Once as iconic as American apple pie, have beauty pageants served their purpose? Here She Is, a tarte analysis of the rise, demise and rebranding of beauty pageants focuses on Miss America---its detractors, its passionate fans within its various iterations--- that only Covid19 brought to a screeching halt in 2021.
Author Hilary Levey Freidman daughter to Pamela Anne Eldred, Miss America 1970, intertwines “pageantry, politics and feminism” with history that began with the suffrage movement. In an era when a woman’s highest achievement was matrimony, children and a life of domesticity, the suffragists demanded to be heard, and seen--- in public. The so-called “revolutionary women” dared to demand equal voting rights, and inclusion in government policy-making. Amendment 19 was the culmination of their prodigious efforts.
Fostered by Barnum (from the Barnum and Baily Circus fame) the focus shifted from emancipation of women’s political rights to competitions on the pedestals of pulchritude. Having won their right to vote, women fearlessly and proudly paraded in public---- this time pushing baby strollers to exhibit their “best babies.” The highly popular “baby pageants” gave currency to the booming beauty industry placing women into the public sphere.
Initially competing only in photographs, the “handsome mothers" ushered in the first Miss America Pageant that debuted in Atlantic City in 1921. As did the suffragists before them, the women wore the symbolic sash their badge of honor while Bert Parks romantically serenaded “Your Ideal.”
In 1935 Loren Slaughter assumed the helm as the chairperson of Miss America. She transformed the organization. Aside from physical beauty, the women were judged on talent. College scholarships that attracted not only beautiful but brainy women who saw the pageant as a stepping-stone to financial independence.
Freidman casts a positive light on beauty pageants--- opportunities to pursue higher education, exposure to media, and access to career options in male dominated fields. Its detractors saw beauty pageants as disrespectful, even lewd, decried the “Barbie doll”, deferential conformity of the competitors. Protesters pressured the discontinuance of the crass exhibitions of women’s bodies citing “objectification" and the unattainable standards of ideal beauty. Bra burning activists railed against the pageants’ racist policies (Bess Myerson the only Jewish Miss America, the first black woman was crowned Miss America in 1983). But neither the “bra burners” nor Betty Freidan’s’ bestselling The Feminine Mystique diminished the adulations of fans nor the opprobrium of “women’s lib” movements.
Does Miss America pageant resonate with the American public today? With access to every job category, political position including running for the President of the United States should women continue to be rewarded for walking in high heels wearing beautiful gowns?
Friedman’s work cogently balances the pros and cons of beauty pageants, within “America’s deeply entrenched history of beauty culture.”
