Historian Blain Roberts notes the dissonance between regulation and celebration of the swimsuit in this period. “As soon as the smaller swimsuit appeared,” she writes in Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women, “beach censors took to the sands to punish women for baring too much skin and the bathing beauty review emerged to reward the very same phenomenon.”
The local press published fiery letters to the mayor about the decision to allow the suits at the Bathers’ Revue. A doctor defended it with the revelation that swimming with stockings is harder than swimming without them. Two sixteen-year-olds, assuring readers they were “not bold girls,” explained that a “good swimmer cannot possibly swim with skirts dangling around her knees.” Church stalwarts took up the opposition, along with older members of the newfound League of Women Voters, who passed a resolution supporting knee-length skirts and stockings on the odd logic that relaxing the rules would cause a rift between younger and older “newly enfranchised” women. They worried that “such a division of sentiment . . . might seriously affect [their] political fortunes.”
The pageant committee, uncertain about how best to display the newly liberated female body, did what they would do in the face of so many controversies that erupted over the next century: they missed the point entirely. The popular “Annette Kellerman” one-piece—which represented women’s new fashion freedom and even encouraged athleticism—would be tolerated, but only for the length of the pageant, to showcase the beauty of the female form. The swimsuit had no practical relevance to women’s physical activity from the pageant’s inception to the day it was retired in 2018. But women who wore the new suits surely felt a sense of freedom, even exhilaration, in sashaying down the beach freed from the heavy remnants of nineteenth-century fashion. The New York Times said as much, reporting that some liked them simply “because they regard them as rather frisky.”
The Atlantic City Daily Press weighed in approvingly—and salaciously: “The Bathers’ Revue was remarkable for the uncensored costumes. One-piece bathing suits were the rule rather than the exception. Nude limbs were in evidence everywhere—and not a guardian of the law molested the fair sea nymphs who pranced about the sands. Every type of beauty was on exhibition, shown to its advantage in the type of sea togs permitted.” But just for one day. The Daily Press noted that the spectacle caused the lifeguards, who normally doubled as beach censors, to “blink, gasp—and then remember they were officially blind until midnight.”
The beauties weren’t the only ones who suited up to compete. There were contests for organizations like the American Red Cross and the Elks, for children and for men. And everyone wore a swimsuit, from firemen (in red one-pieces) to policemen (in blue) to sullen King Neptune, who shed his robes and surrendered to the sun atop a makeshift throne.
That night, Steel Pier’s ballroom was packed with 2,000 fans awaiting the announcement of the winner. The ceremony ran long, partly because so many prizes were handed out, but mainly because of Margee Gorman. She won both the amateur Bathers’ Revue and the Inter-City Beauty Contest, the two most important competitions, sending the crowds into such a frenzy of interruptive cheering, even while other prizes were being presented, that the host was repeatedly forced to walk her out and reintroduce her to quiet her fans.
Gorman was voted the most beautiful girl in America. She took home the Golden Mermaid trophy, a gilded mermaid lounging on a teakwood base lined with seashells, and a two-foot-tall silver “beauty urn” donated by Annette Kellerman herself. Beyond that, she won a vague promise: “Winner of [the] GRAND PRIZE will undoubtedly become nationally famous, as great publicity will be given the winner and her likeness will be used on the Bathing Revue Poster of 1922.” There was no crown; this winner was a mermaid, not a queen, and she would be named Miss America later, retroactively. The pageant ended in the wee hours, when King Neptune, having delivered his beauty to the Jersey Shore, returned to the sea. Gorman’s entire trip had cost her just thirty-five cents: the price of a collect telegram from a fan that read, “Congratulations. Don’t get stuck up.”
AT FIVE FEET ONE, GORMAN would stand as the smallest Miss America in the pageant’s history. She was girlish, with slim hips and ringlets, prompting comparisons to silent movie darling Mary Pickford, “America’s Sweetheart.” As the historian Kimberly A. Hamlin writes, the judges “were not interested in celebrating the new, emancipated women of the 1920s, but in promoting images of the girls of yesterday: small, childlike, subservient, and malleable.”
Indeed, Gorman was less significant, in many ways, for what she was than for what she wasn’t. She wasn’t an adult, for starters, so the question of how her sexuality informed her beauty complicated the judging. “She was very attractive for a kid,” said Harry God-shall, a founding board member. Gorman later described herself as “a little schoolgirl,” and newspapers called her “the little Washington beauty” or “little Margaret Gorman.” Older, worldlier women competed in the less hyped professional category, while lovable ingénues dominated the pageant proper for years to come. They didn’t wear the scarlet lipstick, heavy eyeliner, plucked eyebrows, or boyish bob of the Jazz Age. In fact, for years after Gorman won, even when flapper fashion had landed in the bible of middlebrow apparel—the Sears catalog—newspapers unfailingly noted which contestants wore their hair bobbed. They were never the winners.
Gorman was not quite a woman, and she was decidedly not a “New Woman,” by then a popular term for the enfranchised, independent, post-Victorian woman of the modern age. Nor was she a feminist—a term of choice, borrowed from the French feministe, for women whose political concerns transcended the single issue of suffrage. She was not a suffragette, though the sash she wore, bearing her city’s name, suggested otherwise.
The sashes weren’t particular to Miss America (Southern girls had worn state-specific sashes in monument-dedication ceremonies as early as 1908), but they were highly symbolic at that historic moment: suffragettes, for whom pageantry was a powerful vehicle for activism, had worn them in marches beginning with the historic 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington. (“Through pageantry,” wrote Hazel MacKaye, the feminist who pioneered the sashes as a tool of the cause, “we women can set forth our ideals and aspirations more graphically than any other way.”) The sashes conveyed solidarity with the National Women’s Party through their colors (purple, white, and gold) and their motto, “Votes for Women.” By contrast, the beauty pageant sashes expressed local affiliation and individual aspiration. This contest was not about women. It was about Woman.
It was also part of a growing reactionary impulse. In the 1920s, as Susan Faludi explains in Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, a counterassault on feminism was already under way: “The media maligned suffragists; magazine writers advised that feminism was ‘destructive of woman’s happiness’; popular novels attacked ‘career women’; clergymen railed against ‘the evils of woman’s revolt’; scholars charged feminism with fueling divorce and infertility; and doctors claimed that birth control was causing ‘an increase in insanity, tuberculosis, Bright’s disease, diabetes, and cancer.’” Miss America championed sweet, traditional femininity just when women could see beyond husband-hunting as their only down payment on a future.
Beauty pageants had always reinforced traditional gender roles. In the United States, they dated back to colonial-era adaptations of medieval rituals and May Day celebrations, which endured into the early twentieth century, affirming both women’s fertility and community regeneration. Tournaments that included recreations of medieval jousts, where winners chose a queen, were especially popular in the South before the Civil War, using