Miss America, National Identity, and the Identity Politics of Whiteness

Abstract

In September 1945, Bess Myerson became the first Jewish woman to win the Miss America title. Fifty years later, in September 1995, Heather Whitestone became the first woman with a disability (she is deaf) to win the crown of Miss America. Although the historical contexts of both of these formative moments differ considerably, both demonstrate how the pageant privileges whiteness. For Bess Myerson in 1945, the pageant’s emphasis on whiteness revolved around the discourse of assimilation and Americanization. With World War II providing a nationalist backdrop to the Miss America Pageant, and the complicated terrain of U.S. anti-Semitism and the increasing national realization of the Holocaust operating as political context, the pageant’s cultural politics of whiteness offered a particular kind of logic to the selection of a Jewish woman as Miss America.