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This is a photo of Madison Marsh, the 22 year-old who won Miss America 2024 last week. She’s standing on a pageant stage in Orlando, Florida; upstage, a group of sequined beauties is seeing her off, like she’s leaving for distant shores. It’s a photo we’ve seen so often, it’s become part of our American visual glossary. There’s an oversized bouquet. There’s confetti. There’s a crown poorly bobby-pinned to her shiny blonde hair. And there’s the shock and elation on her not-quite crying face.
It’s so much fun to hate-see this photo; it has become a pastime. It makes some of us (me) nearly hyperventilate with judgment. Giddy amounts of judgment. What kind of self-respecting feminist could do anything other than mock her? Isn’t it just so awful? Let the mocking begin!
My sister and I used to watch the Miss America pageant religiously every September. It was an annual television holiday for us. We’d keep our eye on the TV Guide so that we wouldn’t miss it; it was must-see tv, back when there were three all-important channels. Our favorite segment of the evening was the talent competition; favorite because it was the worst. (In my family, laughing and screaming at poor performance is a source of deeply satisfying entertainment.) The pageant guaranteed contestants performing terribly: rhythmic gymnasts, ventriloquists, marimba-ists, stand up comedians, ballet dancers, opera singers, baton twirlers, monologists, and loads and loads of absolutely awful belters. All of them — ALL OF THEM — smiling maniacally, as if death were imminent and flashing their white teeth was their last hope for reprieve. With every performance, my sister and I would look at each other in disbelief, could this one be worse than the last? Yes!!! We were a kind of firing squad, taking aim with perfect scorn. We hate-watched till our sides hurt; we spared no one. All in the name of good clean fun.
Back then, in the televiso-lithic age known as the 80’s, there was some version of a Miss America on every channel, and we liked it that way. In every sitcom, on every drama, there she was; a pretty lady doing something dumb while wearing thick nude tights under a high-cut leotard with her boobs hanging out. She was either performing earnestly (and therefore open to mockery), or used as a punchline (and therefore open to mockery). And if she was blonde, she was the target of a range of other exciting insults. All in the name of good, clean fun.
Along with my blue eyeliner and atrocious perm, The Miss America Pageant eventually fell off my radar. My tastes matured, I guess. I went to a state university. I took a class on feminism. I learned about the patriarchy. My cultural diet went from high fructose Geraldo Rivera to Proust and pro-life marches. I English-majored myself into thinking I had risen above the casual woman-hating of the old days. I became a righteous defender of all the women, or so I thought.
But as soon as I saw this photo — after the initial shock of realizing that the pageant still exists — I realized that I hadn’t risen very far at all.
Beauty contests were not invented in the 1980s, of course. From ancient Greece, to medieval Europe, to Atlantic City, the ritual of parading women around has evolved (or not) alongside human conventions. The histories of these pageants reflect the attitudes of each place and each decade; not like a fun-house mirror but as an accurate likeness of social norms and expectations. The Miss America Pageant, which started in 1921, is no different; for much of its existence, contestants were required to adhere to “Rule 7” which stated that they should be “in good health and of the white race.” Its history is filled with scandals, as well as stories of women who broke barriers: Bess Myerson, the first Jew sent down the runway just months after the end of WWII; Vanessa Williams, the first Black winner, had both her crown and dignity removed. But it was another group of women — outside the pageant on the Atlantic City boardwalk — who ultimately had the greatest influence on our perception of women in this country.
It was early September, 1968. Just days before, 10,000 demonstrators had descended on Chicago for the Democratic National Convention. Anti-war protests raged, the country was turning inside out after assassinations and racial reckonings, and a group of women decided they were tired of taking men’s shit. Led by Carol Hanisch, they staged an audacious protest outside the pageant with a specific goal: to “bring the fledgling women’s movement into the public arena.” The group, called the New York Radical Women, made things incredibly uncomfortable for host Bert Parks and the “cattle parade” organizers, with the aim of calling out “the degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol.” Hundreds of women marched, they created street theater (like scrubbing the wooden boardwalk) as examples of “women’s work,” they dumped items of male oppression (bras, false eyelashes, Cosmopolitan Magazines) into a “Freedom Can,” which — although they never set it on fire — went down in history as the place where the first bras were burned. As political theater, it got attention. If the war protest in Chicago was like “throwing a brick through a window,” the Miss America protest that September took a different approach:
“The Atlantic City action is comparable to peeing on an expensive rug at a polite cocktail party. The Man never expects the second kind of protest, and very often that’s the one that really gets him uptight.” - Flo Kennedy, protest organizer
That day, the protestors succeeded at making a lot of men uptight. Including popular columnist (and asshole) Art Buchwald, who seemed particularly bent out of shape by the “burning of brassieres” in the Freedom Can: “If the average American female gave up all her beauty products she would look like Tiny Tim and there would be no reason for the American male to have anything to do with her at all.” Oh Art, I love it when you talk sexy.
Ultimately, it was an act of protest by Carol Hanisch inside the convention center that sparked what many call the beginning of the Women’s Liberation Movement in this country. As the contestants tip-toed across the stage in their bathing suits, Carol unfurled a banner that read simply: “Women’s Liberation.” The massive television audience saw it, they saw the absurd reaction to it, and they – too – began to wonder if it was time to stop taking men’s shit.
I wasn’t (quite) born at that time, but in some spiritual way, I was. I didn’t study this event in my feminism class in college, but in many ways I did. So when I finished recoiling at the photo of Madison Marsh a couple of days ago, I wondered what — if anything — had changed about the pageant I used to love to hate? But just as I descended into the Google-hole, I came face-to-face with a stark new truth: the not-quite crying blonde in the image is not the person I thought she’d be.
Miss America 2024 is Madison Marsh, a second lieutenant in the US Air Force. She graduated from the United States Air Force Academy last year, is working towards becoming a pilot, and is now studying public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. She runs a non-profit that raises money for Pancreatic Cancer. She’s the only active duty US soldier to have ever won Miss America. And she said this about her win: “I think of all of the women that came before me. The first people that served in combat. The first female astronauts. The first female everything. And they opened up the door for me to do something like this.” That might possibly include people like Carol Hanisch herself.
In my fumbling journey through self-discovery, I’m apparently still wearing a pair of leg warmers, using a thigh master, and mocking other women needlessly. My nascent understanding of feminism comes equipped with a whopping case of unnecessary judgment. I’m hoping that I’ll figure some of this out before I don the polyester pantsuit of old lady-hood. But I want to thank Madison Marsh, and all of her resplendent, ambitious, shit-kicking blonde gorgeousness, for teaching me something vitally important: there’s more than one way to pee on an expensive rug at a polite cocktail party.
That’s so funny. We’ll find our laughs in new places, to be sure.
Highly recommend reading Margot Mifflin's book Looking for Miss America: A Pageant’s 100-Year Quest to Define Womanhood https://www.amazon.com/Looking-Miss-America-Pageants-Womanhood/dp/1640092234