When the Miss America pageant debuted in September 1921, few Americans had ever heard of a beauty pageant, much less witnessed one. To most Americans, women wearing sashes in pageants signified one thing: the suffrage movement, which had just succeeded in getting the 19th Amendment ratified in August 1920. After the immediate success of that first Miss America Pageant, these two versions of female pageantry competed for prominence in the American imagination — which version of women wearing sashes would be remembered and incorporated into our national narrative? The suffragist, who fought for equal citizenship, or Miss America, who received male approval for conforming to an outworn, constrictive ideal?
For the past 100 years, the Miss America pageant’s version of ideal womanhood has won out. The beauty pageant first became popular as a backlash against the suffragists’ pageants and, in many ways, against the suffragists themselves. And even though the pageant has tried to rebrand itself as a vehicle for female empowerment, even describing its history as emblematic of positive changing roles for women, this is not the case.
Today, as the revised 2020 pageant airs on the eve of the suffrage centennial, it is time to reclaim the legacy of the suffragists and to retire the symbol of Miss America.
Throughout the 1910s, suffragists skillfully staged elaborate pageants to showcase women’s contributions to America (though by women, they generally meant white women) and to argue that granting women the vote would be the logical next step in the progress of democracy. Women wore sashes labeled with character traits, such as “courage”; professional identities, including “writer” or “homemaker”; and political goals, “Votes for Women.” Suffrage pageants centered women in American civic life, and suffragists’ sashes symbolized the increasingly meaningful role women wanted to play as voters, as policymakers and even as officeholders.
The events held in conjunction with the March 1913 inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson broadcast these ideals to the nation. Suffrage leaders recruited famed pageant designer Hazel MacKaye to create the tableaux enacted on the steps of the Treasury Building. As MacKaye explained, “Through pageantry, we women can set forth our ideals and aspirations more graphically than in any other way.” Moreover, she insisted that “for the purpose of propaganda, a pageant can hardly be surpassed.”
Thanks to the pageants designed by MacKaye and others, Americans associated female pageantry with women’s activism and inclusion in the body politic. MacKaye was right: Pageants were highly effective propaganda. But neither MacKaye nor her colleagues foresaw the pageant backlash right around the corner.
In fact, the immediate popularity of the 1921 Miss America pageant surprised even its organizers. Initially, the bathing beauty contest was just one element of a multiday Fall Frolic festival, but something about this alternative version of women wearing sashes and parading in public broadly appealed. At the 1922 Fall Frolic, the bathing beauty contest eclipsed all the other events. Within a few years, there were no other events.
One reason this beauty contest became so iconic was that it offered a competing version of female pageantry — a version centered not on women’s historic contributions or their demands for basic human rights, but on female subserviency, domesticity and chastity.
The contestants first crowned as winners had much in common — they were not suffragists, they were not flappers, they made no demands and harbored no apparent aspirations. And these women also remain the youngest and most petite contestants ever to wear the crown. A Washington, D.C., reporter wrote that when he went to inform the first Miss America, Margaret Gorman (5-foot-1 and 108 pounds), that she had been selected to represent the District, he found her playing marbles. The second Miss America, Mary Katherine Campbell of Ohio, was even younger than Gorman. Pageant rules stipulated that contestants be 16, but Campbell later admitted she was just 15. When informed that she had won the preliminary Miss Columbus title because of her figure, she reportedly asked her mother, “What’s a figure?” Campbell was so popular that she won the crown once again in 1923. By then, the pageant had become a national phenomenon — 76 women competed in front of 300,000 spectators while reporters wired updates across the country.
Most significantly, these pageants undermined the efforts of suffragists to incorporate women’s history and women’s rights into national narratives. In the years leading up to and following ratification, suffragists fought tooth and nail not just for the vote but also for public recognition of women’s contributions to American life. They prioritized pageants, sashes and commemorations because they understood that the stories we tell and the symbols we see shape what we understand to be possible for women. Suffragists wanted their history in museums, their names on monuments and their contributions in textbooks so that future women might have the opportunities they themselves only dreamed of.
Just days after the June 1919 congressional passage of the 19th Amendment, for example, suffrage leader Helen Hamilton Gardener contacted the Smithsonian to see about donating suffrage relics for what she hoped would be a marquee exhibit on the long history of the movement. Similarly, to celebrate the ratification of the 19th Amendment, the National Woman’s Party commissioned Adelaide Johnson, the “sculptor of suffrage,” to re-create busts she had made of movement leaders Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott for inclusion in the Capitol Rotunda.
But these efforts were thwarted. Smithsonian curators placed the suffrage artifacts in a corner and titled the small exhibit “An Important Epoch in American History,” not exactly what Gardener had in mind. For Johnson, months of planning and pleading resulted only in permission to display her “Portrait Monument” in the Rotunda for one day, Feb. 15, 1921. The next morning, it was moved to the Crypt of the Capitol, where it gathered dust until 1996.
What did endure? The Miss America pageant.
Now that the suffrage centennial has finally begun to prompt the inclusion of a diverse array of women into museum exhibits, public history sites and even a commemorative coin, it’s time to retire the Miss America pageant. The #MeToo movement helped inspire the pageant to eliminate the bathing suit competition last year, and viewership dropped 23 percent (after several years of steady decline). The pageant has tried to keep up with the times and refocus, but there is no way to revise the origins of this pageant or the many ways it has obscured and substituted for a much more comprehensive view of women’s contributions to American life.
In 2020 and beyond, when we think of women wearing sashes, let us think of the myriad contributions of women that the suffragists sought to highlight in their pageants. Since the success of the suffrage movement helps explain the appeal of the first Miss America pageants, it would be only fitting if the centennial of the 19th Amendment cemented the pageant’s obsolescence once and for all.