Abstract

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.