Ilise Carter’s The Red Menace is a lighthearted coverage of makeup, and its popularity in the U.S. from colonial days onwards. Carter makes the case that cosmetics were known and used through the 18th and 19th centuries, long before they were “officially” socially endorsed in the 20th. Through her descriptions, we see not just the options, but the demands for beauty society puts on women.

Carter includes a recipe for lip salve from Martha Washington, although it might be generous to call it makeup. (It sounds more like a balm against Potomac winters, rather than a forerunner of Revlon Colorstay). But whatever products were sold, or homemade, there was still a fair amount of prejudice against cosmetics. Women who painted their faces were, to respectable Protestants, actresses and tarts.

That would of course change, with mass-production, Hollywood, and photography. By the 1940s, a well-groomed lady was meant to wear cosmetics. Tasteful and appropriate, but makeup nonetheless. (Carter notes that a handbook for British war brides moving to the U.S. included a reminder that lipstick was expected.) And this transition period coincided with the rise of the beauty pageant. As cultivating a beauty through artificial means became more acceptable, so did being assessed on it.

Amy Argetsinger’s There She Was allows that grading women on their looks goes back to the judgment of Paris and the book of Esther. But pageants (the term coming from a “parade”) became the term that stuck in the American context.

From a novelty event held in Atlantic City in 1921, the Miss America contest took a couple of decades to find its feet, but after World War II was off to the races as a national event. It had formalized rules, including that Miss America could not ever have been married, and could not compete more than once. (The idea of the victor defending her title had been used in 1922).

The Miss part of Miss America was clear and deliberate. The entire thing these young women were commercializing was the concept of the debutante: they were and are single. As young women of Jane Austen’s day were launched into society with an expectation of accomplishment—playing the harpsichord, painting or speaking French, etc.—Miss America had to include a talent portion. While traditional debutante assessment included her family’s social standing, in the modern American version, the girls represented their home state. Their sashes bear a geographic title, not a family crest, suitable for the land of the self-made.

Miss America was also white, and would not have a black contestant until 1970. In this, the contest was in step with the (gradual) changes in the beauty industry. Big cosmetics brands tended not to cater well to women of color, and Vogue would not have a black cover model until Beverly Johnson in 1974. As Carter describes, smaller brands filled the niche, offering shades that suited darker skin tones—and serving as a field of entrepreneurship for some women of color.

But as Miss America—and the beauty industry—expanded its contestant pool, that didn’t change the major tensions. What to do with a contest that—in judging young women in swimsuits—was a prime target for feminist activists from the 1960s onwards? Miss America, the organization, remained staid: even as the world moved on.

There was a time when the televised Miss America contest drew viewers like the Super Bowl. Those days are gone. It limped through the ’80s as part leg show, part cringy variety spectacle, increasingly out of touch with what viewers wanted. Attempts to reform didn’t improve things. I was a kid watching at home when in the mid-’90s they experimented with getting rid of heels in the swimsuit contest. Watching the contestants pad across the stage barefoot, like they were on their way to swim laps at the local Y, seemed somehow more degrading than watching them stride in Manolos.

But that’s one of the paradoxes of whether one regards beauty pageants as somehow empowering, or as a degrading spectacle that no self-respecting feminist would endorse. Attempting to thread that needle led to changes in how the contest was run, and in a requirement for contestants to champion a particular cause. To be activists, in addition to the other criteria.

Nonetheless, all the tweaking didn’t stop the contest from spiraling downwards in viewer numbers and sponsor income. Attempts to repackage it with reality show elements largely fell flat too: unlike the drink-throwing tantrums and scheming that mark reality show highlight reels, Miss America contestants are here to make friends!

Argetsinger details the period in which Gretchen Carlson (a former Miss America) took the helm of the organization. In her attempts to right the ship, she makes changes that include abandoning the swimsuit contest altogether. She says: “We will no longer judge our candidates on their outward physical appearance. … And that means we will no longer have a swimsuit competition.”

Does this mean Miss America contestants will compete from behind a screen, like a blind audition?

Of course not. And even if looks aren’t an explicit criterion, we all know that they will be part of the judging—that’s life for every woman who isn’t competing in a pageant. The whole claim of “it’s not a beauty contest, it’s a scholarship competition” always rang hollow: Rhodes Scholarship interviews aren’t televised. If it wasn’t about looks, people wouldn’t watch. And the new direction might not be one favored by the contestants either.

They get there through a network of small local contests. A woman has to have a regional sash before she can compete for Miss State. And these local contests are, well, local. As I write, a girl on the path to Miss America is probably wiggling into a sequined dress from David’s Bridal to sing “Titanium” to an audience of nine in a VFW hall.

At each level of competition, the judges and organizers still have their own vision of what makes a winner. Argetsinger details some of the men who held sway over these pageants for decades. Older men shaping the industry, by shaping young women, sometimes literally with surgery, to put them up for competition.

Argetsinger talks to some of the women competing now, following several through the 2019 pageant season at regional shows in Virginia. They are ethnically diverse, academically high-achieving, and competing for a range of reasons: but most often, the scholarship cash on offer.

By and large, they didn’t mind the swimsuit competition at all. They didn’t speak of it with the dread of their elders. They had started to talk about it like a bungee jump— a terrifying, life-affirming act of daring.

A moment of bravery, a challenge to the competitive: these are women in the Instagram age. Already familiar with being scrutinized on social media. They have grown up with different expectations of appearance, and cultivating a brand.

But to motivated young women, pageants don’t seem to offer the same path they once might have. Fewer and fewer are entering.

Their numbers had plummeted over a generation—from as many as 80,000 a year competing in the national pipeline of local pageants in the late 1980s to what the Miss America Organization, coming up on its centennial, acknowledged might be as few as 4,000 in 2019. Some close observers suspected it was actually far fewer.

I admit I hadn’t paid attention to Miss America in years. I think pageants seem both quaint and faintly cringey. But just before Covid, I was in Vermont and saw an ad on local TV and nearly fell off the bed. A sequence of young women in bikinis, sponsored by local businesses, who were the contestants in a local pageant. The industry is still there, and there are still young women who want it to be.