Non-Fiction: The Moment That Changed the Women’s Movement

Lectures and conversations with historians, authors, and thinkers. 

Liberation Summer: The Moment That Changed the Women's Movement and the Future of American Politics is a sweeping, definitive work of history exploring the road to the September 1968 protests of the Miss America pageant—one led by women’s liberationists and the other organized by the emergent Miss Black America pageant—and the birth of a new politics of beauty. The book unfolds the full scope of this history, detailing the shocking injustices and passionate debates that led to the demonstrations, as well as the broader social and political landscape that gave rise to some of the most iconic women on both sides of the ideological spectrum. Engagingly told and meticulously researched, Liberation Summer proves how the battle for beauty’s meaning has always been inextricably political, and how its enduring impact continues to shape our politics today.

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. Her last 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 Washington Post, 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.

Produced in partnership with The New York Historical