Miss Teen USA 2024 Addie Carver, 16, celebrates her win in Los Angeles in August. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

Should We Still Have Beauty Pageants?

November 18, 2024

Since its beginnings more than a century ago, the modern beauty pageant has been the focus of a debate over women’s bodies. In 1952, after the reigning Miss America refused to wear a bathing suit in public, the pageant’s sponsor, a swimwear company, founded the Miss Universe-pageant. It’s now the world’s major international beauty contest—famous in large part for its swimsuit competition.

But as beauty pageants developed—thousands of them take place annually worldwide—they’ve also become platforms for contestants to raise awareness of issues such as racial tolerance, cultural identity, and violence against women.

Yet attitudes about women’s role in society continue to change, and many have questioned the relevance of a contest based on judging women on their appearance. Should we still hold beauty pageants? A sociologist and a historian face off on the question.

Beauty pageants have thrived in America for more than 100 years because they’ve changed with the times.

It’s true, as critics point out, that major pageants like Miss America and Miss USA were started by men to promote business interests and capitalize on women’s bodies. But that’s no longer the case. Today pageants are giving contestants a voice—an opportunity to present who they are, their personal struggles and their talents, to the public. A title gets a young woman invited to speak at conferences, where she meets with community leaders and advocates for issues that are meaningful to her.

It used to be that pageants were wildly popular among young women because there were few other avenues for pursuing professional opportunities and achieving social mobility. In the 1940s, the Miss America pageant began creating scholarships for winners, transforming itself into a pathway for women to pursue higher education. Of course, racism, ableism*, and other kinds of discrimination barred many women from access to that money. But over the next 50 years, pageants became ever more inclusive, and now they are open to all kinds of women.

Today’s pageants give women a voice to present who they are to the public.

Many women who compete in pageants say they feel empowered developing skills such as public speaking. And they say the educational opportunities they’ve won not only improved their personal lives but have given them the tools for a larger engagement in public life and political action. There are also some women who compete in beauty pageants simply because they enjoy them, in the same way that some women like to cook, knit, or read “chick lit.” Choosing for oneself is arguably the fulfillment of the women’s movement.

Beauty pageants may never regain the popularity they once held, and that’s OK. Today competing in a pageant is just one of the many choices a woman can make. Girls and women should not feel that they need a crown to be successful. But the option should be there for those who seek it.

—HILARY LEVEY FRIEDMAN
Sociologist, author of Here She Is

At their core, beauty pageants exist to reward women based on how they look. They promote the false ideas that a woman’s physical attributes are fundamental to her worth and reinforce the gendered power dynamics in our culture.

Consider the history of beauty pageants in the United States. The Miss America pageant, the nation’s longest- running pageant, took off in 1921—the year after women attained the right to vote. Its popularity was part of a backlash against the suffrage movement and a growing consensus that women could be autonomous citizens in their own right. Until then, various “bathing beauty” contests never caught on, as people considered it taboo for women to seek praise for their beauty. But with the prospect of women stepping out of the home and taking on a larger role in public life, judging women in their bathing suits took on a new appeal to many people.

In contrast to images of independent women, the Miss America pageant promoted traditional femininity. Judges praised contestants with long hair and harshly judged those who wore makeup or sported bobs, which they considered a “modern” hairdo. The first Miss America, Margaret Gorman, was 16. At 5'1" and 108 pounds, she was what the judges thought an American woman should look like.

Beauty pageants exist to reward women based on their looks.

For many years, feminist activists have called attention to such limiting ideas about women. Yet in spite of these protests—or in reaction to them—the pageant and its many imitators grew in scope. Even now, the Miss America pageant enforces the ideal of beauty that Gorman personified: Contestants must be female, single, and childless.

The Miss America pageant claims it’s not a beauty contest but a scholarship program, and recently, pageant officials eliminated the swimsuit competition. But given how pageant culture still encourages us to judge women on their looks and reinforces traditional ideas of womanhood, this claim doesn’t feel genuine. With so many other ways for women to express themselves, their talents, and their ideals, I see no reason for beauty pageants to continue.

—KIMBERLY A. HAMLIN
Historian, Miami University, Ohio