[September 7-8 marks the 100th anniversary of the first Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy histories and stories of pageants!]
On two
interesting and important contexts for that 1921 origin point.
The first Miss America pageant
(not yet known by that name, which was first used the following year) was
really a combination of a few distinct events. More than 1500 women submitted
photographic entries for a new contest, the Inter-City Beauty Contest, which
promised to reward one finalist with the new “Golden Mermaid” award. But that
was in fact a later stage in the process—the winner among the six Inter-City
contest finalists, 16 year-old Margaret
Gorman of Washington, DC, then competed against two winners from a simultaneous
and longstanding Atlantic City contest, the Bather’s
Revue: the “amateur winner,” Kathyrn Gearon
of Camden; and the “professional beauty,” silent film actress Virginia Lee. Gorman
was once again selected as the winner and awarded the Golden Mermaid, and would
come back for the 1922 and 1923 pageants, identified in 1922 as “Miss America”
which was the first time the phrase was used for the pageant and its winner
(although it was still also known as the Inter-City Beauty Contest for
many years thereafter).
The presence of “professional”
as well as “amateur” contestants and categories in this first pageant
importantly complicates longstanding (and I would argue still ongoing) narratives
of beauty pageants as entirely amateur in nature. As
with the Olympics, there’s a mythos around the image
of all competitors as amateurs, one that masks the fundamentally
profit-based nature of the event (on which more in the next paragraph). And as
with the Olympic Games, the truth is that there has always been a spectrum of
experiences and identities present at these events, from genuinely youthful and
amateur participants like Gorman (who herself became at least semi-professional
through her returns to the subsequent two pageants) through many variations of
models, actresses, and other professional categories. Some of the scandals
around particular pageant participants (such as Vanessa Williams, about whom I’ll
have a lot more to say tomorrow) would dissipate if we did away with the mythic
vision of all-amateur pageants, a vision which in any case also and troublingly
seeks to distinguish between types of contestants and their motivations.
Moreover,
whatever the motivations of individual contestants, the motivations behind this
new 1921 pageant were clear and overt. Mass
leisure and entertainment spots like Atlantic City were still relatively
new in the early 20th century, and were finding themselves
challenged to draw audiences at particular times, including for example the
period after Labor Day. So the Inter-City Beauty Contest was created
by the Businessmen’s League of Atlantic City and scheduled for this precise
moment—and the longstanding Bather’s Revue pushed back from its regular summer
spot—in order to keep tourists in and drew new ones to Atlantic City during
that crucial post-Labor Day period. Even more strikingly, the contest and its
winner were connected to broader narratives of American work and ideals, as illustrated
by labor leader Samuel
Gompers’ quote in the New York Times
about Gorman:
“She represents the type of
womanhood America needs—strong, red-blooded, able to shoulder the
responsibilities of homemaking and motherhood. It is in her type that the hope
of the country rests.” Not sure I need to say much more about the
multiple layers of AmericanStudies contexts present in that quote, and thus
represented in this first Miss America pageant.
Next
PageantStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Pageant histories, stories, or contexts you’d share?
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