| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

"There She Is, Miss America": The Politics of Sex, Beauty, and Race in America's Most Famous Pageant. Ed. by Elwood Watson and Darcy Martin. (New York: Palgrave, 2004. x, 205 pp. Cloth, $69.95, ISBN 1-4039-6301-0. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 1-4039-6302-9.)
The editors Elwood Watson and Darcy Martin open this volume by asserting that "the Miss America pageant provides invaluable insight into broader changes and trends in American culture" in the twentieth century (p. 2). With a laudable breadth of vision, they gathered nine historical, literary, ethnographic, and folkloric analyses of the gender and racial politics of beauty competitions to support their argument.	1
In the first section, which focuses on historical analysis, Kimberly A. Hamlin's essay casts the earliest Miss America contests as both a conservative response to the pageantry of the woman suffrage movement and a controversial commercial display of scantily clad young women. Next, Mary Anne Schofield asks whether Miss America or Rosie the Riveter better represented women's experiences during World War II. In the third chapter, Sarah Banet-Weiser portrays the crowning of the Jewish Bess Meyerson in 1945 and the deaf Heather Whitestone in 1995 as exceptions proving the rule that Miss America represents the normative "whiteness" of the national self.	. . .

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