Menu
Looking for Miss America: A Pageantâs 100-Year Quest to Define Womanhood
Next in the queue
54
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
20/100Critics
88/100Scholars
Author:
Margot Mifflin
Publisher:
Counterpoint
Date:
August 4, 2020
On the centennial of the Miss America pageant, a professor looks back at the contest's cultural significance and its evolution over time as an institution reflecting larger social changes.
What The Reviewers Say
... a lavish and detailed account of the various milestones that have defined the pageant for decades.
Looking for Miss America is, in the language of pageantry, lavish in its research, and its prose is sparkling. It is a riveting, multivalent history. About this, if nothing else, most feminists and pageant enthusiasts will agree.
Mifflin is no Miss America apologist. She’s cleareyed about the pageant’s many hypocrisies and failures, which include a legacy of racial exclusion.
Mifflin’s deep research, numerous support texts, nuanced analysis and punchy writing weave an engaging account. (The history of the bathing suit portion of the pageant is especially fascinating.) She interviewed over a dozen past pageant contestants, pageant employees, a judge and others for a comprehensive behind-the-scenes narrative.
