As a cultural institution, Miss America is impossible to categorize. If it’s not a beauty contest—or not just a beauty contest—what is it? It’s neither a variety show nor an athletic event, though it has elements of each. It’s not a government-sponsored ritual, though winners are invited to meet presidents and address congressional committees. (North Dakota governor Doug Burgum was so jazzed after his state’s first Miss America was crowned in 2017 that he signed a proclamation dedicating an annual Cara Mund Day.) Early on, as a kind of middle American debutante ball, it propelled women toward marriage. Today it trains them for careers, but the lingering requirement that they be unmarried and childless makes this elimination extravaganza look a bit like The Bachelor. Now, with the swimsuit portion abolished, it’s a talent show wrapped in a scholarship program decked out as a job interview.
Any Miss America fan will trumpet the contest’s most impressive achievement: it awards $3 million in scholarships each year, more than any nonprofit scholarship organization for women. Unlike other pageants, it charges no entry fee. What goes unsaid is that 85 percent of this money is generated by the contestants themselves, who must raise a minimum amount—by soliciting donations—to compete. These women spend months or years drumming up funding, volunteering (to enhance their résumés), dieting, exercising, practicing a talent, and paying for coaches, trainers, wardrobes, and travel in the hope of winning a $10,000–$50,000 scholarship. Most are working or attending college while they prepare. Some state winners even have full-time jobs while they serve. Why do they do it? Why did they do it? Does it matter?
It does. The pageant’s history reflects the often ludicrous demands made of ambitious women and the canny ways contestants have both exploited and subverted them. It also shows how visions of ideal American womanhood have been shaped by social forces since the pageant’s inception, whether immigration and the Great Migration in the early twentieth century, wartime and postwar consumer culture in the 1940s and ’50s, civil rights and feminist activism in the 1960s and ’70s, or the late twentieth-century culture wars we’re still fighting. And though Miss America might seem like something only men could have dreamed up (which they did), it was a woman, Lenora Slaughter, who redesigned it for the most part as we know it today, running it for nearly three decades starting in the 1930s. She was a tangle of contradictions—prudish but flamboyant, independent yet socially conservative—a Southern Baptist who gussied up a seaside skin show so her “girls” could get a college degree, partly because she’d been unable to afford one herself. She hoped some of the winners would become doctors and lawyers one day, which some did. And she dearly wished they would land rich, dreamboat husbands, which many did.
Today, in our increasingly multi-ethnic, multi-gendered nation, the myth of a single paragon of authentic American womanhood has faded. Even the winners themselves have trouble saying exactly what they represent. Many explained it by telling me how well competing had served them personally or how it helps women economically or educationally, instead of expressing what the title signifies nationally.
But the pageant’s fluctuating symbolism has never meant just one thing to one group anyway. For some, it’s a cherished expression of regional pride; to others it’s harmless fun, like Barbie, not to be overthought. Still others see it as a pre-feminist pathology, forever pushing women as fetishized commodities. (“The sooner you realize you’re a product, the better,” said Miss America 1962, Maria Fletcher.) Its messy, mercurial, wacky history reflects our class anxieties and cultural biases, our faith in beauty as a virtue and in virtue as a measurable trait, and the truism, as the historian Rosalyn Baxandall put it, that “Every day in a woman’s life is a walking Miss America contest.”
SHE WAS JUST OVER FIVE feet tall, weighed 108 pounds, wore her hair long, came from a respected Georgetown family, and was fifteen years old when she was named Miss Washington D.C. in August 1921. Her photo had been chosen from a thousand submitted to the Washington Herald’s local beauty contest, which meant she would enjoy a paid trip to Atlantic City to compete in a sensational new pageant. When two Herald reporters set out in the sweltering summer heat to interview her, they found Margaret Gorman on her knees in a playground, shooting marbles in the dirt.
Gorman and nine other finalists had appeared in a preliminary competition at the Italian Garden of the Washington Arts Club where they walked for six judges and fielded questions about their backgrounds and ambitions. They were evaluated for “real rather than artificial beauty,” which disqualified anyone wearing conspicuous makeup. Gorman later said she couldn’t recall much about her win; her mind was clouded because she was “madly in love” for the first time. She spent the next week getting squired around the city and attending civic dinners, capped with a visit to the White House, where she met President Warren G. Harding.
Then the real competition began. A few weeks later, Gorman, now sixteen, and seven other contestants from Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., and New Jersey boarded a train to Atlantic City in advance of a two-day festival called the Fall Frolic, created a year earlier to stretch the summer tourism season into the balmy weeks of early fall. They would compete in the first Inter-City Beauty Contest—the nucleus of the Miss America pageant.
The inaugural 1920 Frolic, the brainchild of a hotelier named H. Conrad Eckholm and organized by Atlantic City’s Business Men’s League, set the stage for pageants to come. It opened with an hour-long parade featuring marching bands and 350 wheeled wicker “rolling chairs” gliding down Atlantic Avenue, pushed by men, occupied by “beauty maids,” and led by a single beauty named Ernestine Cremona, a proto-Miss America in white robes, personifying peace. Later, at the seaside Bathers’ Revue, men, women, and babies in swimsuits competed for prizes. That night revelers danced by moonlight at a costume ball on Steel Pier, the ocean roaring beneath their feet.
Banking on the beauty contest drawing bigger crowds to the Frolic in its second year, the Chamber of Commerce hoped to outdo even nearby Asbury Park’s supremely successful annual baby parade—where, as it happened, the mothers often attracted more interest than the babies. The pageant committee advertised for contestants through area newspapers, including the Herald, asking the staff to choose a winner and fund her wardrobe in exchange for free publicity and a boost in circulation. Breathless press releases spurred interest in the event, promising—falsely—that “thousands of the most beautiful girls in the land, including stage stars and movie queens,” would compete. And so their first official beauty competition opened at the second Frolic, now called the Atlantic City Pageant or the Fall Pageant, in 1921.
Known as “Philadelphia’s playground,” Atlantic City was on its way to becoming a national resort. Situated on a barrier island linked to the mainland by a network of train lines, the city was powered, in the early years of Prohibition, by mobster Enoch (“Nucky”) Johnson, who ensured that liquor flowed openly in the city he controlled. It was built on the backs of local African Americans who were banned from enjoying the very beach and hotel culture their labor made possible. In fact, as Bryant Simon writes in Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America, this “public performance of racial dominance” helped make Atlantic City one of the most popular vacation spots in the country. The city’s black residents, many of whom had moved north for work at the start of the Great Migration, comprised 25 percent of its population, yet were confined to the cramped Northside neighborhood and restricted to segregated schools, nightclubs, churches, and a single beach.
One of the nation’s first twenty-four-hour cities, Atlantic City had evolved, by the turn of the century, into an East Coast Avalon where Victorian decorum could be discarded, men and women could mingle freely in public, and the boardwalk promised amusements from the first Ferris wheel to freak shows, fortune tellers, and baby incubators. It was classier than Coney Island and glitzier than Cape May, but unlike