The Perfect American Woman

The Miss America Pageant has served as a platform for beautiful women for a century. Throughout its long tenure, the Pageant has picked a woman each year to serve as the epitome of beauty and femininity. This paper will discuss the Pageant’s trends in the 1950s and 1960s. The Pageant controls the contestants’ talents, outfits, and time as they are in the competition. As such, they have almost complete control over who enters the competition and, by extension, who wins. Through their screening process and judging criteria, the Pageant is able to choose a woman each year that embodies their version of the ideal American Woman.

The Movement Meets the Press

This chapter analyzes national press coverage of the feminist protest at the 1968 Miss America Pageant, the event that put women's liberation on the national media map and that would have a continuing presence in print and broadcast interpretations of the movement. News reports about the events in Atlantic City feature the earliest appearance of many strategies for making sense of the movement—strategies that would reappear in national broadcast stories in 1970 along with film footage of the pageant protest that established its importance to feminism's public narrative. The chapter's discussion of the protest and its reverberations inside and outside the movement highlights an often overlooked aspect of the events of September 7, 1968: that the first Miss Black America Pageant, sponsored by the NAACP, was held the same night just down the boardwalk. The New York Times covered the two pageants in tandem, and the reading of that coverage focuses on reporters' early efforts to construct a narrative about the relationship between feminist and civil rights activism, an emphasis that would reappear in 1970's wave of national television reporting.