Call it a counter myth. Or a triumph of narrative over evidence.

Or maybe just plain wrong.

At the Freedom Trash Can, 1968

Whatever it is, the common interpretation is that women’s liberation advocates burned no bras at their famous demonstration at Atlantic City in September 1968.

They may have had what Robin Morgan, their organizer, called a “symbolic bra-burning,” as a way to protest that year’s Miss America pageant; but the undergarments themselves were not set afire.

The latest to embrace this narrative is Time magazine, which posted a commentary online yesterday that declared:

“Bras were never burned at the 1968 Miss America protest ….”

The commentary, written by filmmaker Jennifer Lee, further stated:

“Bras were just one of the items protestors were encouraged to bring that day that signified how the male-dominated culture was keeping women locked into rigid ideas of beauty, but they weren’t burned. … Misinformation and myths sometimes serve as placeholders in our memory when facts are not remembered.”

The commentary ignores evidence offered in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, that bras were set afire, if briefly, at the Atlantic City demonstration, which was organized to denounce Miss America as a “degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie symbol” that promoted a “Madonna Whore image of womanhood.”

The evidence presented in Getting It Wrong about bra-burning at Atlantic City is from two witness accounts — one of which was published in the local newspaper, the Press of Atlantic City, on September 8, 1968, the day after the protest.

That story appeared beneath the byline of a veteran reporter named John L. Boucher and carried the headline:

“Bra-burners blitz boardwalk.”

The article referred to a burn barrel that the demonstrators dubbed the “Freedom Trash Can” and stated:

“As the bras, girdles, falsies, curlers, and copies of popular women’s magazines burned in the ‘Freedom Trash Can,’ the demonstration reached the pinnacle of ridicule when the participants paraded a small lamb wearing a gold banner worded ‘Miss America.’”

Boucher’s article, which appeared on page 4 of the Atlantic City newspaper, wasn’t particularly sensational. Its reference to burning “bras, girdles, falsies” appeared in the article’s ninth paragraph.

The article, as I noted in Getting It Wrong, “did not elaborate about the fire and the articles burning in the Freedom Trash Can, nor did it suggest that the fire was all that important. … Nonetheless, the passage stands as a contemporaneous account that there was fire in the Freedom Trash Can that day — a firsthand report” that typically has been overlooked or ignored.

In addition, the article’s description was buttressed by the recollections of the writer Jon Katz, who in 1968 was a young reporter for the Atlantic City Press. Katz was on the Atlantic City boardwalk the day of the protest, gathering material for a sidebar article about reactions to the demonstration.

Katz’s sidebar didn’t mention fire in the Freedom Trash Can.

But in correspondence with me, Katz stated:

“I quite clearly remember the ‘Freedom Trash Can,’ and also remember some protestors putting their bras into it along with other articles of clothing, and some Pageant brochures, and setting the can on fire.

“I am quite certain of this.”

Katz also said:

“I recall and remember noting at the time that the fire was small, and quickly was extinguished, and didn’t pose a credible threat to the Boardwalk. I noted this as a reporter in case a fire did erupt …. It is my recollection that this burning was planned, and that a number of demonstrators brought bras and other articles of clothing to burn, including, I believe some underwear.”

So what’s the upshot?

Quite clearly, as I wrote in Getting It Wrong, Boucher’s article and Katz’s recollections “offer fresh dimension to the bra-burning legend. … There is now evidence that bras and other items were set afire, if briefly, at the 1968 Miss America protest in Atlantic City. This evidence cannot be taken lightly, dismissed or ignored.” As the Time commentary did.

But I also noted that the witness accounts do not “corroborate a widely held image of angry feminists demonstratively setting fire to their bras and tossing the flaming undergarments into a spectacular bonfire.” Spectacular and flamboyant the bra-burning was not.

Toronto, 1979

Another moment of bra-burning took place in Canada in 1979, when members of Women Against Violence Against Women demonstrated outside Toronto’s city hall. Near the end of the demonstration, a protester named Pat Murphy dropped a white bra into the hungry flames of a burn barrel (see photo, right).

That demonstration took place March 8, 1979, and coincided with International Women’s Day. It was aimed at denouncing a controversial report on rape prepared by the Ontario Provincial Police.

“The bra burning,” one participant recalled in a telephone interview with me in 2011, “was a way to entice the media as well as [offer] a critique of the police report.”

Interestingly, the Toronto newspapers covered the demonstration. But they did not mention the bra-burning.

WJC

More from Media Myth Alert:

• Ignoring nuance in the bra-burning myth
• Bra-burning: The morphing of a media myth
• ‘Those bra-burning times’: When were they?
• On columnists and burning bras
• The editor and the protest: Bra-burning’s intriguing sidebar
• Bra-burning ‘never happened’?
• Bra-burning in Toronto: Confirmed
• Enticing the media: More on bra-burning in Toronto, 1979
• ‘Burn our briefs’ call in UK evokes myth of ‘bra burning’
• ‘Doctrinaire feminist in the bra-burning mold’?
• Both left, right embrace media myth about WaPo and Watergate
• Maddow cherry-picks to avoid correcting claim about Pentagon, Jessica Lynch
• A debunker’s work is never done
• Getting It Wrong goes on Q-and-A