Child Beauty Pageants Children's beauty pageants have gotten a great deal of negative publicity in recent years, partially because of the sensationalistic coverage in the media via shows like Toddlers and Tiaras. The program depicts the vicious, back-biting, behind-the-scenes drama of competition in which young children dress up as much older, highly sexualized women often because they are pushed to do so by overly driven stage mothers. However, criticisms of beauty pageants for both children and adults stretch far back in history and are much older than reality television. What is particularly noteworthy today is the extent to which pageants have become a metaphor for the over-sexualization of children, particularly young girls. The message conveyed by the pageants seems very different from the empowering message embraced by other aspects of the media regarding the ability of girls to demonstrate their worth outside of the context of sexuality and domesticity.

To understand the complex attitudes towards pageants in America requires an understanding of their role in larger American history. Beauty pageants have an old and storied history in America. Although the attempt to discern who is the "fairest of them all" is even older than the United States, the history of the modern beauty pageant is said to have begun in the 19th century with Phineas T. Barnum. "Some of Barnum's most popular attractions were 'national contests' where dogs, chickens, flowers, and even children were displayed and judged for paying audiences. While 61,000 people swarmed to his baby show in 1855, a similar event the year before to select and exhibit 'the handsomest ladies' in America proved a disappointment" given that women were initially unwilling to display themselves in such an unrespectable manner ("People and events"). However, the rise of the flapper, shorter skirts, and more permissive attitudes gave rise to new interest in the beauty pageant. In 1921, Atlantic City held the first Miss America Pageant. "Stressing that the contestants were both youthful and wholesome, the Miss America Pageant brought together issues of democracy and class, art and commerce, gender and sex -- and started a tradition that would grow throughout the century to come" ("People and events").

The Miss America pageant and other pageants soon became profoundly symbolic of America's attitudes towards femininity and womanhood. To add respectability to the pageant, a talent competition was added in addition to the swimsuit and formalwear portions. A scholarship was also given as part of the prize, to show that talent as well as embodying wholesome American girlhood was valued. The crowing of the first Jewish, African-American, and differently-abled Miss Americas all became headline news as evidence of America's more diverse standards of beauty. "It has been about a dream of being beautiful. It's also been about a dream of being successful" ("Transcript"). Miss America and beauty pageants in general have sometimes been seen as symbolic of deeper cultural issues that were being worked out through the discourse of beauty.

However, beauty pageants became controversial with the rise of the feminist movement. "400 women showed up to protest the 1968 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, N.J." And participate in "the mass dumping of aprons, dust mops, cosmetics and bras into a Freedom Trash Can, an act that reportedly inspired the urban legend that feminists in the '60s liked to burn bras for recreational sport" ("The feminists vs. The contestants"). Feminists saw the pageants as objectifying women, not as celebrating female talent and beauty.

The use of children in entertainment has been almost as controversial as judging adult women in beauty pageants. As early as Shirley Temple, it was not uncommon to see small children made up as adults for comic effect, often in a highly sexualized fashion. Before Temple became a star in her own right she starred in a series called Baby Burlesques, which depicted small children dressed up like sexy adult stars like Mae West and Marlene Dietrich (Pruitt). The British novelist Graham Greene controversially alleged that Temple's appeal was not-so-subtly sexual. "Some of [Temple's] popularity seems to rest on a coquetry quite as mature as Miss Colbert's and on an oddly precocious body as voluptuous in grey flannel trousers as Miss Dietrich's" (Anderson). These same concerns about the sexuality of young children have arisen in critiques of beauty pageants. The little girls are not simply dancing or singing or even wearing age-appropriate beautiful clothing; rather they are asked to mimic the appearance and behavior of adults long before they have awareness of and the ability to consent to what their behavior communicates.

Baby contests began to arise in America...

In fact there was, if anything, less rather than more discomfort about the practice of children being encouraged to engage in adult behaviors and wear sexy clothes. In Asbury Park, during beauty pageants held in 1923 and 1928 for babies, the 400 contestants included an "a three-year-old girl [who] won in a harem costume, a two-year-old [who] won as a 'Vanity Girl,' and a six-year-old [who] won dressed like a 'Show Girl'" (Levy). The events were also more popular with mainstream spectators than today. However, during the more conservative era of the 1930s, objections began to arise. "Outsiders attacked these events saying that they exploited children and treated them like objects. The chief of the preschool division of the Pennsylvania Board of Health condemned baby parades in 1932 as a 'deplorable exploitation of childhood.' These types of complaints will sound familiar if you follow contemporary child beauty pageants" (Levy 2011). Pageants were seen as ruining childhood innocence by dragging unwitting children into the evil world of show business. These criticisms, however, were not leveled from a specifically feminist lens. Also, many of the contestants were boys as well as girls, partially as a result of parents desperate to get their children involved in films (which featured many popular male as well as female child actors). Today, ideological criticisms children's pageants are part of a larger conversation about the sexualizing of girls at increasingly younger ages.
This hyper-sexualization of girls is worrisome given the evidence that sexualization has a negative impact on the self-esteem and development of young women. An American Psychological Association (APA) report on the sexualization of girls found "cognitively, self-objectification has been repeatedly shown to detract from the ability to concentrate and focus one's attention, thus leading to impaired performance on mental activities such as mathematical computations or logical reasoning ("Sexualization of girls," 2014). For example, one study found that girls asked to evaluate themselves in a swimsuit in a dressing room (versus a control group asked to evaluate themselves wearing a sweater) did significantly poorer on a math test given afterward although "no differences were found for young men" ("Sexualization of girls," 2010). This suggests that the type of hyper-sexualization at a young age fostered by beauty pageants does have a subtle cognitive effect in fostering insecurity in young women. The subjects of the APA study were teenagers and the young girls involved in beauty pageants are far older.

It should be noted that all girls, regardless of how progressive their parents' attitudes might be to gender, must deal with sexism to some degree. The media's communication of highly-sexualized messages are omnipresent and even a positive home environment cannot always counteract the negatives of the child's peer group and the images present in film, print, and on the Internet. However, pageants are even more explicit in venerating appearance above intellect and other dimensions of a girl's character at a young age. And parents, rather than working to counteract those messages, are using a great deal of time and money to support them.

Child beauty pageants, although a definite niche subculture, are clearly part of a larger trend of selling sexuality to young, prepubescent girls. Evidence of the growing popularity of this trend can be seen in "advertisements (e.g., the Skechers 'naughty and nice' ad that featured Christina Aguilera dressed as a schoolgirl in pigtails, with her shirt unbuttoned, licking a lollipop), dolls (e.g., Bratz dolls dressed in sexualized clothing such as miniskirts, fishnet stockings and feather boas), clothing (thongs sized for 7 -- to 10-year-olds, some printed with slogans such as 'wink wink'), and television programs (e.g., a televised fashion show in which adult models in lingerie were presented as young girls)" ("Sexualization of girls," 2010). From a young age, almost all girls are forced to confront in some way, shape or form the extent to which mass, modern culture defines their identity in terms of their sexual desirability to the exclusion of all else; beauty pageants intensify this, particularly when the activity is not voluntarily chosen by the girls and when they become immersed in the subculture at an extremely young age.

Pageants are not simply harmless fun: they can have long-lasting repercussions for a child's psyche. "Research links sexualization with three of the most common mental health problems of girls and women: eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression or depressed mood…Frequent exposure to media images that sexualize girls and women affects how girls conceptualize femininity and…