Rise and Fall of National Beauty Contests: 1920s–1980s
This essay examines why national beauty contests emerged in countries such as America and Australia during the 1920s and why they had declined significantly in popularity by the 1980s. Drawing on historical scholarship about women's roles, modernity, and national identity, the paper traces the cultural conditions — including new media technologies, changing fashions, and shifting gender norms — that allowed beauty pageants to flourish in the interwar period. It then analyzes the forces that eroded their appeal, including second-wave feminism, the fragmentation of mass media, evolving ideas of national identity, and women's own changing aspirations. The essay argues that beauty contests served multiple, sometimes contradictory, cultural functions, and that their decline reflects the growing complexity of those functions in modern society.
- Introduction: The Decline of a Once-Great Institution: ABC drops Miss America; decline of national pageants
- The Cultural Context of the 1920s and the Rise of the Beauty Contest: Women's modernity and beauty culture in the 1920s
- Modernity, Technology, and the New Beauty Pageant: Photography, film, and fashion enable beauty contests
- National Identity and the Symbolism of the Beauty Contest: Pageants as symbols of national feminine ideals
- Women's Agency, Empowerment, and the Limits of the Beauty Contest: Contestants' agency versus patriarchal exploitation debate
- From Golden Age to Decline: The 1950s Onward: Feminism and social change erode pageant prestige
- Conclusion: Multiple Forces Behind Rise and Fall: Converging cultural forces explain pageant rise and fall
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What makes this paper effective
- It opens with a concrete, contemporary news hook — ABC dropping Miss America — and uses it to frame a broader historical argument, immediately grounding the reader in why the topic matters.
- It balances structural/cultural forces (media technology, commerce, nationalism) with attention to women's own agency, avoiding a reductive "victims of patriarchy" reading and acknowledging the contested meanings of participation.
- It draws on a well-chosen range of scholarly sources across American and Australian contexts, giving the argument comparative breadth without losing focus.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of integrated quotation: rather than dropping block quotes and moving on, the writer contextualizes each citation and explicitly connects it to the overarching argument about cultural rise and decline. This keeps the essay analytically driven rather than merely descriptive.
Structure breakdown
The essay moves from a contemporary news event (ABC's withdrawal) backward to the 1920s origins of beauty pageants, then forward through the interwar golden age, mid-century tensions, and eventual 1980s decline. This chronological arc is interrupted productively by thematic sections on national identity and women's agency, which deepen the causal explanation. The conclusion synthesizes multiple converging forces rather than offering a single reductive explanation.
Introduction: The Decline of a Once-Great Institution
ABC has dropped Miss America, leaving the famous beauty pageant without a TV outlet for the first time in 50 years. The move, which came after the September 18 pageant drew a record low 9.8 million viewers, could jeopardize the foundation of a program that grew from an Atlantic City publicity stunt into a highly rated TV staple.
The withdrawal of U.S. network television from the Miss America pageant marks a new low in the steady decline of a once great institution: the national beauty contest. From being shared communal events that embodied the hopes and dreams of a sizeable section of their populations and played a role as flag-waving occasions of national pride, events such as Miss America have become just one part of the fragmented multimedia world that is entertainment today — and a distinctly tawdry and unfashionable one at that. The same story of marginalization revealed by ABC's withdrawal from Miss America is repeated across the world, with national contests no longer functioning as shared national events.
The Cultural Context of the 1920s and the Rise of the Beauty Contest
When the national beauty contest began in the 1920s, the cultural context was a very different one. Historians of women's progress in the 1920s have presented women "as flappers, more concerned with clothing and sex than with politics. Women had by choice, the accounts suggested, rejected political emancipation and found sexual freedom."1 The rise of the beauty contest can be read as one symptom of this, but it can also be seen as an expression — albeit a paradoxical one — of women's striving to find freer expression for their own agendas and identities.
In hindsight, it can be argued that the rise of beauty contests reflected ideals of modernity in interwar society, expressed in both notions of the feminine physical ideal and the right of women to the public display of their bodies. Judith Smart observes that "young women of the postwar years were quite certain that they embodied modernity in a literal as well as figurative sense" in pursuing a notion of physical beauty derived from fashion and film of the 1920s, and were prepared to assert "precisely the sexual presence that feminists saw as dangerous, disempowering and debasing."2 By aligning themselves with "the claims of commodified beauty culture," women accepted the notion "that comparing oneself and measuring up to an ideal of feminine beauty through diligent self-scrutiny were indispensable techniques in the quest to become a truly modern woman."3
Beauty contests were not inventions of the 1920s, but were rooted in long-established communal celebrations. As Judith Smart comments, the central part given to women in such celebrations "served a range of symbolic and allegorical functions on these occasions — fertility, moral guardianship, maternalism, political principle, selfless idealism." She further notes that "for all the nineteenth-century prohibitions on women displaying themselves in public, this highly ritualised, idealised and decorous use of the female form precluded protest. But extension of commercial values and photographic technology into the wider culture towards the end of the nineteenth century brought new versions of the Queen contest that directly challenged this limited acceptance of public display."4
Modernity, Technology, and the New Beauty Pageant
The new communication technologies and commercial developments of the early twentieth century — film, photography, the mass circulation press, mass fashion — united with a loosening of public moral consensus and an assertiveness on the part of women to bring about a marked change in the character of the beauty pageant or contest in countries such as America and Australia. The technology of modernity was essential to the operation of the beauty contests and their location in the contemporary mass media. As Liz Conor notes, such contests "could not have taken place without the by now commonplace photographic portrait" and a "linkage to the screen star" which related the types of beauty that were categorized as acceptable in newspaper-run and other contests.5 The rise of public bathing and developments in fashion and swimwear that revealed and flattered — rather than concealed and disguised — the body also contributed to a climate in which the beauty contest could flourish.
Conclusion: Multiple Forces Behind Rise and Fall
The national beauty contest rose to a peak of popularity in the mid-twentieth century as an expression of a range of potent, and not always compatible, cultural phenomena: notions of the "feminine ideal" whether related to marriage, family, and home, or to the perceived needs of wider society; the commodification and selling of the female body as a desirable article in its own right; an avenue for modern female self-expression and autonomous identity; the need of newspapers to sell copies and television networks to sell advertising; ideas of nationhood and communal identity; notions of purity and innocence; notions of sexual availability and advertisement; and a desire for glamour, escape, and entertainment.
It seems that in today's world none of these things is as simple as it once was, and that the beauty contest has suffered as a result. The onslaughts of second-wave feminism, the rise of the consumer society, and the rejection of old ideas of national identity all had a part to play in weakening the appeal of the old-fashioned beauty contest — based as it was upon stable ideas of what constituted the ideal on various levels.
Bibliography
Sarah Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999.
Colleen Ballerino Cohen, Richard Wilk, and Beverly Stoeltje (eds), Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests and Power, New York and London, Routledge, 1997.
Lois W. Banner, American Beauty, New York: Knopf, 1983.
Liz Conor, "Beauty contestant in the photographic scene," Journal of Australian Studies, no. 71 (2001).
Kate Darian-Smith and Sarah Wills, "From Queen of Agriculture to Miss Showgirl," Journal of Australian Studies, no. 71 (2001).
Estelle B. Freedman, "The new woman: changing views of women in the 1920s," Journal of American History, vol. 61, no. 2 (1974), pp. 372–93.
Angela J. Latham, "Packaging woman: the concurrent rise of beauty pageants, public bathing, and other performances of female 'nudity,'" Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 29, no. 3 (1995).
Judith Smart, "Feminists, flappers, and Miss Australia: contesting the meanings of citizenship, femininity and the nation in the 1920s," Journal of Australian Studies, no. 71 (2001).
Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985.
"ABC dumps Miss America," CBS News, 21 October 2004.
Freedman, "The new woman," p. 379.
Smart, "Feminists, flappers, and Miss Australia," p. 3.
Smart, "Feminists, flappers, and Miss Australia," p. 4.
Conor, "Beauty contestant," p. 33.
Banner, American Beauty, p. 451; Cohen, Wilk, and Stoeltje (eds), Beauty Queens on the Global Stage, pp. 3–5.
Smart, "Feminists, flappers, and Miss Australia," pp. 6–7.
Conor, "Beauty contestant," p. 35.
Warner, Monuments and Maidens, p. 96.
Smart, "Feminists, flappers," p. 12.
Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, pp. 31–57.
"Less talent, more skin at pageant," CNN, 17 September 2004.
Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, pp. 37–40; Banner, American Beauty, p. 269.
Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, pp. 10–13; Cohen et al., Beauty Queens, pp. 5–8.
Kate Darian-Smith and Sarah Wills, "From Queen of Agriculture to Miss Showgirl," Journal of Australian Studies, no. 71 (2001), p. 18.
Smart, "Feminists, flappers," p. 8.
Darian-Smith, "From Queen of Agriculture," p. 20.
Smart, "Feminists, flappers," p. 13.
Darian-Smith, "From Queen of Agriculture," p. 26.
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