The Myth of the Bra-burners

The myth of women burning their bras got started at the 1968 Miss America protest. In fact, the idea was not to burn bras at all, but to trash the items that represented what the women viewed as the pageant's oppression of women. About 400 women staged a theatrical demonstration outside the Atlantic City Convention Center on the day of the Pageant. Bras, high heeled shoes, false eyelashes, girdles, curlers, hairspray, etc., were placed in a "Freedom Trash Can." Suggestions were made to burn the contents, but a permit could be obtained, and nothing was actually torched. No one, at this event or any other, literally took off her bra and burned it.

What did happen is that a woman journalist's article about the event made a comparison to the draft-card burnings then going on, and anti-feminists seized on the notion of "bra-burning" and calling feminists "bra-burners." The idea of bra-burning is in fact an urban myth. The stunt was outrageous for its times. It challenged the Miss America icon, attracting world-wide press attention, and drew many people's attention to the ideas of women's liberation for the first time.

Despite the vagaries of fashion and the women's liberation movement, the vast majority of women, even staunch feminists, prefer to wear a brassiere. Feminists face a discomfiting choice: they can avoid participating in the male-dominated fashion industry that controls how their breasts are presented to the public, but only at the risk of drawing attention to themselves from men. Women then choose to wear breassiers for comfort, to ward off what they wrongly fear would be worse stretching and sagging, and to avoid unwanted public attention. Very few women choose to go braless.

The Bikini, Breasts, and Hollywood >