Читать книгу Looking for Miss America - Margot Mifflin - Страница 10
ОглавлениеSHE 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 Social Register resort towns like Newport, Rhode Island, it wasn’t exclusive. Popular music and Broadway-caliber theater flourished there throughout the 1920s, with Manhattan-bound shows at the Apollo, Globe, and Woods theaters introducing work by the Gershwins and showcasing stars like W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers.
The boardwalk was the focus, the beach merely the backdrop. Enormous hotels embraced the surging tide of tourists in a seaside architectural mashup: there was the Spanish-Moorish Blenheim (the first to install private baths in every room), the Regency-style Dennis, the English Renaissance Chalfonte-Haddon Hall, and the radically modern Traymore, a $4 million art deco leviathan that housed over 3,000 guests and spanned an entire city block; its deck contained a glass-bottom fish pond that served as a ceiling to a supper club called the Submarine Grill, where strategic lighting sent the silhouettes of marine life drifting lazily around the dance floor.
“Atlantic City is not a treat for the introspective,” the critic James Huneker wrote in 1915. “It is hard, glittering, unspeakably cacophonous, and it never sleeps at all . . . From the howling of some hideous talking-machine to the loud, confident blaring of the orchestra of the wooden horses and wooden rabbits in the carousel you can’t escape noise.” As a resort that offered both family and adult urban entertainment, one of its perennial challenges was squaring pleasure with propriety. The Miss America pageant would be one of its more difficult balancing acts.
From the minute the contestants stepped off the train to meet the hostess committee on September 7, 1921, teeming crowds trailed them nonstop throughout the entire two-day festival, shouting questions, cheering, and demanding that they pose for the cameras. They were escorted to luxurious suites at the oceanfront Alamac Hotel and feted at a banquet where they met the new mayor, Edward L. Bader, freshly hand-picked in an election rigged by Nucky Johnson.
They made their formal debut the next morning, arriving by sea, perched on a barge helmed by King Neptune, a bronzed, bearded patriarch wearing purple robes and a jeweled crown. He was sixty-eight-year-old Hudson Maxim, the cheerless engineer who had invented smokeless gunpowder, contracting, as a result, a pathological sensitivity to smell. (“While I am exceedingly strong and rugged,” he told reporters, “if I were placed next to someone smelling to high heaven with perfume, I’d collapse and fall in a heap.”) He brandished his trident in his right hand, having lost the other in a lab accident. Deck guns, sirens, train whistles, and church bells heralded the arrival of the sea god and his mermaid court of dancing girls.
Mayor Bader greeted them at the Million Dollar Pier, a complex of theaters, exhibition halls, and a massive ballroom, handing Neptune a silver key to the city before the king and his court boarded a rolling float, escorted, The Atlantic City Daily Press observed, by “black slaves garbed in skins”—the only African Americans to participate in Miss America festivities for the next half century. After stepping off at the stately Keith’s Theater on the uptown Garden Pier, they chatted informally with the judging panel, chaired by one of the nation’s most famous illustrators, Howard Chandler Christy.
An emboldened successor to the statuesque turn-of-the-century “Gibson Girl,” the “Christy Girl” was plucky, sporty, a little saucy—and perhaps best remembered from Christy’s army recruitment poster: GEE!! I WISH I WERE A MAN. I’D JOIN THE NAVY. She was a fashionable socialite who appeared, in his illustrations between 1898 and 1920, at leisure with boyfriends or classmates, but never at home or at work, because Christy’s ideal woman was transitional. She was liberated but limited—no longer the domestic goddess of yesteryear, but not exactly a feminist either. “Charm and a knack for inspiring manly acts are the extent of [her] personal power,” writes Martha Banta in Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History. Christy, who chaired the judging committee for the pageant’s first five years, strongly supported educating women—to make them better wives and mothers.
The other judges included, incongruously, the manager of the Ritz-Carlton hotel, the aging actor John Drew (of Barrymore dynasty fame), and two local artists who, with Christy, oversaw a range of sub-competitions, with the most significant division separating amateurs from professionals who’d worked as dancers, actresses, and models. Gorman and Virginia Lee, a stunning silent film actress from New York, were rumored favorites.
That evening, reunited with Neptune, the Inter-City Beauties mounted a waterfront platform to watch a show by a children’s vaudeville troupe called Dawson’s Dancing Dolls. Seated where the audience could gaze at them as well as at the performers, the women were publicly introduced afterward, and cheers for Gorman could be heard, The Atlantic City Daily Press marveled, “from one end of the beach to the other.”
The Atlantic City Pageant’s central event kicked off the next day with the rolling chair parade, as hundreds of flower-bedecked floats and chairs rumbled, this time, down the boardwalk, the thrumming main artery of the city. The floats advertised businesses, amusements, and civic organizations from the Rotary Club to the Press-Union Company, represented by a nine-foot-long copy of The Atlantic City Daily Press bearing a headline announcing the pageant. The neighboring town of Ventnor’s procession stretched for an entire block, with the mayor leading, flanked by the police and fire departments. The beauties rolled too, flaunting their assets in the hope of winning one of the many prizes to be awarded at the crowning ceremony that evening. Wearing a gold-spangled dress and bronze-tinted shoes, Gorman bowed and smiled at hooting fans as children threw flowers in her path.
She was already a star, having made a splash that morning in the beachfront Bathers’ Revue, where she and the others marched unsteadily along a 1,300-foot swath of sand roped off and marked with flags. Gorman wore a modest taffeta swimsuit with a tiered skirt and dark knee-high stockings, drawing cheers for her “natty beach rig” and earning points as well, since public enthusiasm counted toward contestants’ final scores. The others sported one-and two-piece suits, a few with skirts hanging to the knee, and one—Miss Pittsburgh—with pants that ended, shockingly, above mid-thigh.
They wore headbands to secure their hair in the wind, belts or scarves tied at the waist, and laced boots, flats, or low heels, posing for photos with feet splayed or even planted six inches apart, in contrast to the “pretty feet” stance (with one foot slightly forward) prescribed in later years. Likewise, the compulsive smiling that later became a pageant hallmark wasn’t yet reflexive. Photos capture the hopefuls looking variously amused, relaxed, bored, impatient, distracted, or downright stern—charmingly human, and more like the children most of them were than the women they were presumed to be.
And yet, something scandalous was happening. The New York Times reported that during the Bathers’ Revue, “the censor ban on bare knees and skin-tight bathing suits was suspended and thousands of spectators gasped as they applauded the girls, who were judged on their shapeliness and carriage, as well as beauty of face.”
The exposure of bare knees wasn’t just unusual; it was illegal. The city’s 1907 Mackintosh Law prohibited swimwear that ended more than four inches above the knee without stockings rolled up over the thigh to bridge the difference. It was enforced by “beach cops” who trudged around commanding offenders to “Roll ’em up, sister.” (Men, too, were required to cover their chests with tank tops.) A few days before the Atlantic City Pageant, a thirty-nine-year-old writer named Louise Rosine was stopped for wearing her stockings rolled down to her ankles on a blazingly hot day, then jailed for delivering a “lusty blow” to the officer who insisted she cover them.
“I most certainly will not ‘roll ’em up,’” Rosine declared. “The city has no right to tell me how I shall wear my stockings. It is none of their darn business.” She wore her swimsuit in jail—knees exposed—to protest her arrest, and announced, through a formal complaint, that “bare feminine knees” were protected by the Constitution.
Rosine hailed from Los Angeles, where regulations were looser. The question of acceptable beachwear for women was the subject of lively national discussion, and the rules varied regionally. A year earlier, on New York’s Rockaway Beach, twenty “sheriffettes” had been sworn in to enforce modesty regulations. In 1921, Hawaii enacted a law stipulating that no one over fourteen could wear a bathing suit without an “outer garment” extending to the knees. The summer before the pageant, one-piece women’s suits were banned on Long Island, along with voyeuristic “beach lizards”—“bald-headed men who come to the beach to stare.”
Bathing machines—mobile changing rooms wheeled into the surf to drop women in woolen dresses into the ocean unseen—had been retired at the turn of the century, and swimwear had since replaced streetwear at the beach. But there was still no consensus on appropriate fashion for women who now bathed—and increasingly swam—publicly. In 1907, the woman who invented the one-piece swimsuit, champion swimmer Annette Kellerman, had herself been arrested for indecency for wearing it on Revere Beach in Massachusetts. Designed for speed and intended to be paired with stockings instead of bloomers, it was braless, skirtless, and form-fitting—especially when wet, making it that much easier for this Australian powerhouse to break world records, and that much harder for Victorian holdouts to accept its contours.
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 the trope of anointed royalty: she didn’t earn her beauty—she was born with it. But the Southern queens were generally married, underscoring the moral and domestic virtues of a mature, experienced ideal womanhood that was, on one level, earned.
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 and slapstick crept into the festivities. Four New York City beauties arrived by sea plane, releasing a banner reading HELLOW, ATLANTIC CITY, HERE IS NEW YORK before jumping in the water and swimming ashore. Miss Reading (Pennsylvania) swanned around in a mask, boasting that she had a different one for every outfit she’d brought and claiming no one would see her face until the judging. Miss Indianapolis entered the boardwalk parade in a state-themed rolling chair designed to look like an ear of corn.
The beauty contest now included elimination rounds in which finalists in each section were judged against Gorman. On the pier where the contenders were evaluated in evening gowns and “afternoon dress,” The New York Times reported, the public “fairly rocked the great structure with its demonstration, in which Gorman appeared to be a favorite.” But this year, the popular vote (by cheering) was eliminated, making the judges sole arbiters. Christy had returned, joined now by a graphic designer, a photographer, three other illustrators, and the celebrated artist Norman Rockwell.
Though he had come to appraise the shapely young beauties, Rockwell was battling his own body image problem: he was a lanky six feet tall and just twenty-eight, but his incipient pot belly was a growing source of embarrassment. When he and his fellow judges took a dip in the ocean, the contestants gathered around to heckle and laugh at them in a show of attitude that would be unimaginable today. “You’re judging us?” they asked. “Look at yourselves. Old crows and bean poles.”
Rockwell blushed, sinking into the water to hide his belly, and later that day visited a corset shop where he’d seen a sign reading GENTLEMEN ACCOMMODATED. There he faced further humiliation, eliciting titters from female shoppers as he discussed his purchase with the owner, who answered his hushed questions at theatrical volume: “A corset?” “Weeeeel, pink or baby blue?” The artist wore his new corset out of the store and admired his svelte reflection in a shop window, but later, talking to a friend, he saw the man was looking down in astonishment at two pink silk laces that had slipped below the hem of his shirt. “Oh my gosh,” Rockwell exclaimed, clasping his stomach and running back to his hotel, where he peeled off the corset and threw it in the trash.
In Norman Rockwell: My Adventures as an Illustrator, Rockwell offers a rare look at the contest’s free-form early years. The judging was still informal; the women socialized with the judges over lunch as bystanders came and went. (At one point, the world heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Dempsey, on vacation in Atlantic City, strolled in and pulled up a chair.) The artist-judges, many known for their magazine illustrations of elegant women, were enlisted not just to impart their professional wisdom about female beauty, but also to confer class on the spectacle, framing it as a formal aesthetic exercise, just as Barnum had attempted with his 1854 contest. (His recruitment ad, written in expertly coded Barnumese, claimed it would inspire “a more popular taste for the fine arts, stimulate to extra exertion the genius of our Painters, and laudably gratify the public curiosity.”)
And so the judges were fed caviar, crepes, and sturgeon, plied with champagne, and assigned chauffeurs. The men, all well-known public figures, brought star power to the event: James Montgomery Flagg had created the Uncle Sam recruitment poster; Coles Phillips, a cover artist for Life magazine, was known for his sophisticated fade-away technique. They were given no guidelines for picking a winner. “Just judge it,” the Chamber of Commerce instructed, so they talked it out and agreed on someone who looked gorgeous in her evening dress. But when they saw her the next day in her bathing suit, they noticed she was knock-kneed.
One of the artists proposed assigning numerical values to facial features—eyes, noses, lips—and body parts—legs, shoulders, necks—then adding up the scores to select a winner. But the point system failed. “A girl might not have anything wrong with her features or figure and so receive a very high score,” wrote Rockwell. “But then she might not have anything right either. Individually her features were lovely, but put together they left one cold or bored. We found you can’t judge a woman’s beauty piecemeal; you have to take the whole woman at once.”
They ended up voting on impulse, choosing Mary Katherine Campbell, a hazel-eyed brunette with adorable dimples, barely sixteen years old, from Columbus, Ohio, who was hoisted on the shoulders of the mermaid court and paraded around the ballroom. The decision, said Rockwell, incited the jealous wrath of the other contestants’ disappointed mothers, including one who looked “like an enraged lizard,” according to one judge. Campbell, the daughter of a CPA, had studied French, played Bianca in a high school production of The Taming of the Shrew, enjoyed writing, drawing, tennis, golf, and fishing with her grandfather, and could cook a very fine dish of ham and cabbage. When she’d learned at school she’d been chosen as Miss Columbus because of her figure, she went home and asked, “Mother, what’s a figure?”
“That’s none of your business,” her mother snapped.
Unlike Gorman, Campbell had an athletic build and stood at a more commanding five feet six, weighing 125 pounds. Like Gorman, she wore her hair long and eschewed makeup. In one of her first interviews after winning, battling a cold and holding a thermometer, flanked by her mother and her doctor at the Waldorf Hotel, she announced, “I don’t use cosmetics.” She explained that she never had, because “I don’t need them.” It was a political statement. Wholesome girls didn’t. (The New Yorker magazine drolly reported on her subsequent appearance in a full-page ad for “a certain tonic” and quipped, “If Miss America comes to Atlantic City proclaiming that she never used cosmetics in her life and in future months subscribes her testimonial to a cosmetic ad, be lenient with her, girls. She has but a brief while to gather the berries.”)
Hair, too, was a political matter. When the judges noticed that the vast majority of Inter-City Beauties had “natural” (not bobbed) hair, they concluded that the contestants had been chosen with “loaded dice.” They certainly didn’t resemble the women dancing on the pier at the pageant ball—“piquant jazz babies, who shook the meanest kind of shoulders,” according to The Atlantic City Daily Press. A New York Times editorial agreed, lamenting that “bobbed hair disqualifies or handicaps its wearers. Our enthusiastic feminists . . . ought to have something to say about this obvious attempt to restore the double standard.”
Bobbed hair and makeup were two emblems of women’s new liberty, which the emerging hairdressing and cosmetics industries enabled. For women who danced, who swam, who played sports and rode bikes, who studied, who worked as nurses or cooks, who zipped around in automobiles with wind in their hair, bobbing was a practical choice. For women who wore the new streamlined fashions, with clean lines and drop waists, it made more aesthetic sense than billowing tresses. The celebrity soprano and actress Mary Garden, who bobbed her hair in 1921 at age forty-seven, called long hair “one of the many little shackles that women have cast aside in their passage to freedom.”
The contest’s bias toward tradition was not just a default embrace of the familiar; it was also key to the paradoxical essence of the exercise: exploiting women’s bodies while suppressing their sexual and physical power, a double standard best dramatized when a contestant was arrested on the beach for wearing the swimsuit she’d competed in the day before.
Campbell competed again the following year and won, beating more than seventy girls and women and becoming the only queen ever to be crowned twice. By 1924, the pageant was a national event, running for five frenetic days and drawing entrants from cities west of the Mississippi. Governors, mayors, and a senator attended. Even President Harding, a notorious womanizer, vacationing with his wife in Atlantic City, had formally greeted Gorman and—creepily—held her hand for a meaningful moment. But some Christian and women’s groups were already intent on axing it. The New Jersey State Federation of Women’s Clubs condemned beauty pageants as “detrimental to the morality and modesty of our young women,” inviting seventy-five organizations in nearby states to do the same. “The girls are exposed to grave dangers from unscrupulous persons,” their statement read, “and the shocking costumes which such contests encourage certainly call for protests.”
Ratifying the view that the pageant filled contestants’ heads with “vicious ideas,” the eighty-four beauties who competed in 1924 were slicker in their self-presentation, especially the four New Yorkers, who, The New York Times said, “seemed to have been well primed for the long series of poses and parades” they appeared in that week. Miss St. Louis, a crowd-pleaser that year as well as the previous one, had her dimples insured by Lloyd’s of London for $100,000 and distributed fans bearing her photo, identifying her as the “Popular Favorite.”
Because the 1923 Miss Brooklyn had turned out to be Mrs. Everett Barnes, the wife of a professional baseball player, a new rule now forbade married women from entering, but Miss Boston had missed the memo and, faced with disqualification, cried in her hotel room with her seven-month-old son while her husband, a lawyer, threatened a lawsuit, and the rule was relaxed.
The need for clearer guidelines was further highlighted when Helmar Liederman, Miss Alaska, a vivacious favorite in white—swimsuit, stockings, and jazzy tam—was exposed as a married New Yorker who had immigrated from Sweden a year earlier and spent all of three days in Juneau. One newspaper reported that she’d “made the long journey from her native town by dog sledding, hiking and automobiling.” Known as the “Arctic Venus,” she and her grifter husband had posed as a brother-sister team at other beauty contests.
Liederman made national headlines by filing a $150,000 lawsuit against the pageant for barring her from it, spelling out the damages in exquisite detail: “My worth in future beauty contests was reduced tremendously thereby. For you can deplore the fact all you wish, but marriage certainly hurts a girl who wishes to appear before the public . . . To the American public there is no romance, no zest, no mystery to the married woman. Her eyes are opened; her case is decided. She is as flat as a blown out tire, as tame as a dish of rice and milk. She is like a story read several times, all discovered and finished.” Which was exactly why married women were forbidden from competing in the first place.
The 1924 parade included thirty bands, a cohort of weary Civil War vets in faded blue uniforms, and floats propelled by great sums of money—but not, evidently, enough for eighteen-year-old Ruth Malcomson, Miss Philadelphia, who balked at the shabby—though mammoth—contraption she was expected to ride, dressed as Betsy Ross, with a court of honor packed with girls costumed as Quakers. She surveyed the fake fireplace and spinning wheel installed on a flatbed truck and broke down in hysterics, crying until a doctor was called to calm her into compliance.
Once aboard, Malcomson was hugely popular both for her looks and as a Philadelphia candidate—second only to Atlantic City nominees in whipping up local enthusiasm. She handily took three preliminary awards, but the Miss America title was harder won. The judges mulled over the five finalists for four hours on a night so hot that four women fainted. Philadelphia’s mayor lost patience and took off for a theater across the boardwalk, asking to be alerted if his girl prevailed. Finally, Campbell, a return competitor and finalist, was asked to step forward and stood quaking at the prospect of a third victory. She was stilled when a thunderous voice announced Philadelphia was the winner, and the band broke into the national anthem. Wearing a knee-length tunic and gladiator sandals, Neptune crowned Malcomson, and Campbell kissed her, whispering, “You have been my choice.”
Malcomson was five feet six, with delicate lips, melancholy blue eyes, and auburn hair, worn natural—a strategic choice, considering the previous year she’d sported a bob and lost. One reporter described her as “a startling combination of athletic prowess and femininity.” She was a sprinter, gymnast, swimmer, and baseball player who, the boys in her neighborhood said, could throw a ball “as straight as a bullet and play any position on the team.” She was sort of interested in a film career but considered herself a “home girl” who loved singing in her church choir and wanted to keep playing ball with her friends, who knew her as Rufus. She’d shrewdly worked the pageant to her own advantage—growing out her hair to win and grandstanding over the hokey float—but her ambition, it seemed, ended with the title.
Frank Deford, who wrote a 1971 history of the pageant, There She Is: The Life and Times of Miss America, deemed Malcomson, Campbell, and Gorman early prototypes of one enduring kind of winner, “generally a shy woman, with no sustaining interest in pageants or any other form of publicity; but for this one incidental burst of fame, she is never again in the public eye.” Gorman had gone home to be feted in D.C., then forgotten; Campbell worked in theater for eight months, went to college, then dropped out to care for her father after her mother’s death. Malcomson did a bit of modeling but rejected stage and movie offers; she visited hospitals and church bazaars in Philadelphia during her reign, then married and largely faded into obscurity.
But on one subject, she was no wallflower: the following year she refused to return to crown Miss America 1925 because of the influx of professional beauties using the pageant as a career stepping stone. “What chance has an ordinary girl,” she asked, “untrained, to win a contest in which girls who have been trained to make the most of their beauty are competing?” She was especially irked by two New York showgirls, one of whose employers was a pageant judge.
Confirming Malcomson’s allegations, the 1925 contestants were asked to sign a contract promising that if they won, they would appear in a film produced by Famous Players-Lasky Corporation (later Paramount Pictures). Shortly before the contest, Miss Pittsburgh backed out, declaring, “This whole thing reeks of commercialism.” But the others had no objection, least of all the winner, Fay Lanphier, Miss California, who landed a leading role in a comedy-romance called The American Venus. In a case of art imitating life, Lanphier played an aspiring beauty queen.
Though she was toasted by Will Rogers and Rudolph Valentino and appeared in a Laurel and Hardy film, Lanphier’s acting career never lifted off. By 1927 she was running a beauty parlor, and in 1934 she described herself as a housewife. Deford dubbed her a second Miss America prototype: the Hollywood dreamer—whose dreams were almost always dashed. More losers, it seemed, made it in Hollywood in the 1920s than winners: Georgia Hale (Miss Chicago 1922) costarred in Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush; Adrienne Dore (Miss Los Angeles 1925, second runner-up to Lanphier) signed a five-year contract with Universal Pictures; Joan Blondell (Miss Dallas 1926) starred in films with James Cagney.
Lanphier, nineteen, was the first winner to represent a state, the first from the West, the first to appear in a feature film, the first whose win was broadcast on live radio, and the first to wear a bob. She was also the first to be crowned with something that looked more like metal than cardboard, as the crown evolved from a headband evoking Lady Liberty to a coronet connoting royalty. A secretary from Oakland, she had lost ten pounds since placing third in 1924 and was yet the heaviest of the bunch, at 130. But her crown was quickly tarnished; later that year, in an extraordinary lapse of judgment as the one veteran pageant judge, Christy unveiled a nude sculpture called “Miss America 1925,” eliciting whispers that she had posed naked for it, which she hadn’t. That fall, tabloid rumors swirled that the pageant was fixed and Famous Players-Lasky had chosen Lanphier as their star before the competition began.
Film contracts were just one element of the creeping commercialism of 1925. Miss Chicago scandalized the crowd by posting an ad for a powder puff on her rolling chair, prompting onlookers to yell, “How much are you getting for that?” Ads for a railroad and a telegraph company also appeared. “It had never been done just that way in previous years,” The New York Times explained, “but there had been rumors that the contestants weren’t all that altruistic.” In fact, they’d never been altruistic at all: they competed to win prizes, careers, recognition, or husbands.
Recognizing that the contest was corroding Atlantic City’s image (already damaged because of open gambling in its pool halls, along with the heroic volume of alcohol it was bootlegging—nearly 40 percent of the entire nation’s supply), Mayor Bader supported terminating it. But instead of giving in to the opposition, the committee tried to bring the pageant to heel. New rules for 1926 said the beauties couldn’t be married, divorced, or widowed; couldn’t be professionals (including stage and screen performers and artists’ models); must be over sixteen and under twenty-five; and couldn’t have competed previously. Seventy-three women entered, fifteen judges were recruited, and still everything went wrong.
When the “Beauty Train” arrived from Philadelphia with its cargo of contestants, the bands played, the crowds cheered, and the welcoming party hoisted the flag, but the rope broke and Old Glory went crashing to the ground. Stormy weather prevented King Neptune (now played by comic actor DeWolf Hopper) from arriving by sea. Returning champion Lanphier suffered “a slight nervous breakdown” after the introductory formalities at City Hall, repeatedly bursting into tears at the luncheon in her honor. A New York Times headline offered an apt metaphor for the troubled mermaid pageant: RULER OF THE SEA FINDS WATER TOO UNRULY.
The judges again wrestled with their decision. (The New Yorker cracked, “It’s becoming hard now to find a beauty queen, which may or may not be a comment on the types of pulchritude at hand.”) The vote went to Norma Smallwood, Miss Tulsa, an eighteen-year-old who was part Cherokee, an oversight of yet another unspoken pageant rule that would later be formalized: contestants had to be white. In fact, the previous year, in response to Miss America’s blatant segregation, a black beauty pageant had materialized. Sponsored by the African American press and modeled on Miss America (sans swimsuits), the National Golden Brown Beauty Contest was also held in Atlantic City, where thirty-two state nominees received diamond rings and the winner, Josephine Leggett of Louisiana, was awarded a new car. The founder, Madame Mamie Hightower of the Golden Brown Chemical Company, purveyor of cosmetics for black women, appeared to be a pioneer in the spirit of Madam C. J. Walker and claimed to be promoting racial pride through her pageant. But there was something rotten at its core: Golden Brown sold skin bleach, the winners were mostly light-skinned, and Hightower turned out to be a fictional character created by the white owner of the company.
Smallwood’s Cherokee heritage wasn’t mentioned, but in a spasm of recognition that Native Americans might bear some relevance to American beauty (and with a nod, perhaps, to the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act), the pageant committee installed Okanogan beauty queen Jessie Jim in Neptune’s coronation court as a “guest of honor.” Wearing family heirloom buckskin and beads, she functioned as an ethnic analogue to the royalty on display—or merely added a note of novelty. Earlier that month, nineteen-year-old Jim had been crowned Princess America II at the second annual National Indian Congress in Spokane, Washington. Her father, Long Jim, a chief forced to leave his ancestral land on Lake Chelan in Washington for a reservation, was still fighting for his family’s return.
Back then, contestants cried with disappointment, not joy. After losing 7–8 in a face-off with Smallwood, Miss Washington D.C. wept backstage while fans cheered the winner in the ballroom. “Tears trembled on her lashes,” reported the United Press, and “her mouth jerked with the effort to smile and take the blow standing.” Smallwood, who had graduated from high school at a precocious sixteen, was a student at Oklahoma State College for Women, where she studied art. She rode horses, played hockey, swam, loved painting and music, and wanted to be an artist. She was chosen for “her beauty, intelligence and personality,” but newspaper reporters didn’t concern themselves with much beyond her marriageability and her measurements, which one syndicated article described in demented detail, from “her well molded throat, which is 12 inches in circumference,” to her “normal 33-inch bust.”
“What kind of man would suit her?” she was asked. She ventured a description, then added, poignantly, “But it’s silly to talk about. I’m a day dreamer—most girls are. But dreams hardly even come true. I guess in our hearts we know they won’t.”
While she lounged in her presidential suite at the Traymore Hotel after the crowning, Smallwood received three fraternity pins, stage and film contracts, an offer of a cook stove, and a marriage proposal from a college professor who had seen her photo in the paper. She accepted the cook stove on the logic that “cook stoves are sometimes essential.” A husband, by contrast, was “not absolutely essential just now.” She had other ideas, and they didn’t involve domesticity.
Smallwood was the first college student to win and the first to go out on a full sponsorship year as a spokesperson. Her crowning may have been a victory for traditional womanhood (she wore her hair neatly braided in buns at her ears, and the United Press called her “a type entirely apart from the bobbed haired, boyish flapper”), but she was set on getting paid in money, not marriage, and shrewdly parlayed her banquet appearances and product endorsements into a reported $60,000, which, if true, meant she earned more than Babe Ruth that year. And that wasn’t all. The next year, when she returned to crown her successor, she demanded $1,200 for her services. When her fee was rejected, she grabbed her mother and left town in a huff.
That year, the pageant committee had invited another Princess America from Spokane, Alice Garry, who substituted for Smallwood during the formalities. Raised on the Coeur D’Alene reservation, Garry had won her title in 1925. She was the great-granddaughter of Chief Spokane Garry, and sister of Joseph R. Garry, who became the first Native American state senator in Idaho. Garry carried a beaded bag, one reporter noted, “that would be the envy of any flapper,” and laughed when she was told some of the beauties didn’t swim. “What for, then,” she asked, “are they bathing beauties?” She arrived on the Beauty Train with the others and led the parade in place of Smallwood, saying she was “thrilled to the eyebrows” to serve as the guest of honor. But her role was purely ceremonial, subservient, and likely subsidiary. After the pageant, she went to Washington for more important business: meeting President Coolidge, commerce secretary Herbert Hoover, and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs.
By now, the judges were wary of setting off another firecracker like Smallwood. So in 1927, after eliminating the women wearing bobs, makeup, gold teeth, and plucked eyebrows (and measuring the contestants themselves), they settled on Lois Delander, Miss Illinois, a demure sixteen-year-old blue-eyed blonde who had won a medal for reciting Bible verses. Delander assured reporters she didn’t smoke, drink tea or coffee, or, for that matter, eat pickles. Like Smallwood, she was set on becoming an artist. She said she had no interest in performing and would not accept professional contracts because “I want to become a great artist. I want to draw, to make a name for myself, to be somebody in this world.” (The statement is remarkable in light of the few women artists who actually were “somebody in this world.” Around this time, the pioneering abstract expressionist Lee Krasner had resorted to sneaking into a classroom at the National Academy of Design reserved for men.)
A few weeks later, the United Press ran a photo spread called “Miss America is ‘a Great Help About the House,’” showing her back home in Joliet, Illinois, with her mother, “handling household weapons” like a dust rag and a vacuum cleaner. That fall, Delander hit the vaudeville circuit and performed with the young Bob Hope, but she didn’t like it, so she returned to high school, became a salesgirl, married, then vanished from public life. Hers was a classic case of pageant whiplash: she was pushed by her ballet teacher to compete, dumbfounded that she won, and confused when, at sixteen, she was expected to enter vaudeville merely because she was pretty.
Even before Delander took the crown, the Atlantic City Hotel Men’s Association was debating ending or suspending the lavishly produced pageant. Careerism was one concern: “There has been an epidemic recently,” one member explained, “of women who seek personal aggrandizement and publicity by participating in various stunts throughout the world, and the hotelmen feel that in recent years that type of women [sic] has been attracted to the pageant in ever-increasing numbers.” Another grumbled, “Many of the girls who come here turn out bad later and though it may happen in other cities, it reflects on Atlantic City.”
More significantly, the pageant attracted a low-class “Coney Island crowd” and exploited women. The latter charge was echoed by an unexpected critic: the legendary actress Mae West, whose first published play, Sex, had landed her in prison in 1927 for “corrupting the morals of youth.” That fall, her drama The Wicked Age opened in Manhattan with a live jazz band. It was, she wrote, “an exposé of the bathing beauty contests of the 1920s—the Miss Americas, crooked contests, and fixed winners.”
West starred as a flapper named Babe who pulls strings to get the pageant rigged for her. When she wins, she develops a huge ego and a devastating coke habit. The play not only blasts the corrupt national pageant industry and the businessmen who ran it but also mocks the women who submitted to it—presumably without West’s sexual self-awareness or business smarts. Lobbying for launching a seaside New Jersey beauty contest, one character declares, “The basis of any industry that needs immediate attention of the public for success today is based on the exploitation of the female form . . . everything is an excuse for a horde of almost naked women to parade up and down the stage.”
And so Miss America got shelved before anyone had ever really defined what she signified. What was American beauty in a nation of immigrants, and how did it benefit the women who won? Throughout the pageant’s history, people—specifically men—made vacuous pronouncements about it. In 1922, Samuel Gompers, the conservative head of the American Federation of Labor, proclaimed, ridiculously, that tiny, elfin, seventeen-year-old Margaret Gorman “represents the type of womanhood America needs—strong, red-blooded, able to shoulder the responsibilities of home-making and motherhood. It is in her type that the hope of the country resides.”
William G. Kreighoff, a 1926 pageant judge, imagined Miss America as “a girl of balance and mentality, who has ambitions to marry and have a flock of kids.” Illustrator Haskell Coffin, who painted Lanphier after her win, believed the queen should be a “dainty girl of temperament, delicacy, and charm—a home-loving, modest, effeminate, but healthy girl.”
Character, beauty, body type, ambition—they all figured in the equation. But what was being calculated? Was Miss America merely the prettiest woman in America or a symbol of American womanhood? And by what measure was she, or could she be, symbolic?
Despite the pageant’s patriotic trappings, from Gorman’s Lady Liberty crown to Malcomson’s Betsy Ross float, Miss America symbolized nothing beyond a few dozen men’s fantasies about women’s roles in post-suffrage society. The pageant was a marketing opportunity in need of a bigger purpose, which required articulating a national ideal against which young women could be gauged—something that proved challenging in this period of transition, which was saturated with ambivalence about women’s progress. The coin of conventional beauty, the winners learned, was women’s greatest currency; it purchased romance, often a husband, a short career, or a flicker of fame—but even that was brief. Gorman returned to watch the pageant just a few years after her win and moved through the crowds unrecognized. The best-case scenario for winners was the kind of fast fortune Smallwood squeezed out of it.
As Banner observes, although beauty contests “offered the possibility of social mobility to a few working class women, their primary purpose . . . was social discipline and not social advance.” Though some of the early Miss Americas returned to great acclaim in their hometowns (Malcomson was late to her own wedding because of swarming crowds), the title was never professionally transformative, and not all savored it. Decades after her win, Campbell said, “I got so tired of the publicity, I didn’t ever want to hear about Miss America again.” Malcomson had no regrets but much later said winning the title “never affected my life.” In 1980, Gorman, then a D.C. socialite who said life had been “extremely kind” to her, confessed, “I never cared to be Miss America. It wasn’t my idea. I am so bored by it all. I really want to forget the whole thing.”
But the contest wouldn’t be dormant for long. When it was revived in 1935, the city officials who thought it had attracted insufficiently docile women could have no idea what new insurgencies lay ahead. Likewise, little Margaret Gorman, shooting marbles in the dirt that sultry summer day in 1921, couldn’t have dreamed that the quest to define American womanhood, first played out on her body, would continue for nearly a century.
