Nicholas Goldberg: If the Miss America beauty pageant isn't a beauty pageant, then what exactly is it?
by Nicholas Goldberg, Los Angeles Times
Dec 14, 2021
3 minutes
In its early years, the Miss America pageant was just a beauty contest, a straightforward competition between eager young women with curvaceous figures and pretty faces. Baldly exploitative, gleefully sexist — it knew what it was about.
As it grew more popular, it sought respectability. Miss America was packaged as the virginal girl next door — white, of course — in a bathing suit or a gown, a sash and a crown. The pageant increasingly recognized intelligence, talent, poise and personality, and began to winners in the 1940s. But it was still, at heart,
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