The Miss America pageant has been shaping beauty ideals ever since it first began in The GIF and timelines created by the website highlights just how unrealistic this image of the "ideal" body for the American woman really is.
The educational website found that while the average woman in the U. This information is more relevant than ever with the Miss America Pageant taking place this Sunday night. Although the pageant started in , the first winner wasn't crowned until which explains why the images begin in The GIF above shows that the shift towards a dramatically thinner body type didn't happen until the late '90s, early '00s.
The chart shows that in the average BMI of the American woman was roughly about As PsychGuides points out, the pageant describes Miss America as a woman who "represents the highest ideals," the pageant's website reads. Debra Barnes. Judith Ford. Pam Eldred. Phyllis George. Laurel Lea Schaefer. Terry Meeuwsen. Rebecca King. Shirley Cothran.
Tawny Godin. Dorothy Benham. Susan Perkins. Kylene Barker. Cheryl Prewitt. Susan Powell. Elizabeth Ward. Debra Maffett. Vanessa Williams. Suzette Charles. Sharlene Wells. Susan Akin. Kellye Cash. Kaye Lani Rae Rafko. Gretchen Carlson. Debbye Turner. Marjorie Vincent. Carolyn Sapp. Leanza Cornett. Boys learned how to watch girls, and girls learned how to watch boys watching girls.
I remember tuning in to the pageant during the eighties with my father, who wielded the remote with ceremonious male authority. More than the seahorsey fonts and the sherbet gowns, it was his attachment to the ritual that fostered mine. Despite an ordinance that forbade women to bare their knees on the beach, the contestants were required to wear bathing suits, establishing a confusing precedent of control and empowerment.
At the end of the festival, five male judges pronounced Margaret Gorman the most beautiful girl in America. At sixteen years old and just over five feet tall, Gorman was the smallest Miss America ever.
The inaugural pageant took place almost exactly one year after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote. Mostly, white women got to exercise it. Dramatic pageantry, Mifflin notes, had been instrumental in the suffragist movement, in the form of silk sashes and theatrical tableaux.
Is it any surprise that, just as women won the vote, a repurposed form of pageantry emerged, out of the deep blue, to insure that they were voted upon? Throughout the twenties, the pageant was a hustle.
As its renown grew, the organizers angled for respectability, but the contest kept being thwarted by entrants who bent the rules with a madcap, Miss Hannigan-like period energy.
In the thirties, the pageant hired Lenora Slaughter, of the St. Petersburg, Florida, chamber of commerce, to spiff up the program. Winner absconds with her chauffeur on the night of her coronation? Assign a society matron to escort each contestant twenty-four hours a day.
Palomino nearly falls into the orchestra pit? No more animals in the talent competition. Miss America positions itself as a meritocratic institution—a congress of self-improving strivers pulling themselves up by their spaghetti straps. Its quasi-legislative structure, with each state and the District of Columbia sending a delegate, implies that Miss America not only reigns over the nation but also represents it.
In the course of a century, the pageant has had one Native American winner, in , and one Latina winner, who was born in Paraguay to Mormon missionaries; it has never had a Muslim, trans, or openly gay winner. For newly arrived Europeans, the contest served as a portal to whiteness, turning immigrants into Americans.
Myerson refused and won the contest, becoming the first and only Jewish Miss America. Even in the sixties, as consciousnesses levitated across the country, the pageant remained a bastion of conservatism. As feminists protested on the boardwalk, the first Miss Black America was being crowned at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, four blocks away. The contest, sponsored by the regional N.
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