P. T. Barnum lowered the bar in 1854 by opening a beauty competition to the masses in what the historian Lois W. Banner has called “the first modern beauty contest.” Submitting oneself, in person, to be inspected and evaluated by men was different from being chosen as a beauty by a community—and invited unsavory associations. When Barnum’s contest drew entrants “of questionable reputation,” he changed the format so that they could avoid appearing in person by sending daguerreotypes from which their portraits would be painted and hung in a gallery, where visitors could vote on them. It was an ingenious repackaging of pop culture as high art.
But the first in-person beauty pageant, as we know it, preceded Miss America by four decades. The 1880 Miss United States contest at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, was inspired by the same marketing logic that drove Atlantic City businessmen to launch their competition. The judging, based on face, feet, hands, hair, poise, and “costume” (an expensive gown), lasted a week, and the panel consisted of a Delaware Supreme Court judge, a French diplomat, and—go figure—Thomas Edison. The winner, Myrtle Meriwether of Pennsylvania, nearly fainted when she was named “the most beautiful unmarried woman in our nation.” She won a gilded plaque and a bridal trousseau. But she was less euphoric the following day, when she faced a conundrum common to so many pageant hopefuls who spend to win: she had to sell her brocade dress to pay for her ticket home, where she was promptly forgotten. The event, the organizers concluded, hadn’t been lucrative enough to repeat.
The outstanding success of Atlantic City’s first contest hinged on three factors: the terrific growth and class diversity of its resort culture (train travel allowed for day-trippers on a budget, boarding houses served middle-class vacationers, and the wealthy summered in lavish hotels); the relaxation of Victorian fashion restrictions, which led to the acceptance of women’s public swimming; and the birth of the “bathing beauty,” which filmmaker Mack Sennett popularized in his slapstick comedies beginning in 1915.
As Banner explains, Sennett’s Keystone Kops films both exploited the newly visible female body and defused its sexual dangers by presenting it in comical situations. (Police officers at the early Miss America contests even dressed as Keystone Kops.) Sennett claimed to have invented the bathing beauty. So, more legitimately, did Annette Kellerman, who made his films possible by creating the swimsuit in which they cavorted, and whose fame as a swimmer led to a successful vaudeville and silent film career in which her (sometimes fully naked) physique was the focus. Kellerman’s celebration of the “supple body, well groomed and well dressed,” was consonant with the pageant’s; her 1918 book Physical Beauty: How to Keep It offered beauty advice and promoted body-positivity—both for women’s own self-esteem and as a means of getting and keeping a husband. (Swimming, she noted, expanded the chest.)
There was also an unspoken motivation for a national beauty competition: eugenics. The momentum of the American eugenics movement of the early twentieth century had inspired Better Baby contests, which applied the principles of evaluating livestock to children and led to Fitter Family contests nationally, the first of which was held at the 1920 Kansas State Fair. Competing clans were graded on their physical and psychological health and—significantly—heredity, in the name of “better breeding” and building larger families as urbanization shrank American farm communities and immigration complexified national idenity. Miss America concentrated the focus: what better way to gauge national fitness than through a contest measuring the quality of the breeders themselves—healthy, young unmarried white women? In the early years, contestants were even introduced with recitations of their genealogical history and “breeding,” tracing their pedigree back for generations.
Beauty contests shored up gender difference not just in response to immigration and urbanization, but also to accommodate changing visions of masculinity in the face of women’s progress. As historian George Chauncey explains, in the early nineteenth century, adult masculinity was defined in opposition to boys. Late in the century, as women gained power and “the boundaries between men’s and women’s spheres seemed to blur, many men also tried to reinforce those boundaries by reconstructing their bodies in ways that would heighten their physical differences from women.” Bodybuilding and prizefighting, for example, allowed them to flex the muscle they felt they were losing in other aspects of their lives. Pageantry did the opposite, foregrounding femininity and exalting potential wives and mothers.
The introduction of the bathing suit into a beauty contest, however, required a delicate dance of decorum that the Miss America pageant never perfected, though it tried for nearly 100 years. In the 1920s, this meant harnessing the physical freedom of the New Woman while shrouding her in Victorian propriety and presenting her as the girl next door. Before bathing beauty contests, the only cultural precedent for the live, public display of semi-nude women was the burlesque show, from which the pageant borrowed its unison formation and (later) its runway—a feature the famous Minsky brothers added to their burlesque performances in the late 1910s so that as the women moved, howling audiences could “look right up their legs.” The Minskys also claimed credit for staging the first striptease in 1917.
Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. uplifted burlesque through his Ziegfeld Follies (whose fifteenth season opened in Atlantic City in the summer of 1921) by wrapping his dancers in the European sophistication of the Folies Bergère and ensuring that they titillated without transgressing. Like the Miss America contestants, they were native born, ensuring an ethno-feminine ideal in the wake of the third wave of immigration, which had delivered some 20 million Europeans to American shores before and after the turn of the century.
While women forged ahead in other corners of culture, the pageant held fast to the past, redressing a simmering anxiety about newly empowered women and their impact. Women had worked during World War I, had won the vote, had entered business and politics; by 1921, thirty-three women were serving in state legislatures. The first birth control clinic in the U.S. had opened in Brooklyn in 1916—a huge step for women’s self-determination. A year later, women were admitted as medical students at Columbia University. By 1920, female lawyers could practice in every state.
But women weren’t just seizing opportunities previously denied them. They were also claiming cultural space historically identified with men: Bessie Coleman, bypassing obstacles preventing women and African Americans from getting pilot’s licenses, trained in France and caused a media sensation when she returned with her license to launch a career as a stunt pilot in the 1920s. In 1921, Edith Wharton became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for the Novel—one of five women to claim the award during that decade. Film stars like Clara Bow and Colleen Moore were playing characters who not only enjoyed independence, but also expressed erotic desire, as did blues singers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. As the film historian Gaylyn Studlar writes, in “actively seeking sexual pleasure, American women of the 1920s were widely believed to be usurping a male prerogative more powerful and precious than the vote.” By rewarding girlish women who posed no threat to men, the pageant pushed back.
THE TITLE “MISS AMERICA” WASN’T formally used until 1922, when Gorman returned to compete again but could no longer be identified as Miss Washington D.C. That year, newspapers in every Eastern city were invited to send contestants, drawing fifty-eight—ten from New York alone. The 1921 Atlantic City Pageant had been such a success—for the city, the railroad, the hotels, the sponsoring newspapers, and the local merchants—that the budget was nearly doubled in 1922 and the event was extended to three days, with the beauty contest as its centerpiece.
The weekend opened with screaming sirens and booming cannons as Neptune emerged, once again, with his court from the sea, where Gorman met him. He bowed to her as a new crop of mermaids, all Atlantic City locals, shimmied behind him, tossing scentless flowers as he sniffed the air to safeguard against hazardous rogue perfumes. Gorman, designated Queen of the Pageant, wore a flimsy Lady Liberty crown studded with fake pearls, a silver and green gown reflecting the colors of the sea, and a flag as her coronation robe; its stripes rippled in the wind when she extended her arms to her cheering fans.
That year, a bit of showmanship