William G. Kreighoff, a 1926 pageant judge, imagined Miss America as “a girl of balance and mentality, who has ambitions to marry and have a flock of kids.” Illustrator Haskell Coffin, who painted Lanphier after her win, believed the queen should be a “dainty girl of temperament, delicacy, and charm—a home-loving, modest, effeminate, but healthy girl.”
Character, beauty, body type, ambition—they all figured in the equation. But what was being calculated? Was Miss America merely the prettiest woman in America or a symbol of American womanhood? And by what measure was she, or could she be, symbolic?
Despite the pageant’s patriotic trappings, from Gorman’s Lady Liberty crown to Malcomson’s Betsy Ross float, Miss America symbolized nothing beyond a few dozen men’s fantasies about women’s roles in post-suffrage society. The pageant was a marketing opportunity in need of a bigger purpose, which required articulating a national ideal against which young women could be gauged—something that proved challenging in this period of transition, which was saturated with ambivalence about women’s progress. The coin of conventional beauty, the winners learned, was women’s greatest currency; it purchased romance, often a husband, a short career, or a flicker of fame—but even that was brief. Gorman returned to watch the pageant just a few years after her win and moved through the crowds unrecognized. The best-case scenario for winners was the kind of fast fortune Smallwood squeezed out of it.
As Banner observes, although beauty contests “offered the possibility of social mobility to a few working class women, their primary purpose . . . was social discipline and not social advance.” Though some of the early Miss Americas returned to great acclaim in their hometowns (Malcomson was late to her own wedding because of swarming crowds), the title was never professionally transformative, and not all savored it. Decades after her win, Campbell said, “I got so tired of the publicity, I didn’t ever want to hear about Miss America again.” Malcomson had no regrets but much later said winning the title “never affected my life.” In 1980, Gorman, then a D.C. socialite who said life had been “extremely kind” to her, confessed, “I never cared to be Miss America. It wasn’t my idea. I am so bored by it all. I really want to forget the whole thing.”
But the contest wouldn’t be dormant for long. When it was revived in 1935, the city officials who thought it had attracted insufficiently docile women could have no idea what new insurgencies lay ahead. Likewise, little Margaret Gorman, shooting marbles in the dirt that sultry summer day in 1921, couldn’t have dreamed that the quest to define American womanhood, first played out on her body, would continue for nearly a century.
BEAUTIFUL FAY LANPHIER WAS SEATED in the lunchroom of Paramount Pictures talking about the five years since she’d been crowned Miss America 1925. She had not become a star. She had married and divorced a millionaire. She had opened and closed a beauty parlor. Now twenty-four, she was working as a stenographer in the very studio that had signed her after the pageant. And she had something extraordinary to say: she was happy.
“Those days when I was ‘Miss America’—they were nice in one way, but I was never happy. Something was always bothering me, causing me to worry,” she told the reporter profiling her for The New Movie Magazine, a popular gossip monthly. In fact, it was everything: her looks, her weight, her talent, her right to be in the spotlight, her fear of letting people down, and her very worth as a public figure. The studio hadn’t wanted her for The American Venus; they had wanted Miss America.
“I wonder if you know what it means to be wanted not for yourself?” she asked. “How it feels to know that people are interested in you not because you are you, but because you are something?” It was a misgiving any celebrity might share, but she sharpened the point and aimed it at the very heart of the pageant. “Perhaps if that something is a real accomplishment on your part you can take pride in it and so feel all right. But I couldn’t.”
Crowned for her non-achievement, Lanphier felt unworthy of the attention. “I did not build myself,” she explained. “I just happened to be like I am.” Or was. She had since quit wearing makeup and had gained almost thirty pounds. “I suppose that a person dying of thirst would overdrink when he first got a tank full of water,” she noted without remorse. “You’ll never catch me getting the same ailments some of the girls who win beauty contests work themselves into. Fifteen pounds overweight is better than ten pounds underweight. So that is that.”
Lanphier’s frank allusion to pageant-inspired eating disorders was unusual in the early twentieth century. The problem became obvious in the fitness-crazed 1980s and ’90s, when Miss Americas proudly described their starvation diets and kamikaze exercise regimens as if they were commendable, not crazy. Later, one honest ex, Kate Shindle (1998), affirmed that the pageant preparation had left her with both an eating disorder and a “massively unhealthy” exercise compulsion.
Thinness had defined the first wave of Miss Americas, who competed in a period when the corset was in decline and disciplining the body through dieting was on the rise. The Victorian paradigm of fleshy beauty had shifted as women became more physically active and fashion became less restrictive. In 1918, the first popular weight loss book, Diet and Health, with Key to the Calories, was published by Lulu Hunt Peters, a formerly fat doctor who offered a scientific method for slimming down: counting calories. She assured aspiring dieters that “fat individuals have always been considered a joke, but you are a joke no longer” and entreated women to ignore husbands who claimed they preferred zaftig women. The book was a bestseller from 1923 to 1927.
Like so many former beauty queens who gain weight, Lanphier was fat-shamed. She’d heard the whispers behind her back at work, but she didn’t care, because with the pounds came relief from the pressure. “The prize,” the reporter concluded, “was not worth the game.” He added that she was still very pretty, and “a great part of that attractiveness was her perfect ease of manner,” which set her apart from the flutteringly self-conscious women—even a few stars—he had spotted lunching on the Paramount lot that day.
The oldest of six children whose father died before the last was born, Lanphier entered her first beauty contest in Oakland, California, in an effort to improve her life as a secretary. She placed second, which didn’t qualify her to compete statewide for Atlantic City, so she raced to San Francisco the next day to try there. But as she stood in the wings waiting to walk out and be judged, she was paralyzed with fear and plagued with self-doubt. She couldn’t budge. The pageant host gave her a shove and told her to smile and keep moving. “Don’t stand still out there. SMILE! Do you hear?”
She smiled and she won, qualifying for Miss America, which she lost in 1924, and to which she returned—thinner—to win in 1925. All that was fun. But then came the fashion shows and sponsorships and a sixteen-week stint demonstrating Underwood typewriters as Miss America and the inkling that she wasn’t really the most beautiful girl in the United States, which was true—no one was. Soon after her New Movie Magazine interview, she married her childhood sweetheart, had two kids, and rarely made news again, except in articles about failed pageant winners.
Already, the media had launched a lasting practice of shooting down beauty queens, Miss Americas among them. Swimsuit pageants had sprung up all over the country, from copycat regional contests to Miss NRA. A 1924 article titled “Cursed by Their Fatal Gift of Beauty” ran down the “tragic misfortunes” high-profile winners had suffered. A 1931 piece announced, “Tragedy or Obscurity Comes to Beauty Queens; Disaster Follows Scores of Winners; None Has Made Good as Actress.” Miss America winners were dismissed directly in a 1934 article that asked, “What Has Befallen the 6 Beauties Who Won the Title ‘Miss America’?” It took three columns to explain: not much. Except, perhaps, Norma Smallwood, whose marriage