Bra Burning (1968)

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:15 PM -0500 3/12/03, Baker, John wrote:
>         Wasn't "chauvinist" always a derisive term, whether or not
>accompanied by "pig" (or, for that matter, by "male")?

Well, there's effectively derisive and there's ineffectively so.  If
"male chauvinist pig" infected the serious use of "chauvinist" for a
perpetrator of sexism or patriarchy, the latter becomes unusable with
the original intent.  (I don't know if that happened, I'm just
paraphrasing what I take to be Fred's point.)

>
>         According to a number of online sources, there was no bra
>burning at the 1968 Miss America pageant; a journalist was told that
>there would be a "symbolic bra-burning" and misunderstood that to
>mean that there would be a literal bra-burning.  There probably were
>cases in which feminists burned bras, but if so, they apparently
>were few and obscure.
>
and had lost their elastic.

larry