Since its inception, the pageant has evolved in some ways and not so much in others. Women’s beauty-white women’s beauty-was a tool. Newspapers across the country held contests judging photographs of young women, and the winners came to Atlantic City for a competition where they were evaluated on “personality and social graces.” There was no equivocating. Held in Atlantic City just after Labor Day, it started in 1921 as a way for newspapers to increase their circulation and for the resort’s businesses to extend their profitable summer season. Like so many things, the Miss America pageant began as a marketing scheme. The 1968 uprising was conceived by a radical feminist named Carol Hanisch, who popularized the phrase, “The personal is political.” Disrupting the beauty contest, she thought, in the summer of that year, “just might be the way to bring the fledgling Women’s Liberation Movement into the public arena.” As women organized the first protest against Miss America, they were responding not only to the pageant and its antiquated, misogynistic attitudes toward women and beauty, but also to how the United States, as a whole, treated women.
The Miss America pageant has never been a progressive event, but in 1968, it sparked a feminist revolution.
