Welcome to Raking Down Patriarchy. I'm Amy McPhee All the Best. How do you feel about beauty pageants?

I've been thinking about them lately because I just read a book called Feminisms, A Global History, by Cambridge Professor Lucy DeLap.

She wrote that in the Philippines, which by the way was colonized by Spain between 1521 and 1898 and then by

America from 1898 to 1946, Filipino women found that they could gain power in the public sphere

by means of beauty and fashion and specifically through beauty contests.

Many women suffragists and journalists in the Philippines gained support for their causes

by competing for the title of Carnival Queen and posing in glamorous costumes in the 19th century and early 20th century.

Beauty pageants were a powerful way of gaining civic recognition for women's rights.

Professor DeLap then points out that in the late 1960s in the United States,

second wave feminist activists took aim at beauty contests,

which were the very place that Filipino women had used to find entry points into politics.

In 1968, the feminist group New York Radical Women organized a picket of the Miss America pageant and paraded sheep around the

area to protest models being judged like animals at a county fair. This was a really, really

famous event that got tons of media attention. These activists refused to talk to male reporters,

which forced newspapers to call in

women reporters from their usual assignments covering second-tier stories. And then they set up a

freedom trash can right outside the event, and they piled in their bras and false eyelashes,

and they put in copies of magazines such as Playboy

and the Ladies Home Journal. Contrary to legend, though, they did not set anything in that

trash can on fire. They did not burn their bras. These demonstrations at pageants spread to many

other countries, including to the Miss World pageant held

in England in 1970, where protesters threw flower bombs and disrupted the event with football

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