lovely paper dolly to call your very own property .... She can push your product, push your ego, or push your lawnmower...,"
The highlight of the afternoon was the giant Freedom Trash Can. With elaborate ceremony and shouts of joy, we threw away instruments of torture to women -- highheeled shoes, Merry Widow corsets, girdles, padded bras, false eyelashes, curlers, copies of Playboy, Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal, etc.
Throughout the afternoon activities, we were observed by some five or six hundred onlookers, mostly men, who were by turns amused, perplexed, and mostly enraged by our presence. The heckling was led by two young men: "You're just jealous --- you couldn't be Miss America if you were the last man(?) on earth',," "Get back on your broom"' "Why, don't you go back to Russia?". "Which one of your girlfriends is your husband?". The women in the mainly lower middle class crowd by and large agreed with them. One woman, however, crossed the police line with her three children and joined us.
We generally ignored their jeers, but in the evening (we stayed until midnight), when the crowd was somewhat less hostile we changed our tactics, Many of us put down our signs and went right up to the police line and began engaging in dialogue with the people. Two more women crossed the line to our side, thought we did not make many noticeable conversions.
But a dialogue was established, and women who had felt confused and hurt by the signs and leaflets which they didn't understand and demonstrators with whom they could not identify, began to go through some changes in their heads when we began to talk to them personally. Proving what many of us have felt for a long time — women who are unreachable on most radical issues can be reached on this one, since it involves their daily lives.
Sixteen of us purchased tickets to the Pageant and, from seats in the balcony near the stage, began a disruption as the outgoing Miss America was making her farewell speech. Although there was no (continued on p. 7)