz said he remembered protesters setting the can on fire and that "the fire was small, and quickly was extinguished."

The organizers rejected that account. Hanisch's version is that "we had intended to burn it, but the police department, since we were on the boardwalk, wouldn't let us do the burning." Participants also said nobody took off a bra. What no one claims is the scene the national columnists described: a bonfire of underwear stripped off on the boardwalk.

Why "bra burner" outlasted the protest

The label was useful to the movement's opponents. The communication scholar Bonnie J. Dow argued that bra-burning recast feminism as women asserting themselves as sexual beings, not seeking freedom from sexism. It made a political protest about a pageant sound like a stunt about underwear, much as the press of the 1850s had mocked Amelia Bloomer for her trousers instead of her arguments.

Hanisch put the irony more briefly: "The media picked up on the bra part. I often say that if they had called us 'girdle burners,' every woman in America would have run to join us." Her joke assumed what every woman of 1968 knew: the girdle, ancestor of today's control brief, was the garment they most resented.

The other pageant that night

The same day, Saundra Williams won the first Miss Black America pageant at the Ritz Carlton in Atlantic City, a contest held in answer to the main pageant's all-white finals. Its organizers wanted Black women included in the definition of beauty; New York Radical Women wanted the definition gone. For the boardwalk protest Robin Morgan drew a raised fist inside the Venus symbol, and that emblem spread from Atlantic City into the women's movement.

Last updated October 27, 2026

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