Beauty pageants

A pageant, by definition, is an elaborate, public exhibition. The idea of pairing a pageant with the word beauty to mean a contest based largely on physical appearance originated in the United States. Traditional beauty pageants, depending on one’s point of view, are celebrations of female pulchritude or a outmoded, sexist objectification of the female body. While such pageants most common in the United States, they also take place in other nations around the world, from Canada to South Africa and China. Most pageants feature young women, but others feature babies, children, nursing home residents, and men.

Overview

Some scholars believe the beauty pageant can be traced to ancient Greece; others point to England’s 1839 Eglinton Tournament, a reenactment of a medieval revel that included a "Queen of Beauty." The \\May Fair festivals popularized in England in the early 1880s, in which a young woman was crowned the May Queen, wore a white dress, and headed the May Day parade, is another precursor to the modern beauty pageant. In the United States, legendary showman P. T. Barnum hosted beauty contests in the mid 1800s, but the most famous beauty contest, the Miss America Pageant was first held in September 1921, and within a few short years many other beauty pageants were founded, with some of the most popular over the years being Miss USA, Mrs. America, and Miss Teen USA.

The first Miss America Pageant in 1921 was an attempt to extend the tourist season past Labor Day in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Critics of the pageant system have noted that the Miss America pageant began the same year women won the right to vote. The image of young American womanhood championed by the promoters of the pageant was in marked contrast to that of the feminist suffragettes and the flappers who were challenging established gender roles at the time. In 1968, around four hundred protesters gathered in front of Atlantic City’s Convention Hall during the Miss America Pageant to toss bras, girdles, and copies of Ladies Home Journal and Playboyinto a “Freedom Trash Can.” With reporters from major media outlets gathered to cover the pageant and with two-thirds of the nation’s television viewers watching, the protesters presented their cause to millions, namely that the pageant objectified women and hampered efforts for women to attain gender equality at home, in society, and in the workplace. This protest is often credited with popularizing second-wave feminism to a mainstream audience.

This protest was not the only one directed against the pageant that year. On August 17, 1968, the first Miss Black America was crowned in Atlantic City in a contest established in part to protest the racism of the Miss America Pageant, which was restricted to white contestants. Although African Americans had organized beauty contests for decades, some of which predated the Miss America pageant, and other formerly all-white pageants, including New York’s Miss Subways, saw African American women win titles as early as the 1940s, it was not until 1970 that the first African American woman competed in the Miss America Pageant. Vanessa Williams became the first African American Miss America in 1984. When scandal forced Williams to resign, her title was passed to the first runner-up, Suzette Charles, also an African American. African American beauties were not the only ones to be excluded from the ranks of Miss America for much of its history. Bess Myerson, Miss America 1945, was the first, and as of 2015, only Jewish Miss America, and it was 2000 before the first Asian American contestant was crowned Miss America. In 2014, Nina Davuluri became the first Indian American winner.

Not all beauty pageant contestants are adults. Teen pageants are numerous. America’s Junior Miss, renamed Distinguished Young Women in 2010, traces its beginnings to a local contest in Mobile, Alabama, in the 1920s. Barnum attracted an audience of more than sixty thousand to a beautiful baby contest in 1855, and one of Thomas Edison’s earliest movies was of the 1904 Asbury Park baby parade. Children’s beauty contests began in the 1960s and by the twenty-first century they were a multimillion-dollar industry. More than three thousand children’s beauty pageants are held in the United States each year, with more than one hundred thousand children competing for titles, most of them girls from ages two to twelve, although children as young as eight months have competed and, according to one report, about 5 percent of pageant contestants are boys.

The pageant circuit becomes a way of life for some contestants. One newspaper reported that a four-year-old was already a veteran of forty-eight pageants, and Susan Akin, Miss America 1986, began competing at six and held the title of Little Miss America in 1970. Toddlers and Tiaras, a reality television series that debuted on TLC in 2009, followed the lives of some of these young contestants and their families, including a pair of five-year-old twins who have a tour bus, a bodyguard, and a 13,000 square-foot practice building with a stage. The show produced three spin-offs, including the controversial Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.

Inclusivity in the pageant industry remains a topic of discussion. In 2023, the seventy-two-year-old Miss Universe competition for the first time allowed mothers, married women, and trans women to compete. It also promoted body positivity by allowing women of "all sizes" to compete. Two trans women walked the runway. However, critics noted that many state pageants do not permit trans women to compete, thus preventing them from reaching the international stage.

Bibliography

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