The same year Ms. was launched, Dorothy and Gloria helped found a feminist organization called the Women’s Action Alliance (WAA). Led by Gloria and NOW vice president Brenda Feigen, the WAA sought to rework the top-down legislative focus of NOW “by encouraging women to confront sexist issues in their own communities.”54 The WAA sought to provide coordination and advocacy for the many feminist groups springing up around the country. Grassroots feminist action was envisioned as being facilitated by an organization that would “allow groups of mothers (and fathers) to look for sexist references in the textbooks their children were studying” and support working women by advocating for “twenty-four-hour child-care centers.” In this original vision, women would organize around their own communities and eventually connect to groups around the country struggling with the same problems. The idea was that “women not yet committed to feminism” would articulate issues that touched them personally. The personal would be made political by fashioning those personal concerns into broader agendas and pushing for change in state legislatures and in Washington, DC. 55
The WAA, like Ms. magazine from its first issue, was focused on gender socialization as a crux for organizing and producing change. In response to a national call to identify feminist issues, the newly founded Women’s Action Alliance received more than five thousand letters in 1972 from parents across the United States asking for advice: “How do we keep young children from developing the rigidities of sex-role stereotyping? How do we help little boys realize that love, affection, and nurturing are indeed part of the proper role of a man? How do we help little girls realize that the world is theirs to have and to hold? How do we help them in their earliest years make choices that will not one day limit their choices?”56 The outpouring led the WAA to support the Non-Sexist Child Development Project, which help put children and gender socialization on the national agenda. This focus fit naturally with Dorothy’s own interests stemming from the West 80th Street Day Care Center.
Dorothy’s focus on children’s issues was also shared in another iconic piece of feminist media: the record album and TV special Free to Be . . . You and Me.57 Dorothy attended the same consciousness-raising sessions as the actress and producer Marlo Thomas. Dorothy remembers, “When Marlo explained her children’s album to me, I personally understood the need for it. From all my experiences caring for and working with children, I know that social change has to start with them.”58 That said, Dorothy also appreciated that Free to Be was not solely for children, just as the center was meant to be transformative for an entire community. Free to Be was as much for adults as children.
Free to Be . . . You and Me was developed in parallel with Letty Pogrebin’s work at Ms. magazine.59 From their first issue in 1972, Ms. included a “Story for Free Children.”60 Some of these stories were included in the Free to Be . . . You and Me book. All of the stories, nonsexist alternatives, were often accompanied by beautiful color illustrations. They could be cut out of the magazine, folded, and stapled into a separate children’s book. The Free to Be . . . You and Me project drew from these Free Children story sections in 1973. As the TV show, record album, and book were being developed, Marlo Thomas and the Free to Be projects were featured on the cover of the March 1974 issue of Ms., which was devoted to “free children.”
When Marlo began filming her television special, she selected Dorothy’s day-care center as one of the locations and included some of the center children in a segment in which Marlo talks about their relationships with siblings. Dorothy’s middle daughter, Patrice, was among those children but wasn’t included the final version of the television show. Patrice, who was just eight at the time, remembers being disappointed, which is natural.61 Dorothy saw the experience as empowering for the children and an opportunity to gain confidence. On a more personal level, Dorothy felt her focus on classism, racism, and sexism made it into the show as it took on multiple forms of discrimination.62 It is fitting that the kind of intersectional feminism that grew from Dorothy’s community activism was reflected in one of the most popular pieces of feminist media ever produced. Dorothy recognized the transformational power of actions rooted in children’s lives. She knew the impact would reach well beyond the children themselves to affect women and their community as a rich and complex form of activism that cut across race, sex, and class.
CHAPTER 5
“RACISM WITH ROSES”
Miss New York City and the Transition to Harlem
For her seventy-fifth birthday, Dorothy organized a fundraising event to benefit a community garden she’d helped develop in order to provide access to healthy food and youth engagement in her new home in Jacksonville, Florida. Part of the celebration involved reshooting the iconic photograph of Dorothy and Gloria Steinem. It was rare to have the two women in the same place at the same time at that stage of their lives, so I took advantage of the opportunity to interview them over breakfast.
We had a long conversation, at the end of which, I asked them if there had been times when they didn’t see eye-to-eye. Gloria responded, “Well, we were certainly learning from each other.”
Dorothy reflected, agreed, and then added, “Okay. There was one. There was one major one.”
“For over sixty-five years,” Dorothy continued, “America had not deemed a Black woman beautiful or talented enough to be Miss America.”
“Oh yeah, that came up,” Gloria exclaimed. “The beauty contest!”
Dorothy felt strongly that the Miss America pageant shouldn’t feature only “white women’s beauty,” so in 1979, she bought the franchise for the Miss Greater New York City pageant.
“I never ever objected to Dorothy doing it,” Gloria clarified, laughing, “but I wouldn’t have done it! I wouldn’t have bought a Miss America franchise. I mean, I wouldn’t.”
Following up later, Dorothy remained careful in discussing this point of departure between the two activists. She remembered thinking, “Oh, I hope Gloria doesn’t get mad, but I have to prove that Black women are beautiful and talented, and we should not be discriminated against.”
Dorothy knew about the famous feminist protest, organized by New York Radical Women, against the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in September 1968. Influenced by media savvy tactics first introduced by friend and mentor Flo Kennedy, Robin Morgan, Carol Hanisch, Shulamith Firestone, and Chude Pam Allen organized a protest of about four hundred people primarily from New York on the Atlantic City boardwalk to decry the impact of the “Degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol.” In their words, the contest awarded an “Irrelevant Crown on the Throne of Mediocrity.”1 The protest gave the women’s movement its most notorious nom de guerre, Bra Burner, after organizers released a press statement announcing they would burn the tools of female oppression in a “Freedom Trash Can.” Although they failed to get a fire permit, they chose not to correct the New York Post headline, “Bra Burners and Miss America,” since the reference drew on parallels to the draft card burning protests of the Vietnam War and to nineteenth-century dress reformers like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, who urged women to burn their corsets. The protest also brought the phrase “Women’s Lib” into the homes of millions of Americans after four women unfurled a “Women’s Liberation” banner made from three double-size bedsheets in the Atlantic City auditorium just before the winner was announced in the nationally broadcast event.2
This now-infamous protest was not the protest that Miss America Pageant, Inc., organizers feared that night. There was another simultaneous protest, with a planned boardwalk parade, which has been nearly erased from historical memory, upstaged by the protest organized by the New York feminists. The protest that moved Miss America organizers to change their entire contestant lineup at the last minute took place just a few blocks away in the Ritz-Carlton.3 There, the first ever Miss Black America pageant had been planned for midnight to assure that the press corps attending the televised Miss America pageant would be available to cover Miss Black America as well. That protest page
ant, organized by a Philadelphia civil rights activist and businessman named J. Morris Anderson, had been announced to a New York Times reporter the week before by NAACP tristate director Phillip H. Savage.4 As a Pittsburgh Courier reporter noted, “The promoters of the traditional white ‘Miss America Pageant’ got wind of what was being planned earlier last month and made a last minute appeal to the national office of the NAACP to get them some Negro candidates to be placed in the competition of the pageant.”5 In other words, Miss America executives, fearing charges of racism against their pageant, which had never had an African American finalist, offered to reject tradition, codified in 1921, in order to counter this public shaming.
Miss Black America was not the first attempt to integrate the Miss America pageant. In 1944, Robert Duke Morgan had organized the Miss Sepia America pageant but lamented that “I’ve been trying to integrate the Miss America Pageant for 25 years . . . placing Black girls in these [city and state level] contests, but they are not ready yet.”6 The NAACP was not satisfied with the last minute gesture from the Miss America organizers. According to the Pittsburgh Courier, “The NAACP, which believes firmly in fully equal integration, almost politely said, ‘No, thank you,’ with as much as to imply, ‘You have already had your chance.’”7
Many members of the press, invited to the Ritz-Carlton for the long-announced counter-contest, never made it. The image of young protesters marching with signs asking, “Can Make-Up Cover the Wounds of Our Oppression?” and “Women: Feeling Older Watching Your Man Watch Miss America?” cordoned off by police tape from a steady stream of mostly men in short-sleeved shirts and pants, was too appealing. The more radical event, protesting the very premise behind the “Miss America Cattle Auction,” became the headline for all but the Black press.
Naming the Miss Black America contest “a positive protest by Black Americans that they are being left out as winners of beauty contests judge[d] strictly by white American standards,” the Pittsburgh Courier contrasted it to the largely white protest, which they linked to other more radical organizations and movements. Under a page-three headline that asserted “Women with Gripes Lured to Picket ‘Miss America,’” the Pittsburgh Courier described the “Picket” as part of an International Liberation Front, “which has subdivisions such as the National Liberation Front in the United States and the Black Liberation Front and the Women’s Liberation Front.” Juxtaposed to the “positive protest” of the counter pageant, the picketers acted in a manner typical of the Liberation Front movement, by inviting “all who have any kind of complaints whatsoever help them ‘tear down the Establishment’ in their revolution.”8 While they noted that the “Women’s Liberation Front” did have “some signs denouncing the racism of the ‘Miss America Contest,’” the Pittsburgh Courier made sure to note that protesters planned to picket the Miss Black America contest as well, “because it also is a part of the system.”9
The fact that the African American newspaper’s description of the event continued to place the phrase “Miss America Contest” in quotation marks indicates the continuing critique of a pageant that claimed to represent the country but did not recognize African Americans. A decade later, Dorothy decided to challenge the very basis for the exclusion. She decided not to run a counter pageant but to infiltrate the pageant system by buying a franchise to assure that the finalists for the Miss Greater New York City feeder pageant for the national contest were all women of color.
The initial Boardwalk protest in 1968 became an annual event, inspiring protests throughout the country. The visibility of these protests meant that, by 1979, when Dorothy tried to rework the pageant system from within against the racialized beauty myths of the pageant world, she did so with some apprehension. After all, she had already become a figure known for her own iconic feminist image and advocacy.
African American women began increasingly to place in beauty pageant finals in the 1970s. Anita Hosang had been a finalist for Miss New York State in 1967, along with six other “Negro Beauties.”10 The pageant had been “lily white” until 1970 when Cheryl Browne of Iowa became the first Black woman to appear as a contestant onstage.11 Patricia Patterson, the 1971 Miss Indiana, made the cover of Jet in her bid to become Miss America. Cheryl Johnson became the first Black woman to compete as Miss Wyoming in 1974. Her success was not appreciated by an anonymous racist who, during the contest, sent her “a little piece of paper with ‘Ticket back to Africa’ written on it.”12 Fortunately, Albert A. Marks Jr., chairman of the board of directors of the Miss America pageant, declared it “lousy, dirty, rotten hate mail.”13
Like the original organizers of pageants meant to groom African American contestants for the national contest in the 1970s, Dorothy understood the impact on children like her own three daughters, driving her to decide to change the system, to identify what it meant to be excluded from the national vision of who stood for the country. As she put it, “What I felt at the time, which is still here with us, is that it wasn’t understood how African American women felt about being left out of the possibility of being Miss America for sixty-five years.” More important, for Dorothy, was the impact of this exclusion on her daughters: “[I] was looking at the fact that my daughter is beautiful. Why wouldn’t she have the opportunity to be Miss America?” Her daughter, Delethia, remembered that she and her two sisters were obsessed with Miss America. The dolls that they played with, like Miss America, were all white. Their idea of what it meant to come of age as young women in their own country was framed through the lens of white female beauty. In addition, Delethia had begun modeling in 1975, at age fifteen. In Dorothy’s words, “If I could not fight for the opportunity for my daughters, then what was I fighting about?” Of course, Dorothy understood there were a whole range of problems worth fighting for. But, as she noted in our interviews, these struggles were often politically focused. Dorothy realized the importance of something else when it came to her daughters. As she noted, “My kids had not decided that they wanted to be president of the United States. I might have been interested in that, but they weren’t. They were interested in Miss America.”14 Dorothy’s motivation to enter the world of pageants was both personal and political.15
Dorothy learned about the process of determining who could become a member of the Miss America club in another kind of clubhouse. Her second husband, Clarence, a mechanic by trade, worked at GM as a branch manager in Williamsville, part of the Buffalo area.16 Anytime someone in the area got laid off or left, GM added the district to Clarence’s territory, moving him up in the management ranks. As part of his bonus, Dorothy and Clarence were given tickets to a Buffalo Bills football game. At a pregame dinner, hosted by the president of GM, Dorothy found herself in a heated argument. As she noted, “I was dealing, as I always do, with racism, classism, and sexism.” The gist of the conversation focused on how difficult it was to make substantive change, especially for women, in the US. Dorothy claimed, “It seemed to me that they [the American people] were only concerned about Miss America, apple pie, and Chevrolet cars.”17 Differences in opportunity based on race, class, and sex were just not a concern to most Americans. She remembers saying, “I could own, probably, a Chevrolet . . . [but I knew that] there had not been a Miss America that was a woman of color.” One of the guests called her on her perception of opportunities to create change, countering, “It’s not racism. If you want it, the pageant in New York City has not operated for three years and it’s up for sale.” “Send me the papers,” she told him.18
He did. A few weeks later, papers to purchase the rights to the Greater Miss New York City pageant made their way to her office at the West Side Community Alliance. In Dorothy’s words, “I gave up all the money that I had, and I bought the pageant.”19 The right to run the franchise of the Miss New York State scholarship pageant, unclaimed for seven years, came to her as an extension of her vision for community development. The pageant was formally affiliated with the West Side Community Alliance as a not-for-profit corporation.
As part of her vision of the pageant as a form of political action, Dorothy chose Lloyd Terry as her co-director. In 1968, Terry had been appointed the assistant commissioner of the Harlem Redevelopment Agency. After directing the youth program at the Harlem YMCA, he was selected by the New York City Council Against Poverty for this new role, which included supervising twenty-five city anti-poverty programs.20 His selection by Dorothy suggests how she saw the pageant, as a cultural redevelopment tool targeted at lifting her community’s self-image and public perception. Terry’s connection to the larger community helped efforts both to diversify the background of the contestants and to signal the political dimension of the pageant. Because she affiliated the pageant with her West Side Community Alliance, Dorothy wanted to assure that it would help build the community. For Dorothy, the business of beauty would be as political as childcare, the education of children in her center, and the creation of community networks that sought to increase youth opportunities in her neighborhood.
With Her Fist Raised Page 10