Looking for Miss America A Pageant's 100-Year Quest to Define Womanhood

Margot Mifflin

eBook - 2020

From an author praised for writing “delicious social history” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times) comes a lively account of memorable Miss America contestants, protests, and scandals—and how the pageant, nearing its one hundredth anniversary, serves as an unintended indicator of feminist progressLooking for Miss America is a fast–paced narrative history of a curious and contradictory institution. From its start in 1921 as an Atlantic City tourist draw to its current incarnation as a scholarship competition, the pageant has indexed women’s status during periods of social change—the post–suffrage 1920s, the Eisenhower 1950s, the #MeToo era. This ever–changing institution has been shaped by war, evangelism, the rise of televisi...on and reality TV, and, significantly, by contestants who confounded expectations.Spotlighting individuals, from Yolande Betbeze, whose refusal to pose in swimsuits led an angry... more