Misbehaving

By Sue Finch, Jenny Fortune, Jane Grant, Jo Robinson, and Sarah Wilson, authors of Misbehaving. This article was adapted from the speeches Sue and Jenny gave at #FiLiA2021 during the Misbehaving: Stories of Protest Against the Miss World Contest and the Beauty Industry Panel.

Sue Finch:

The organisers expected 100 women, but 600 came to the Ruskin Women’s Liberation Conference in 1970. A group of young women historians whose daring scholarship blitzed through male history opened our minds and challenged our views forever. Sheila Rowbotham spoke about how women had been hidden from history yet started bread riots leading to revolution and the Paris Commune. The collaboration of minds at Ruskin presented us with liberating views and revolutionary ideas.

Inspired by this view of history we discussed women and ‘herstories’, sexuality, patriarchy, women's role in the family and socialist feminism. We began to question the roots of our own oppression, throughout history. A challenging time for relationships had begun. But a new world opened for women, and nothing would ever be the same. What happened at Ruskin, didn't stay at Ruskin, it spread like wildfire, and countless women's groups formed across the UK.

This led to the protest at the Miss World contest in London in November 1970, the first large demonstration from that new Women’s Liberation Movement. Planning meetings happened across the country. The aim - was to stop the proceedings during live TV transmission, while Bob Hope was on stage. We took flour bombs, smoke bombs, whistles, stink bombs, water pistols, football rattles, and rotten food. No one knew how many of us would be there (over 100 inside the Albert Hall and similar numbers outside). We wrote a leaflet with the slogan ‘We’re not beautiful, we’re not ugly, we’re angry’ and distributed it far and wide.

Sarah swung a football rattle furiously to signal the start of the action. Bob Hope was alone on stage so there was no risk of harming the contestants. He had already made numerous sexist jokes but his grotesque references to the war in Vietnam and the impact his visit with the new Miss World would have on the sex-starved troops appalled and inflamed us. The Hall rang with the sound of whistles and women shouting. Showers of leaflets fluttered down from the galleries. Flour bombs landed on the stage, the clouds of flour mixed with the effects of smoke bombs and leaflets, and Bob Hope tried to run away. Live transmission was stopped after ten minutes. We were ejected and five were arrested. It was a success!

That year, two black women won Miss World and runner-up. What did this mean to us then? What does it mean now? (In 2019 black women won titles in five major beauty pageants). After all, it was a beauty contest where all women regardless of their colour were objectified, exploited, humiliated, and used to endorse a homogenised standard of beauty and an industry that promises we can transform ourselves with their products. Is the result of a competition based on appearance ever something to celebrate? For some contestants winning a beauty competition offered opportunities they might not otherwise have, but what were they? Being sexually harassed and assaulted? Accompanying Bob Hope to Vietnam as a ‘death mascot’ for US troops?

At the time, while we were influenced by the civil rights and black power movements, most women’s groups in the UK were white. If this hadn’t been the case, could we have understood what would eventually be called intersectionality earlier? Or realised that black women winning beauty contests might represent a small step in tackling the racism that imposed white standards of beauty.

Our protest in 1970 was seen by over 100 million people worldwide live on TV. What did it change?

The Miss World contest carries on. Fifty years later, there’s still a continuum of violence between women being judged by our looks, seen as objects - and rape and femicide. Two to three women are still killed by men each week in England and Wales. The number of rapes is rising, but only 1.4% of reported rapes resulted in any kind of charge in England and Wales in 2020 – a record low.

A hundred years after suffragist creative direct action won votes for women, only a third of MPs are women in the UK.

Forty years after direct action at Greenham Common won the withdrawal of American missiles from the UK, we still have nuclear-armed submarines on 24-hour patrol.

There are new generations of women who are active feminists – including our daughters – and the FiLiA community comprises thousands. The Women in Black international women’s network for peace with justice for women campaigns across the world.

But what’s changed for women since 1970?

Not enough!

Jenny Fortune:

Demonstrating against the Miss World contest, being on trial & imprisonment was the pivotal point in my life. With the support of the women's movement around me, I dared to speak out, challenging the male establishment, explaining why the Miss World contest was a disempowering attack on women. We took over the courtroom and turned it into a farce. It was joyous, funny and empowering. Ever since that concept of ' collective empowerment' has been key for me, because I experienced it.

Women's Liberation spread like wildfire - we decided we could do anything and we did - rather than wait for the slow change of policy and law. We rejected the property relations of the family and it became common for women to confidently have children without getting married or dependent on a man. We lived in communes and brought our children up collectively. We squatted housing, learnt plumbing, electrics, car maintenance. We refused to wear make-up, we cut our hair short and wore boots and dungarees in protest against the feminine stereotype. We created our own culture.

The '90s and the '00s were hard - I felt an imposter in my highly skilled job and was constantly fighting against privatisation and cuts to services at the same time as bringing up my daughter on my own. A different kind of feminism was beginning to emerge -corporate, individual, and aimed at 'success' and commercialism. 

Where are we today? In 'Miss World on Steroids' I wanted to bring our refusal of patriarchal culture up to date, especially in relation to the beauty and cosmetic surgery industries. These are now mega-powerful billion-dollar money-making machines, feeding on women's insecurities.

Beauty and make-up can be fun and a bonding activity for women - but it is constantly subverted and channelled by today's surveillance and algorithm technologies. On which we are now dependent, particularly young people who are terribly susceptible because of being tied to their screens.

Women's Liberation is cultural as well as structural - we need cultures as well as structures of collective empowerment. There has been such a drift to individual empowerment, ' power feminism' as Julie Bindel coins it. We have corporate structures everywhere now which promote ' statutory equality' , framed in  legal language which is mystifying and misleading, putting all the emphasis on individual identity, whilst we know that patriarchal capitalism still depends on women's cheap and free domestic labour

We need to take our lead from those movements of collective empowerment today - like the wave of cleaners’ strikes and victories sweeping the country, where black and Latino women are leading, spurred on by Black Lives Matter.