Who’s the symbol of all we possess.
“A Toast to Miss America,” pageant theme song, 1949
WHO IS MISS AMERICA? SHE’S the kind of girl who enters a bar and orders an orange juice “just loud enough for everyone to hear her,” said Yolande Betbeze, Miss America 1951. “She’s a prom queen who wants to become the Statue of Liberty,” wrote the critic Richard Corliss. She’s “the body of the state, and the country is in her eyes,” gushed the journalist and pageant judge Frank Deford. But no—she’s “Miss Whatever She Wants to Be,” Miss America’s mission statement declares.
She was born in 1921, a “beauty maid” wearing a sash and a swimsuit in a parade in Atlantic City, conspicuously unlike those other parades, where women in sashes marched for suffrage until they got it in 1920. Sometimes she was the girl next door; sometimes she was America’s ideal woman. A few Miss Americas became household names: the actresses Mary Ann Mobley and Lee Meriwether, the journalists Phyllis George and Gretchen Carlson, the singer Vanessa Williams—the most famous and beloved of all, despite getting dethroned in 1984. One Miss America regretted her win: Bette Cooper skipped town the night of her 1937 crowning, whisked off into the night by her dashing pageant chauffeur, leaving the mystified press staring at her empty throne the next day, awaiting her press conference. She just wanted to finish high school.
Looking for Miss America unzips the story of the pageant: an underexplored, curious, contradictory, ever-changing, entertaining piece of women’s history. It spotlights the women who made it an inadvertent index of feminist progress, from Betbeze, who flatly refused to wear a swimsuit in public during her reign (so angering a key sponsor that it dropped Miss America and started Miss USA), to Erin O’Flaherty, the first openly lesbian contestant in 2017. It examines the controversies the pageant has ignited, the racial bias it has enabled, and the social mobility it has offered low-income winners.
Considering that neither a Muslim nor a woman of Hispanic descent has ever won, it’s safe to say that Miss America does not represent America. But the pageant crystallizes many distinctly American impulses: a dual fixation on women’s virtue and sexuality, a baffling fascination with royalty (is there anything less American than a crown?), the belief that education and intellect can be demonstrated in a twenty-second interview, and the unshakable conviction that young women are the best women and it’s their duty to entertain you.
The state and national winners, judges, and pageant officials I interviewed for Looking for Miss America were open about the organization’s weaknesses and persuasive about its benefits, from life-changing college scholarships and sponsorship jackpots to career-boosting professional training and networking connections. (That said, the title can also backfire. In an editorial for Refinery29, Crystal Lee, first runner-up to Miss America in 2014, said the “stigma of pageantry” hurt her professionally and that her company told her it “diminished my credentials as a businesswoman.”) Though the number of contestants in its nationwide competitions has shrunk to about 4,000—down from 80,000 in the 1980s—the Miss America community is still a buzzing subculture. The network of volunteers who sustain local and state pageants includes contestants, “formers,” friends, and families. Even state pageant judges and directors are unpaid. It’s most vibrant in the South, where winners are in the greatest demand and pageants are well funded.
In its first half century, Miss America channeled the aspirations of women whose professional and economic opportunities were so limited that beauty was an attractive and potentially powerful tool of advancement. Their options broadened with feminism’s second wave, which announced its arrival on September 7, 1968, the day activists protested the pageant’s sexism on the Atlantic City boardwalk outside, then dropped a banner from a balcony inside demanding WOMEN’S LIBERATION!, releasing “women’s lib” into the American lexicon.
Since then, the pageant has been in constant dialogue with feminism, though rarely in step with it. Most of the pageant people I interviewed for this book referred to contestants as “girls,” evoking Playboy bunnies or cheerleaders, not the super-achievers touted in the organization’s mission statement. And though the Miss America Organization promotes women’s empowerment and vows to prepare them for professional success, the honorific “Miss” died out in the workplace decades ago.
Still, despite Miss America’s socially conservative roots, many contestants consider themselves feminists (though most don’t say this publicly, one state board chair confided, because they fear the word’s negative connotations might be a turnoff for some fans). Broadway producer Eric Cornell, a veteran state pageant judge, is often asked, with a note of incredulity, why he supports Miss America. “I’m a huge feminist,” he says, “and I do really think giving visibility to women who are pursuing higher education and professional careers is important.” He believes that even if they never win state or national titles, Miss America contestants end up better off financially because of the prize money and professional training they get from competing.
Though there are “formers” whose pretty selfies and peppy Instagram bromides fulfill age-old beauty queen clichés, some winners have been iconoclasts, if not full-on rebels. Starting in the 1960s, Betbeze publicly decried the pageant’s racism, boycotting the event until Vanessa Williams was crowned the first black Miss America in 1983. Miss Montana Kathy Huppe quit in 1970 after being told to muzzle her anti-war views. She posed for Life magazine in her gown and crown, a fist raised in defiance. Miss America 1998 Kate Shindle’s AIDS activism brought her a standing ovation when she addressed the 1998 International AIDS Conference. Marilyn Van Derbur, Miss America 1958, went public with her family history of incest and became a proto-#MeToo activist in the 1990s. Now in her eighties, she’s still fiercely advocating for abuse survivors. And there are symbolic subversions: though Gabriela Taveras, a runner-up in 2018, was advised to tamp down her Spanish accent during her introduction, she rolled the r’s in her name, sending a thrill of pride and a flurry of Snapchat videos through her hometown of Lawrence, Massachusetts.
The pageant’s history encompasses not just the women who won or lost, but also those who were excluded, like the Native American beauty queens invited to join Miss America’s court in the 1920s, standing as “guests of honor” in buckskin and beads, sidekicks to America’s queen. Asian Americans, African Americans, and Native Americans staged their own pageants before and after Miss America barred them through its notorious Rule Seven, formalized in the 1940s, requiring contestants to be “in good health and of the white race.” As chapter 1 confirms, the whiff of eugenics wasn’t coincidental.
Likewise, Miss America’s legacy belongs not just to its queens, but to the Americans they presume to represent as “ambassadors.” It’s a gauge of dominant regional and national values. Miss America 1960, Lynda Lee Mead of Mississippi, for example, was the face of the state with the highest number of lynchings in America, including one just five months before her crowning. At a homecoming lunch in Jackson that year, she affirmed her state pride by telling the press she wouldn’t apologize for Mississippi. “We have nothing to apologize for,” she said. Nina Davuluri’s historic 2013 win as the first Indian American Miss America was both a triumph of diversity and an alarming barometer of American bigotry and cultural illiteracy: in a flood of social media vitriol, she was denounced as an Arab and a terrorist. But the pageant has also had a galvanic effect. When Bess Myerson was crowned the first (and only) Jewish Miss America weeks after the end of World War II, just as the scale and horrors of the Holocaust were fully registering, she spotted triumphant Jews in the audience shouting “Mazel tov!” and turning to embrace one another.
Whether we grew up loving its sparkle and spectacle or hate-watching it as a rhinestone relic, the pageant has wormed its way into our national subconscious. Its mythology runs through popular culture, from Mae West’s withering 1927 Miss America teardown The Wicked Age, which she wrote and starred in, to the uproarious 1999 pageant mockumentary Drop Dead Gorgeous. In Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, we meet the only Miss America contestant in literature who speaks—loudly and sympathetically—for herself. Pop stars from the Beach Boys to Leikeli47 have exalted and reviled Miss