Abstract
The Miss America Pageant has provoked a wide range of responses throughout its history. Time critic Richard Corliss wrote, “It’s gaudy it’s fake, it’s real, it’s live! We hate it. We love it!”1 Former Miss America Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Leonard Horn referred to the pageant as a competition that “promotes healthy competition and breeds character among young women.”2 Robin Morgan, feminist scholar and former editor of Ms. magazine, responded that it was “the classic entity where racism, sexism, and homophobia are merged into one.”3 Corliss’s comment captures the kitschy, glitzy, carnival-like atmosphere that he experienced while covering the pageant, while Horn’s invokes the years of training, hard work, and competition that most of the contestants endure before having a chance to wear America’s most coveted crown. Morgan’s critique attacked what she sees as the perennial blond-haired, blue-eyed, heterosexual, Barbie doll-like archetype that the pageant has rewarded for most of its history. These few remarks constitute a small sample of the broad spectrum of sentiments proffered by observers of the pageant. Such varied reactions no doubt indicate that the pageant touches a nerve in the American psyche.
“There she is, Miss America,
There she is, your ideal.”
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Notes
Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of Americas Beauty Culture (New York: Metropolitan, 1998).
Sarah Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 6.
Lois Banner, American Beauty (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 268.
“Intercity Beauty Picked,” New York Times (8 September 1921): 9. See also Elwood Watson and Darcy Martin, “The Miss America Pageant: Pluralism, Femininity and Cinderella All in One,” Journal of Popular Culture 34, no.1 (Summer 2000): 105–126.
Ann Marie Bivans, Miss America: In Pursuit of the Crown (New York: Mastermedia, 1991).
Frank Deford, There She Is: The Life and Times of Miss America (New York: Viking Press, 1971), 147.
Elaine Tyler-May, Pushing the Limits: American Women 1940–1961 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 25.
A. R. Riverol, Live from Atlantic City: A History of the Miss America Pageant (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992), 115–121.
Candace Savage, Beauty Queens: A Playful History (New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1998), 100.
Susan Faludi, Backlash (New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1992), 75.
Excellent accounts of the 1968 protest, including the infamous “bra-burning” incident, can be found in Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open (New York: Viking Penguin, 2000);
Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (New York: The Dial Press/Random House, Inc., 1999);
Rita Freedman, Beauty Bound (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1995); Banner, American Beauty; and Faludi, Backlash, to name a few. It is interesting to note that at midnight following the 1968 pageant and the feminist protest to the pageant, the first Black Miss America Pageant was held in Atlantic City “as a direct protest of the pageant.” Nineteen-year-old Saundra Williams was the first recipient of the title. See PBS television program, “Miss America, The American Experience,” 27 January 2002, www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/missamerica.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg), 1903.
Maxine Leeds Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 45–64. K. Sue Jewell uses the image of “Mammies” to define black domestics, “Sapphires” to describe the “loquacious and headstrong” woman as exemplified by the role of Sapphire in the Amos and Andy television series, and “Jezebels” to portray the “bad-black-girl.”
K. Sue Jewell, From Mammy to Miss America: Cultural Images & the Shaping of U.S. Social Policy (New York: Routledge, 1993), 45–46.
M. M. Manning, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press), 1998.
There were a number of debates and articles written that expressed resentment that Bo Derek was receiving so much credit and attention for adopting a hairstyle that had been a major part of black female culture for centuries. See, for example, Paulette Caldwell, “A Hairpiece: On the Intersection of Race and Gender,” Duke Law Journal 41, no. 397 (1991), and Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall, The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color among African Americans (New York: Anchor, 1992).
Christopher Newfield, “What Was Political Correctness? Race, the Right, and Managerial Democracy in the Humanities,” Critical Inquiry 19 (Winter 1993): 320.
See Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth (New York: W. Morrow, 1991; reprint ed., New York: Anchor Books, 1992).
bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt Publishing, 1995).
Nella Larsen, Quicksand (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928).
A. Cleft Pellow, “Literary Criticism and Black Imagery,” in Images of Blacks in American Culture, ed. J. C. Smith (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988), 151–154.
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970).
Toni Morrison, Jazz (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).
Vanessa Dickerson, Recovering the Black Female Body: Self Representations by African-American Women (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 307–308.
Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of liberty (New York: Vintage, 1997).
Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955).
Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Random House, 1997).
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© 2004 Elwood Watson and Darcy Martin
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Watson, E., Martin, D. (2004). Introduction. In: Watson, E., Martin, D. (eds) There She Is, Miss America. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981820_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981820_1
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