Beauty Queens

Subtitled "A Playful History," Beauty Queens is a wonderful, uncritical look at the evolution of beauty pageants in North America seen through the eyes of a historian and told from the heart of a feminist. Savage wants readers to know that the women who have participated in the pageants often blamed for creating oppressive beauty standards, are not 'the enemy.' In fact, Savage writes, they were often gutsy women with few resources of their own looking for a big break in Hollywood or, later, a free college education. From the get-go, Savage chronicles the historic pageant of 1968 where New York Radical Women crowned a sheep as Miss America and proceeded to toss symbols of women's oppression into a Freedom Trash Can: high heels, copies of Cosmopolitan and at least one very unattractive brassiere. Savage exposes the origins of bathing beauty contests in this beautiful picture book, and the irony of that 1968 protest. Imagine that 50 years earlier, women who dared to wear rolled down hose and one-piece swimsuits were seen as radicals for defying the dictates of Victorian conformity. A writer for Vogue suggested around 1915, the "bathing-girl … deserves credit for firing the first shot in the Battle of Modern Dress." Sewers take note: The photos in this book are a fascinating record of the history of women's bathing attire.