Sure, Williams had taken nude photos, but " different is it to parade women in evening gowns and then ask them to essentially disrobe into swimsuits?''īut these days, pageant organizers are probably longing for a controversy as simple as swimwear. Not only did the Miss America pageant winners get college scholarships and a foot in the door in the entertainment world, the winner was supposed to embody some perfect balance of book smarts, personal virtue, and beauty - the pageant's theme song unsubtly billed her as "the queen of femininity" and "your ideal" - and to serve as role models for younger women.įeminists, of course, called bullshit from the beginning it was a demonstration outside of the 1968 Miss America pageant that gave rise to the myth of "bra-burning." As late as 1984, after Williams lost the title, they were railing against the contest in general and the swimsuit competition in particular: "'It's hypocrisy for pageants to call themselves American institutions of (feminine) rectitude and propriety,'' Jean Lipman-Blumen told the Christian Science Monitor. Once upon a time, beauty pageants were billed as being good for women. As it stands, they're making the shift just as the tide of popular opinion is turning against superficial "body-positivity" in general, and Miss America in particular - and it may be too little, too late. And maybe, if the organization had made the change back then, it would have helped.
People have been protesting the Miss America pageant, and the swimsuit competition specifically, since the 1960s.
As you might guess from the not-so-helpful nature of that last comment (what happens if you put the swimsuit on before your body is "swimsuit-ready?" Does it explode?) this change is not exactly as revolutionary as the Miss America Organization would like you to think.
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