Miss America turns 100: How the iconic pageant invented the cultural changes that would render it obsolete

The Washington Post

"Miss America is marking its 100th anniversary this week, and beyond Mickey Mouse, it’s hard to think of another pop culture brand born in the Jazz Age that has made it this far," says Amy Argetsinger, author of the recently released book There She Was: The Secret History of Miss America. "Yet this milestone is going barely noticed for an institution running on fumes. The blue chip sponsors that once plumped its vaunted scholarship fund have vanished. The number of young women competing in the network of local pageants leading to the big title has plunged. Last year’s pageant was preempted by the pandemic; this year’s has been scheduled for Dec. 16, the Miss America Organization announced Wednesday morning. But no broadcast partner has yet publicly committed to airing what was once the biggest show on television, after fewer than 4 million viewers tuned in to the 2019 edition. What happened? In many obvious ways, Miss America simply fell out of step with rapidly changing times and tastes. The feminist critique of the pageant as an oppressively patriarchal force originally struck many Americans as radical when activists hurled brassieres and girdles into a trash can during a headline-grabbing Boardwalk protest in 1968. But this critique began to sink in with the public, too, by the 1980s, around the same time that the entire format — the relentlessly chipper contestants, the turn-for-the-judges stiffness, the hokey variety show staging — ran into an even more dire problem: the tailspin of fatal uncoolness. Which is ironic, considering that we seem to be living today in a world that this dusty, fussy institution helped create, well beyond just reality TV. Many of Miss America’s most exotic habits have gone mainstream now that we all seem to treat so much of our screen-driven lives as part of our own little pageants."