On September 7, 1968, members of New York Radical Women protested the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey, throwing symbols of 'women's oppression' — including bras, girdles, curlers, and copies of women's magazines — into a 'Freedom Trash Can.' Though no bras were actually burned (the protesters were denied a permit to light a fire on the boardwalk), the event was widely misreported as a 'bra burning' and the term entered popular culture as the defining symbol of second-wave feminist rebellion. The protest became one of the most iconic acts of feminist performance in American history.

The 'bra burning' myth — however factually inaccurate — generated enormous quantities of feminist poetry, song, and essay in the months and years following the protest. The bra became the central material symbol of feminist liberation poetry in the late 1960s and 1970s, replacing the corset as the locus of bodily and social critique. Muriel Rukeyser, Robin Morgan, and other poets associated with the women's liberation movement used the bra as a recurring image of enforced femininity to be discarded.