ABSTRACT
The twentieth Miss World contest, organised by Mecca Promotions, took place in the Royal Albert Hall in London, on the evening of 20 November 1970, compered by American comedian Bob Hope. At a pre-arranged signal a group of women interrupted the event, in full view of millions of television viewers. The women threw flour, smoke-and stinkbombs, blew whistles, waved rattles and distributed leaflets to members of the audience, protesting against the objectification of women in beauty contests, which epitomised ‘the traditional female road to success’. The women were arrested, Bob Hope cracked a few defensive jokes and the show continued. The form the interruption took echoed the pattern of many similar events initiated by post-1968 student protest: a spectacular interruption of a public ‘spectacle’, disrupting an occasion in order to express anger at it and arouse its audience from their passive consumer roles. But the objective and the protesters were different: feminists were registering anger at the commercialising of women’s sexuality as it was imagined and packaged for profit by men. Writing about the event later, the protestors described it as:
a blow against passivity, not only the enforced passivity of the girls on the stage, but the passivity that we all felt in ourselves.
