Liberation Summer

Micki McElya is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut, specializing in the histories of women, gender, race, and sexuality in the United States from the Civil War to the present, with an emphasis on political culture and memory. Her most recent book, The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received a number of other accolades; her 2007 book, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America was the cowinner of a 2007 Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. McElya has written for The Atlantic and Boston Review, and her work has been featured in The New York Times, NPR, MSNBC, The Nation, Elle, and more. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and New York University and is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"This lively history chronicles second-wave feminism through a novel lens: the politics of beauty. Assembling a diverse cast of activists, McElya considers some of the movement’s key events—including protests against the Miss America pageant and the staging of the first Miss Black America contest in 1968 — to highlight the ambitions, conflicts and contradictions among women who, while fighting for equality, continued to be judged, and to judge one another, according to conventional standards of beauty." —The New York Times “A wide-ranging, comprehensive cultural history. . . . Drawing on a wealth of sources—including memoirs, published interviews, biographies, and histories—McElya recounts the origins and activities of the many contingencies that roiled American society. . . . [Her] prodigious research informs a lively contribution to women’s history.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review “With historical nuance and narrative flair, Micki McElya guides us to the Atlantic City boardwalk in late summer 1968, where the political, racial, and social tensions of that tumultuous year explode in a battle over that icon of womanly perfection—Miss America. Blending deft portraits with vibrant storytelling, McElya provides a kaleidoscopic view of the politics of beauty, sex, and race colliding on the beach, illuminating the personalities and ideas that propelled—or strenuously resisted—an emerging women's liberation movement. A mesmerizing chronicle of the moment the second wave of feminism came crashing onto American shores.” —Elaine Weiss, author of The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote "Piercingly smart and seductively current. Even fun. Rarely has history-storytelling turned on the terrifying axis of this exact quandary—beauty’s quagmire—in this way. What is brilliantly layered here, what is exquisitely puzzle-pieced here, will alert you and amaze you. Especially since gender’s racialized grip on beauty isn’t done with us." —Kathryn Bond Stockton, author of Gender(s)  "In Liberation Summer, Micki McElya offers an ambitious and original account of beauty as a central force in postwar American political life. Rather than simply retelling the Miss America story, she reframes it as a foundational struggle over political power, revealing how women across lines of race, ideology, and activism understood beauty as a terrain on which authority was distributed and contested. Crucially, McElya shows that Black women, their ideas, and their organizations were central to this history." —Sherie M. Randolph, author of Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical “As Micki McElya’s gorgeous and urgent Liberation Summer reveals, the spectacle at Atlantic City in 1968 was not a side show, but the world-shifting main event in an era of upheaval—with reverberations that still shape how we see ourselves and each other. McElya shows how a vast array of characters, drawn into surprising coalitions and conflicts, held up a mirror to a nation, confronting its shortcomings and what it would take to shed them. Liberation Summer foregrounds the essential freedom to control one’s body and how others perceive it while reminding us that even small groups of motivated women can reset the course of history in a short time. Fascinating, maddening, and especially, inspiring.” —Katherine Turk, author of The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization that Transformed America "Liberation Summer explores the iconic and enduring legend of the 'bra-burners' with drama, rigor and complexity. Venturing through the origins of the women's liberation movement and its backlash, Micki McElya uses the protests surrounding the 1968 Miss America Pageant as a fascinating lens to understand the dramatic upheaval to gender norms unfolding in the late 1960s and how, then as now, beauty standards served as a proxy for larger debates about the position of women in society." —Rebecca Grant, author of Access: Inside the Abortion Underground and the Sixty-Year Battle for Reproductive Freedom "An informative, incisive and engaging examination of the course of American feminism through the incongruous backdrop of the Miss America contest. Beginning with the political turbulence of 1968 through the clashing of the Me-Too and MAGA worlds, the reader is immersed in the sweeping onrush of cultural, racial and political change in this important contribution to our understanding of the history of the women’s movement over the past six decades." —John Lawrence, author of Arc of Power: Inside Nancy Pelosi's Speakership 2005-2010 “A thought-provoking read. By tracing debates about beauty, feminism, and race from the late 1960s through the 1980s and beyond, Micki McElya’s Liberation Summer illustrates how ideas about beauty and their connections to women’s public opportunities continue to shape American society.” —Melissa Estes Blair, author of Bringing Home the White House: The Hidden History of Women who Shaped the Presidency in the Twentieth Century "Here, in the most famous moment in beauty pageant history, lies a primer for understanding the fierce battles over feminism, family values, and race that continue to inform our politics today. As Micki McElya convincingly demonstrates, we dismiss the significance of beauty contests at our peril." —Blain Roberts, author of Denmark Vesey's Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy