Abstract
Little did I know when I took a teaching position at Oklahoma City University (OCU)—my first job out of graduate school—that the institution had a long-standing tradition of recruiting young pageant winners and grooming them for the Miss America Pageant. Indeed, OCU touts itself as the best school in the country for aspiring Miss Americas, having produced three of them over the years (Jane Jayroe, 1967; Susan Powell, 1981; and Shawntel Smith, 1996) as well as thirty state pageant winners—more than any other college or university in the nation. The commitment to pageantry at OCU is serious business: The university sponsors a Miss Teen OCU pageant every year to help recruit promising teenagers and even provides scholarships to anyone who already has won some type of pageant, whether it is Miss Teen Wyoming or Miss Cherokee Nation. Young women come to OCU from all over the country to develop their talents before competing in the Miss America qualifying pageants in their home states. Why Oklahoma City University? Past success is no doubt the biggest reason, but full scholarships and nationally recognized programs in dance, music, and theater also play a role in recruiting. Focusing on American dance—jazz, modern, tap—and musical theater, both the School of Music and the School of American Dance offer the perfect training ground for young women who want to compete in the Miss America Pageant or, failing that, to pursue careers in the entertainment and tourism industries.1
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Notes
For a lively discussion of kitsch and “the trashing of taste in America,” see James B. Twitchell, Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
Susan Bordo, Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 23.
Ironically, the Miss America Pageant borrowed certain conventions from the suffrage movement, as Jennifer Jones has pointed out: “The Miss America pageant adopted and adapted the suffragette pageant by opening with the traditional processional parade of states, moving on through several musical numbers, and finally a series of tableaux in which the women were viewed in gowns and bathing suits…. The banners worn by all beauty contestants, bearing the names of their states or cites, are eerily reminiscent of suffragette banners first worn at rallies for women’s rights.” Jones, “The Beauty Queen as Deified Sacrificial Victim,” Theatre History Studies 18 (June 1998): 102.
Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 2.
On the Gibson Girl and the Ziegfeld Follies, respectively, see ibid. and Linda Mizejewski, Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
See Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985), for a discussion of how working women at the turn of twentieth the century enjoyed unprecedented freedom of movement and economic independence.
“In fact, no bras were burned at the demonstration,” Susan Bordo claims, “although there was a huge ‘Freedom Trash Can’ into which were thrown bras, along with girdles, curlers, false eyelashes, wigs.” Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, 1995), 19. For other accounts of this incident, see
Susan Brownmiller, Femininity (New York: Fawcett, 1984), 45–46; and
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): 111.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), xv, viii.
“Academic feminists have yet to adequately address the issue implicitly raised by millions of women,” Stange writes, “how to reach politically conservative yet ‘liberated’ women, many of whom testify, ‘I’m not a feminist, but…’ Some of those women may be feminists without knowing it, although putting it that way implies a certain condescension. Others are openly hostile to feminism.” Mary Zeiss Stange, “The Political Intolerance of Academic Feminism,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 21 June 2002, B16.
Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), xxi.
See Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 25. See also Sander L. Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 6. The surge in aesthetic surgeries in recent decades is one indication of the pressure on women to adapt themselves to certain physical ideals. Breast augmentation jumped from 39,247 in 1994 to 87,704 in 1996, while the number of women removing their implants dropped from 37,853 to 3,013 (240). Similarly, in 1995, there were some 63,000 face-lifts performed and a startling 208,000 botox and collagen procedures (316).
Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), 3.
Gerald Early, “Watching the Miss America Pageant,” The Best American Essays of the Century, ed. Joyce Carol Oates (New York: Vintage, 2000), 533.
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© 2004 Elwood Watson and Darcy Martin
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Eaton, M.A. (2004). My Miss Americas. In: Watson, E., Martin, D. (eds) There She Is, Miss America. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981820_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981820_9
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