Author: Diane Bernard / Source: Washington Post
On Sunday, the Miss America contest will take place without a swimsuit competition for the first time in the pageant’s nearly century-old history.
The new Miss America Chairman Gretchen Carlson, the former Fox News host and 1989 Miss America, announced the change in June, in an effort to revamp the event for the #MeToo era.
But the move has caused controversy among those who say the swimsuit portion is a storied tradition, while critics have been saying for decades that the event is a paramount symbol of the objectification of women.
From the pageant’s start in 1921, the swimsuit competition, and the pageant as a whole, has been a contentious event. The first pageant was launched by Atlantic City hotel owners who wanted to extend the lucrative summer season past Labor Day.
Petite Margaret Gorman, 15, of the District, won the first Miss America award, and newspapers touted her long tresses at a time when modern women were bobbing their hair, according to Kimberly H. Hamlin’s essay, “Bathing Suits and Backlash: The First Miss America Pageants, 1921-1927.”
“From descriptions of her appearance and small stature, it is apparent that 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,” Hamlin writes.
Yet the pageant toed the line between propriety and titillation by allowing Gorman and two other contestants to roll down their bathing stockings below the knee.
At the time, female bathers on Atlantic City beaches were required to wear stockings to avoid any display of bare skin, according to Hamlin. In addition, the new “Annette Kellerman” swimsuits, which were named after a famous swimmer who ushered in a more form-fitting suit than the bloomers and baggy outfits women wore at the time, were also banned.
[It’s not just about bikinis: Inside the battle for the future of Miss America]
Gorman’s outfit was considered “quite risque at the time,” Hamlin said in a phone interview. A few days before Gorman was photographed with her rolled-down stockings, Louise Rosine, a 39-year-old novelist from Los Angeles, was jailed in Atlantic City for appearing on the beach in much the same garb. In a New York Times article with the headline, “Bather Goes to Jail: Keeps Her Knees Bare,” Rosine argued, “the city has no right to tell me how I shall wear my stockings. It is none of their darn business.”
The 1921 pageant was an enormous success and became a template for all beauty pageants to come. It set the precedent of contestants parading in swimsuits, which was the dramatic core of the contest. And it also created a tension between crowning an idealized model of wholesome American womanhood while at the same time allowing a certain amount of titillation to please the crowd.
During the 1920s, the early pageants sought to stay free of commercialism by offering a token small award for the winners. Women were supposed to take their crowns, go home, get married and not parlay the title into commercial success.
But that changed when Fay Lanphier was crowned Miss America in 1925. Lanphier was the first Miss America from the West, the first to make a Hollywood movie and the first to profit financially from the title, earning $50,000 on a 16-week personal appearance tour, Hamlin writes, an enormous amount for the 1920s.
By 1927, the complaints about Miss America’s growing commercialism reached a peak, with groups including the League of Women…
The post Swimsuits are gone from Miss America, but the relationship was always complicated appeared first on FeedBox.