The Miss America Pageant Stills Sends the Wrong Message

Blain Roberts, an associate professor of history at California State University, is the author of the forthcoming "Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South."

Updated September 12, 2013, 6:12 PM

Has anything changed since 1968, when hundreds of feminists gathered on the boardwalk to protest the Miss America pageant?

Yes and no.

Although pageant officials and contestants emphasize scholarships and package the swimsuit competition as the 'lifestyle and fitness' category, their rhetoric rings hollow.

Back then, the protesters criticized the pageant for promoting “racism with roses,” drawing attention to the troubling racial politics of beauty contests. This was, in fact, a time in which southern Miss America contestants symbolically stood for, and sometimes promoted, segregation. Yet by 1968 the pageant’s connection to Jim Crow was diminishing. And while no woman of color had competed for, much less won, Miss America at the national level at the time of the demonstration, eight African-Americans and one Asian-American triumphed in the decades that followed.

The protesters also argued that the contest rewarded women who were unintelligent, inarticulate and apolitical. Recently, however, winners and contestants have attended Ivy League universities, earned professional degrees and run for Congress.

Nevertheless, the feminists’ most incisive critique — that beauty contests exploit women, sexualize their bodies and encourage conformity to “ludicrous” beauty standards — still resonates today. After all, the point of returning the pageant to Atlantic City is to have bikini-wearing beauties market the city as a vacation destination — the very purpose for which the pageant was originally founded.

Although pageant officials and contestants emphasize scholarships, talents and platform issues and repackage the swimsuit competition as the “lifestyle and fitness” category, their rhetoric rings hollow. At the Miss California preliminary in June, the emcees repeatedly urged would-be contestants and other women in the audience to seek out the right makeup and styling products. When the Miss California hopefuls came on stage in their bathing suits, I did not see women performing push-ups or wind sprints but rather thin, tanned bodies sashaying in high heels. And men whistled enthusiastically.

Pageant defenders might say it was all in good fun. Yet with a large contingent of young girls in the audience cheering on the contestants and envisioning their future selves, that “good fun” seemed bad for everybody.