Bras (and draft cards)

[Laurence Horn]

At 3:33 PM -0500 3/11/03, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
>>  >"Naked protest" probably started in the 1960s-1970s, with women burning
>>their bras.
>>
>>That's as spurious as all those wrong "Windy City" attributions.  Feminists
>>never burned bras.  There was a protest in New York City, I believe in the
>>late 1960s, in which women threw bras and other "symbols of oppression" into
>>a garbage can, but never set them on fire.
>
>IIRC, you either discarded your bra or burned your draft card (I suppose
>relatively few individuals were in a position to do both). I believe these
>activities were later conflated as a symbol of aggressive public hippiedom,
>or something.
>
And I*I*RC, much was made of the draft card burnings, but I don't
know how widespread that practice really was either.  The true
politicos *sent back* their draft cards to their local draft boards
to express non-participation in the system, since the burning itself
would have been a pretty idle exercise.  (Nobody ever asked to see
one's draft card.)  Mostly other things were symbolically burned,
including letters from the draft board.  Of course we're talking the
sixties here, and as Wavy Gravy used to say, if you can remember the
sixties, you weren't there.

Larry