Liberation Summer

A sweeping, definitive work of history exploring the road to the September 1968 protests of the Miss American Pageant—one led by women’s liberationists and the other organized by the emergent Miss Black America Pageant—and the birth of a new politics of beauty.

A revolution was brewing. In the dying days of the summer of 1968, during one unprecedented Pageant weekend, Atlantic City played host not only to the fifty young contestants and thousands of eager visitors who had arrived in town for the Miss America crowning, but also to the first Miss Black America Pageant, mounted to protest its “lily-white” sister competition, as well as raucous actions from women’s liberationists. For just a few hours, the boardwalk became a site of vigorously contested ideas—ideas that would redefine the women’s movement and reverberate across American culture.

Now, Pulitzer Prize finalist Micki McElya unfolds the full scope of this history, detailing the shocking injustices and passionate debates that led to the demonstrations, as well as the broader social and political landscape that gave rise to some of the most iconic women on both sides of the ideological spectrum. Here, we find complex portraits of Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Florynce Kennedy, Phyllis Schlafly, and Anita Bryant as well as glimpses of Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Lewis, Vanessa Williams, and Donald Trump years before they became the public figures we know them as today.

Immersive, galvanizing, and endlessly edifying, Liberation Summer is also a kaleidoscopic panorama of the year that saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the Tet Offensive and the escalation of the Vietnam War, violence at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, and the election of Richard Nixon. Within this ever-shifting terrain, lesser-known characters like reporter Charlotte Curtis, radical feminist organizers Robin Morgan and Carol Hanisch, Miss America 1968 Debra Barnes, and the first Miss Black America Saundra Williams fought to not only define their conception of ideal womanhood, but to live it.

Engagingly told and meticulously researched, Liberation Summer proves how the battle for beauty’s meaning has always been inextricably political—and how its enduring impact continues to shape our politics today.