We call her a scholar.” Many of the women who have won the pageant in the last decade have been college graduates hoping to finance an education in law, medicine, or another professional field. A recent ad for the organization featured a young woman in a strapless dress holding a tiara, looking up at the words: “Some people call her a beauty queen. An oft-cited fact about the Miss America Organization is that it is the top scholarship provider for young women, doling out more than forty million dollars each year. The women who compete must perform a talent and have a social platform that they would use their title to promote. The expectations for contestants have changed. In the twenties and thirties, Miss America winners exemplified conservative definitions of femininity: docile, unassuming, and chaste. Women had won the right to vote just the year before. Girls like Gorman represented an idea of American morality expected to hold the nation together after World War I in the age of Jay Gatsby, jazz, and the flapper’s loosening sexuality. That first year, fifteen-year-old Margaret Gorman was crowned the winner because the judges deemed her capable of handling the responsibilities of motherhood. The Miss America pageant began in 1921 as an Atlantic City summer resort festival. Maybe pageants offered more ways to be beautiful than I’d realized. And I would love for everybody to be able to think about what fen-fenim-feminism means for him or her and to be able to express that.” I pass the microphone back to West and exit the stage.Ī few weeks earlier, I would have answered West’s question very differently: “Make society stop objectifying women through institutions like beauty pageants.” But I was also curious about their widespread allure, to the point of entering a pageant myself: the 2013 Connecticut USA Extravaganza Pageant in New Haven. “I think that that’s sort of a loaded word, umm, and unfortunately, it usually has negative connotations. “I think I would want everyone to be able to define feminism for him or herself,” I begin, my voice trembling. “If you could change one thing about society’s attitude toward women, what would it be?” West asks, passing me the microphone. And yet, I have a strange feeling-novel to me-that from where the judges and audience are sitting, I look beautiful, enigmatic, older, even seductive.Īfter completing my circuit, I stop in front of the pageant’s creator and emcee, Logan West.
I’m wearing more eye makeup than I ever have in my life. An iridescent mother-of-pearl necklace hangs around my neck. My legs jitter as I walk, even though my sparkly heels are only two inches high. When I pose for the first time, stiffly shifting my weight leftward, everybody claps. I try to smile at the three female judges seated at a table below me and at the audience in rows of school cafeteria chairs beyond, but it’s the mechanical smile of a news anchor. My legs snap into position, and I begin my walk into the bright light: one and a half large circles around the stage, just as I practiced this morning. I look down at the number pinned to my dress. “Contestant number 19.” The announcer’s amplified voice reverberates through the auditorium.
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