Date: 2024-05-18 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00019485
Beauty Pageants
Miss America
Miss America’s History-Makers and Rule-Breakers ... For a century, women have conformed to, and rebelled against, the contest’s strictures. But are beauty pageants finally beyond redemption?
Peter Burgess
Miss America ... Pageants offer both ideology and entertainment, weaving together the forces of patriarchy, capitalism, and racism.Illustration by Joana Avillez
To the long-standing annoyance of people involved with the Miss America contest, which bills itself as “first, and foremost, a scholarship program,” the general public often confuses it with Miss U.S.A., which freely admits to being a beauty pageant. As annual tournaments of unmarried, childless women in their late teens and twenties, the two events have much in common. In fact, one emerged out of the other. In 1950, Yolande Betbeze, a convent-educated coloratura soprano from Mobile, Alabama, entered the Miss America contest and performed an aria from “Rigoletto” as her talent. She returned to her dressing room to find the words “Hairy sits here,” a reference to her thick eyebrows, scrawled in lipstick on the makeup mirror. But she won, and, newly crowned, refused to sign a contract that would have required her to tour the country in swimsuits made by Catalina, one of the pageant’s sponsors. “I’m an opera singer, not a pinup,” Betbeze said.
Catalina went and started its own contest, Miss U.S.A., scrapping the talent competition and offering cash prizes instead of scholarships. Despite the schism, Miss America endured, with a reputation as the more demure of the two franchises. Miss America finally did away with its swimsuit competition in 2018, in the wake of a scandal that began with male executives at the organization referring to one former winner as a “blimp” and to other contestants as “cunts.” Apart from their formats, the big difference between the two pageants is that, until 2015, Miss U.S.A. and its international offshoot, Miss Universe, were owned, in part, by Donald Trump.
Of all the things Trump could have invested in, why a beauty pageant? The proprietary access to young, beautiful women was surely an attraction. As Jeffrey Toobin reported in this magazine in 2018, Trump also used Miss Universe to drum up foreign business. There are plenty of places to host clients, though. Pageants, commingling ideology and entertainment, offered something extra—the French-braided forces of patriarchy, capitalism, and racism. As Margot Mifflin demonstrates in “Looking for Miss America: A Pageant’s 100-Year Quest to Define Womanhood” (Counterpoint), they have been woven into pageant culture from the start.
Participation has been declining for decades, but Miss America still commands attention, rivalling perhaps only major-league baseball in outsized nostalgia-based influence. The pageant isn’t a state-sponsored ritual, but its winners are invited to meet with Presidents and to address legislative committees. In 1995, Hillary Rodham Clinton, at that time the First Lady, called in to a pre-competition press conference to chat with the reigning queen. Since girlhood, Clinton claimed, she had never gone a year without watching the pageant. “This is the only way I would ever, ever appear on a Miss America contest,” she said, deprecating herself instead of the contest’s premise. “It’s one of those dreams deferred, but it’s finally coming true.”
At its peak, in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, Miss America attracted more than two-thirds of the country’s television viewers. The annual telecast, culminating with Bert Parks, the m.c., crooning “There She Is,” amounted to a minor late-summer holiday, a reunion of the intact but dysfunctional American family. Boys learned how to watch girls, and girls learned how to watch boys watching girls. Philip Roth once tried to identify the primordial source of the pageant’s allure, “the quirk that made me watch this thing year after year.” All he could come up with was that his boyhood barber, a Jewish immigrant from Turkey, kept a framed picture of the current winner on his scissor tray. I remember tuning in to the pageant during the eighties with my father, who wielded the remote with ceremonious male authority. More than the seahorsey fonts and the sherbet gowns, it was his attachment to the ritual that fostered mine.
The first Miss America pageant was held in September of 1921, in Atlantic City. Inspired by Asbury Park’s popular baby parade, city boosters invited eight “Inter-City Beauties”—from New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., and New Jersey—to participate in a two-day festival. King Neptune, whom Mifflin describes as “a bronzed, bearded patriarch wearing purple robes and a jeweled crown,” ferried the ingénues around on a barge, depositing them on the shore near Million Dollar Pier for a meet and greet with the mayor. King Neptune was played by Hudson Maxim, the inventor of smokeless gunpowder: “He brandished his trident in his right hand, having lost the other in a lab accident.”
Mifflin is as alive to the pageant’s historical grotesqueries as she is to the weirdo details of its founding. Built near a bay that the Lenni Lenape people called Absegami, Atlantic City was a segregated town that relied on Black labor: African-Americans accounted for twenty-two per cent of the population, but, according to the historian Nelson Johnson, they made up ninety-five per cent of the workforce in the area’s white hotels, which enabled its main industry, tourism. After the opening ceremony at Million Dollar Pier, the contestants were escorted to a float by Black residents in slave costumes—as Mifflin notes, “the only African Americans to participate in Miss America festivities for the next half century.”
The pageant’s “Bathers’ Revue” caused a sensation. Despite an ordinance that forbade women to bare their knees on the beach, the contestants were required to wear bathing suits, establishing a confusing precedent of control and empowerment. At the end of the festival, five male judges pronounced Margaret Gorman the most beautiful girl in America. At sixteen years old and just over five feet tall, Gorman was the smallest Miss America ever. We know this because contestants’ measurements were recorded in maniacal detail. (Newspapers congratulated the winner of the 1926 pageant, Norma Smallwood, on the twelve-inch circumference of her “well-molded throat.”) Gorman, Mifflin writes, “was not quite a woman, and she was decidedly not a ‘New Woman,’ by then a popular term for the enfranchised, independent, post-Victorian woman of the modern age.”
The inaugural pageant took place almost exactly one year after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote. (Mostly, white women got to exercise it.) Dramatic pageantry, Mifflin notes, had been instrumental in the suffragist movement, in the form of silk sashes and theatrical tableaux. “I can only state my firm belief that a pageant has more power to convince people of the truth of our cause than any other means,” Hazel MacKaye, a suffragist who served as the director of drama and pageantry for the Y.W.C.A., once wrote. Is it any surprise that, just as women won the vote, a repurposed form of pageantry emerged, out of the deep blue, to insure that they were voted upon?
Throughout the twenties, the pageant was a hustle. As its renown grew, the organizers angled for respectability, but the contest kept being thwarted by entrants who bent the rules with a madcap, Miss Hannigan-like period energy. In 1923, Miss Alaska, whom Mifflin describes as “a vivacious favorite in white—swimsuit, stockings, and jazzy tam,” was disqualified on the ground that she was a New York resident and a married woman. A recent immigrant from Sweden, she had “spent all of three days in Juneau.”
In the thirties, the pageant hired Lenora Slaughter, of the St. Petersburg, Florida, chamber of commerce, to spiff up the program. As the pageant’s director, Slaughter hoped to attract a “better class of girl,” and thus a better class of sponsor, transforming a popular entertainment into a tidy model of middle-class advancement. She added the talent competition, instituted scholarships, created the coronation ceremony, and started pageant-momming the pageant with a genteel dauntlessness that left many of her “girls” in her thrall well into adulthood.
Using a “whack-a-mole approach to controlling the obstreperous beauties,” as Mifflin writes, Slaughter established a pattern of reactivity that plagues the Miss America Organization even now. Winner absconds with her chauffeur on the night of her coronation? Assign a society matron to escort each contestant twenty-four hours a day. Palomino nearly falls into the orchestra pit? No more animals in the talent competition. Slaughter is remembered as the pageant’s great reformer, but there were brittle limits to her progressivism, which placed education alongside, but never above, marriage as a pathway to fulfillment.
Miss America positions itself as a meritocratic institution—a congress of self-improving strivers pulling themselves up by their spaghetti straps. Its quasi-legislative structure, with each state and the District of Columbia sending a delegate, implies that Miss America not only reigns over the nation but also represents it. Demographically, she clearly doesn’t. In the course of a century, the pageant has had one Native American winner, in 1926, and one Latina winner, who was born in Paraguay to Mormon missionaries; it has never had a Muslim, trans, or openly gay winner.
The shame of Slaughter’s thirty-two-year regime was Rule Seven, which appeared sometime in the forties and stipulated that contestants must be “in good health and of the white race.” To Slaughter, “of the white race” seems to have meant pretty much anything but Black. For newly arrived Europeans, the contest served as a portal to whiteness, turning immigrants into Americans. In 1945, pageant officials pressured Miss New York, Bess Myerson, of the Sholem Aleichem Houses, in the Bronx, to Anglicize her name. (“ ‘Betty,’ or whatever, ‘Merrick’ or something,” Slaughter advised.) Myerson refused and won the contest, becoming the first and only Jewish Miss America.
Even in the sixties, as consciousnesses levitated across the country, the pageant remained a bastion of conservatism. In 1968, the feminist collective New York Radical Women organized “a day-long boardwalk-theater event,” in Atlantic City, to coincide with the pageant. As part of the protest, they filled a “Freedom Trash Can” with cosmetics, steno pads, floor wax, hair curlers, undergarments, and other such “woman-garbage.” Writing about the demonstration in the Washington Post, the humorist Art Buchwald concluded, “There is no better excuse for hitting a woman than the fact that she looks just like a man.” Reading Buchwald now, one realizes that Trump’s tone of cruel appraisal is at least partly pageant-watcher-speak, the snap judgment of the Nielsen patriarch accustomed to rating bodies the way he rates shows.
As feminists protested on the boardwalk, the first Miss Black America was being crowned at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, four blocks away. The contest, sponsored by the regional N.A.A.C.P. and the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, was, Mifflin writes, “a pivot from pressuring Miss America to integrate,” which had already been attempted, with “pitiful results.” Miss America’s famous theme song dealt in superlatives (“she is fairest of the fair”), but the Miss Black America serenade, by Curtis Mayfield, offered a collective vision of victory (“You’re such wonderful people / And so beautifully equal”). As the sociologist Maxine Leeds Craig has written, “while Women’s Liberation protested the racism of the contest as one of the specific ways it oppressed women, the N.A.A.C.P. sought to fight that racism by having a black woman win the crown in the name of all black women.” An immediate success, Miss Black America exerted transformative pressure on traditional pageants and on the definition of beauty that they presupposed. At the end of last year, Black women held the crowns of five major beauty pageants: Miss America, Miss U.S.A., Miss Teen U.S.A., Miss Universe, and Miss World.
Miss America officials, Mifflin writes, considered themselves “concertedly apolitical.” In 1969, the pageant’s chairman declared, “We have no interest in minorities or causes. S.D.S. has its thing. We have no thing.” Soon, the pageant was not only thingless but sponsorless: Pepsi withdrew as a major advertiser, seemingly unimpressed by the chairman’s vision of a “plain American idealism” devoid of any actual ideals. In 1970, Miss America finally admitted a Black contestant, Cheryl Browne. Thirteen years later, Vanessa Williams, of New York, became the pageant’s first Black winner. But, even if women were no longer to be excluded on account of their skin color, their sexual histories, real or imagined, were still fair game: ten months into Williams’s reign, Penthouse published nude photos of her, taken when she was a teen-ager, and pageant officials shamed her into stepping down. Three decades later, Sam Haskell, the longtime C.E.O. of the Miss America Organization, formally apologized to Williams for its handling of the situation.
Haskell resigned in 2017, after his derogatory e-mails about contestants (“OMG she is huge . . . and gross”) became public. He was replaced by Gretchen Carlson, Miss America 1989 and a former Fox News host, who had recently left the network and received a twenty-million-dollar settlement in a sexual-harassment lawsuit against Roger Ailes. Carlson brought in an all-female executive team, promising, hilariously, “to make this organization 100 per cent about empowering women.” She was supposed to professionalize the pageant, and, surely, to lend it an aura of #MeToo credibility, but her tenure seemed to be less about empowering women than about remaking her career. Carlson left the pageant after a shambolic year during which the sitting Miss America, Cara Mund, accused her and other officials of workplace bullying. (They denied the charge.) In an open letter, Mund wrote of being silenced, marginalized, and treated like “a wind-up toy who they can power up to spit out the meaningless words that are put into her mouth.”
Delving into the history of Miss America, one is struck by the consistency of its critics. Political correctness is often presented as a function of time, a contemporary phenomenon forever on the rise. The pageant’s history, however, shows that social change is often about shifts in attention, that “cancel culture” is just an amplification of critiques that people were making even in the crinoline age.
Betbeze, the swimsuit apostate, received a hundred and sixty-three marriage proposals in the course of her reign. She once remarked that Miss America is the kind of girl who walks into a bar and orders an orange juice “just loud enough for everyone in the place to hear her.” Later in life, she channelled her sparkiness into activism, picketing segregated lunch counters and campaigning for nuclear disarmament. In the sixties, she was invited to return to Atlantic City for an onstage reunion with other previous winners. “Why would I want to do that?” she replied. “You’re not Miss America, y’all are Miss White Christian.”
Beauty queens were once remunerated in fun: “Had Champagne! Met Spanish playboys! Chauffeur drove us home at 6 a.m.!” Bess Myerson wrote in her diary, after being crowned Miss New York. Less thrillingly, there were consumer goods produced by pageant sponsors, such as the Philco “Miss America” television set, in whose advertisements winners appeared, draped in ermine. These days, being Miss America is a full-time job, with a salary that, according to a spokesperson, is “in the low six figures.” A listing on the pageant’s Web site enumerates the position’s requirements: “energy, positivity, professionalism and courtesy while engaging in extensive travel, often logging 20,000 miles a month and at times changing location every 8-24 hours.”
If Miss America is a job, its winners need a union. The position offers little to no formal training, protection, or straightforward possibility for advancement. There is no set entry fee, but the Miss America Organization requires candidates to raise money for charity in a scheme that Kate Shindle, the 1998 winner, has described as “borderline fraudulent.” Contestants also have to guarantee that they’re neither married nor pregnant (attesting to “a mint-condition uterus,” as John Oliver has observed). Pageant winners are awarded college-tuition money, but they are required to take time off from school in order to carry out their duties. Many never go back. The scholarship money diminishes significantly at each ranking, so that seven finalists receive eighty-five hundred dollars apiece, enough to pay for a third of a semester at Georgetown, where Jade Glab, Miss New Jersey, is currently studying management.
Despite all this, pageants are an attractive option for many young women. Even Gloria Steinem participated in one as a teen-ager in Toledo, Ohio, standing on a beer keg in a bathing suit; she said later that it seemed “like a way out of a not too great life in a pretty poor neighborhood.” Competing in 1924, Miss St. Louis reportedly had her dimples insured for a hundred thousand dollars. Pageants have always been a means, above all, for young women to try to convert cuteness into capital. If it was once sacrilege to say you were competing for money—“to gain poise and develop my personality,” one 1949 contestant gave as her reason for entering—today it’s unusual to say you’re doing the pageant for anything else. In her memoir, Kate Shindle notes that “formers” have been known to use their crowns as receptacles for party dip. They weren’t all in it for the rhinestones.
Recently, Miss America rebranded itself as “Miss America 2.0,” promising “a fresh take” for “a new generation of female leaders.” In addition to forgoing the swimsuit competition, participants were no longer to be judged on “outward physical appearance.” Last December, at a new venue, the Mohegan Sun Arena, in Connecticut, fifty-one competitors posed in Velázquez-like formations on a black-and-white, minimalist stage. One of them had a pixie cut. Others had bare midriffs. Some of the old cheese endured, such as the habit of introducing oneself in the appositive (“A nationally known speed-painter, I’m Miss Kansas, Annika Wooton!”), but for the most part the “trifecta” of traits that organizers said they sought in a winner—passion, talent, ambition—were on display in abundance. The winner, a begoggled pharmacy student from Virginia named Camille Schrier, basically gave a ted talk onstage, demonstrating the catalytic decomposition of hydrogen peroxide with exploding goo.
Still, it was impossible to magic away the event’s fundamental dissonance. If recent contestants have been racially diverse, and even heroically outspoken (“From the state with eighty-four per cent of the United States’ freshwater but none for its residents to drink, I’m Miss Michigan, Emily Sioma!”), they also remain overwhelmingly gorgeous and skinny. “I love how Miss America is really showing and highlighting that we’re more than just a beauty pageant,” one contestant said, in a video segment. Being more than just a beauty pageant is like being more than just a corset, adding comfort features to a base of constriction.
Progressivism has its limits in a regressive institution. A 2020 issue of the contest’s magazine touts its scholarships as “much-needed great gender equalizers,” asserting that each participant’s “future will be brighter and her financial burden lighter.” But that trajectory applies to, at most, only a few hundred American women a year. Pageants are expensive to participate in. Young mothers—who tend to need financial aid more than women who have children later in life—need not apply. For every woman who loves her pageant experience, there are scores more who, watching at home, feel diminished by its objectification of women. For every Yolande Betbeze, subverting pageant culture from the inside, there is an Erika Harold, Miss America 2003, advocating for virginity until marriage. (In 2018, Kellie Chauvin—the wife of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed George Floyd—competed in Mrs. Minnesota, a pageant for married women, wearing a sparkly navy-blue evening gown as “an homage to police officers,” according to the St. Paul Pioneer Press. She has since filed for divorce.) To criticize Miss America is to risk seeming unsisterly, because, like success, criticism can always be personalized. Perhaps the most American thing about Miss America is that it fetishizes individual opportunity at the expense of the common good.
In 1988, a college student named Michelle Anderson infiltrated the Miss California pageant as a contestant, undergoing months of “bleaching, dieting, training, tanning, and feigning fundamentalist beliefs to get into the running.” Seconds before the winner was to be announced, she reached into her cleavage and unfurled a silk banner that read “pageants hurt all women.” Anderson went on to become a lawyer and is now the president of Brooklyn College. I think she was right. Miss America gets money for college. Everyone else gets lessons in sexism, racism, and capitalism that take a lifetime to unlearn. There is no scholarship for that. ♦
Published in the print edition of the September 7, 2020, issue, with the headline “Contested.”
Lauren Collins has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2008. She is the author of “When in French: Love in a Second Language.”
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