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Gifts from The Morning Star
Flour bombs and rotten vegetables: 50 years on and women’s struggles are being hidden from history again
2 years after the explosive arrival of the women’s liberation movement in 1968, it confronted the twisted 'Miss World' event in London head on. Now a major Hollywood movie is retelling that story — leaving out the socialist and working-class elements
Miss World is the oldest 'beauty pageant.' November 1970 it was disrupted by women's liberation protesters (pictured) who stormed the event armed with flour missiles, water pistols filled with ink, rotten fruit and stink bombs. The event however, still takes place today.

THE film Misbehaviour is currently on general release. It is about the protest at the 1970 Miss World beauty contest, compered by reactionary “comic” Bob Hope, where feminists disrupted proceedings at the Albert Hall by throwing flour bombs and rotten vegetables.

In the film Keira Knightley plays one of the protesters, Sally Alexander. The film also features a scene, manufactured for dramatic effect, with her then partner Gareth Stedman Jones.

Both are socialist historians and founding editors of the History Workshop Journal, which continues to be published to this day, styled as a journal of socialist and feminist historians.

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