Analysis Of No More Miss America

The 1960s marked an age of transition in the United States. Movements advocating equal rights involved minorities emerged across the country, challenging the hegemony which biased and restrained the minorities. Feminist movement was one of those. In 1968, Robin Morgan wrote the manifesto “No more Miss America” for the demonstration against the Miss America Pageant, calling for liberation of women through removing the stereotype of and the oppression of men on them.

For the feminist, Miss America represented “an image that oppresses women in every area in which it purports to represent us (179)”. They listed 10 points they against about the oppression of women in the contest. In its first point, the statement compared the contest to the 4-H

Women did not have the rights to choose what they like but had to choose the things made men like them. Miss America set a universal standard of success for women— “unoffensive, bland, apolitical” (181) and “be both sexy and wholesome” (180). For the feminists, such standard showed no recognition and appreciation of the society to women’s merits; the only way to succeed for them was to conform the men rather than being intelligent. Their freedom in using knowledge and engaging social topics were denied. Moreover, age discrimination on women was demonstrated in the contest as people did not remember the winner of Miss America in past years. Men loved young girls but for them, the girls were just something “spindle, mutilate, and then discarded tomorrow (180)”. but women were brainwashed to believe in such value that objectifying them as demonstrated in the statement. The statement also pointed out the truth at point 9 that boys supposedly grew to be president but the girl hoped to be Miss America, without any power and influence in the society. This point proved how the standard mentioned previously continued to influence the society. The

The origin of this hegemony came from the gender formation process. Men and women were assigned different roles with different responsibilities since the beginning of human society. Women were expected to focus more on the family and nurturing children while men were expected to be involved in the outside world. To justify these roles people created stratification system in the society to rank men above women as sociologist Judith Lorber described “one gender is usually the touchstone, the normal, the dominant (89)”. Women were consequently discriminated in the society level. Before 19th-century women did not have the right to vote. The power in the society was solely concentrated on the men while the only place for women to show merits was their home. After women being given suffrage rights and the industrial revolution, women still did not have many chances to involved in society and productions. Factories preferred men to women and when they carried out the same occupancy, women received less than men. The appropriate jobs for women were nurses and maids, which were not much different from domestic labor and nurturing children. Men dominated the authority and leadership in every social aspect from military, law to even cultural productions. Moreover, women became the sacrificed in the consumer culture started from the beginning of