Essay - History Why did National Beauty Contests Emerge in America and...

History

***** did national beauty contests emerge in America and Australia among other nations) in the 1920s and why had *****y declined in popularity by the 1980s?

ABC has dropped Miss America, leaving ***** famous beauty pageant without a TV outlet for the first time in 50 years... The move, which comes after the Sept. 18 pageant drew a record low 9.8 million viewers, could jeopardize ***** foundation of a progr*****m that grew from an Atlantic City publicity stunt into a highly rated ***** staple.

The withdrawal of US network television ***** the Miss America pageant marks a new low in the ste*****dy decline ***** a once great institution: ***** national ***** contest. From being shared communal events ***** embodied the hopes and dreams of a sizeable section of their populations and played a role as flag-waving occ*****ions of national pride, ***** such as ***** America have become just one part of the fragmented multimedia world that is entertainment today, ***** a d*****tinctly t*****wdry and unfashionable ***** at that. The same story ***** marginalization revealed by ABC's withdrawal from Miss America is repeated across the world, with ***** ***** no longer shared national events.

When the national beauty contest began in the 1920s ***** cultural context was a very different one. Historians of women's "progress" in the 1920s have presented women "as flappers, more concerned with clothing and sex than ***** politics. Women had ***** choice, the accounts suggested, rejected political emancipation and found sexual freedom." ***** rise of the ***** contest can be read as one symptom of this, but it can also ***** seen as an expression, albe***** a paradoxical one, of women's striving to find freer expression ***** ***** own agendas and identities.

In hindsight, it can be argued that the rise ***** beauty contests reflected ideals of modernity in inter-war society as expressed in both *****tions of ***** fem*****ine physical ideal and the right of women to the public display of ********** bodies. Judith Smart observes that "young women of the postwar years were quite certain that they embodied modernity in a literal as well as figurative sense" in pursuing a notion ***** physical beauty derived from fashion and film of the 1920s, and were prepared to assert "precisely the sexual presence that feminists saw as dangerous, disempowering and deb*****ing." By aligning themselves with "the claims of commodified beauty culture" women accepted the notion "that comparing oneself and measuring up to an ideal of feminine beauty through diligent self-scrutiny were indispensable techniques in the quest to become a truly modern wom*****n."

***** ***** were not inventions of ***** 1920s, but were rooted in long-established communal celebrations, as Judith Smart comments:

The central part given to women served a r*****nge of symbolic and allegorical functions on these occasions--fertility, moral guardianship, maternalism, political principle, selfless idealism... For all the nineteenth-century prohibitions on women displaying themselves in public, ***** ***** ritualised, idealised ***** decorous use ***** the female form precluded protest. But extension of commercial values and photographic technology