On September 7, 1968, about four hundred women activists converged on the Atlantic City boardwalk outside the hall hosting the Miss America Pageant. It was the inaugural media event of the women’s liberation movement.

Some had traveled to New Jersey from as far away as Florida and Michigan. Women gathered on the boardwalk under the hot autumn sun, picketed in an oval, and remained there from midday through midnight.

Over the following decades, feminists would go on to create a dense, well-funded liberal apparatus that focused on eliminating gender discrimination in public policy, the law, and the workplace. This was a formidable, heroic task, one that remains incomplete.