Hilary Levey Friedman is a sociologist at Brown University, where she has taught a popular course titled ‘Beauty Pageants in American Society.’ She is an expert on beauty pageants, childhood and parenting, competitive afterschool activities and popular culture. As a leading researcher in pageantry, she merges her mother’s past experiences as Miss America 1970 with her interests as a glitz-and glamour-loving sometime pageant judge. Friedman serves as the president of the Rhode Island chapter of the National Organization for Women and was a mentor to Miss America 2018. Her first book, “Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture” focused on children’s competitive afterschool activities. “Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America” is her newest book and it uses beauty pageants to trace the arc of American feminism from the 1840s to the present.

“Here She Is” begins with the author admitting that she “can’t remember ever not knowing what a beauty pageant was.”  In the Preface, she explains that as the only child of a divorced beauty queen, her mother is Miss America 1970, Pamela Eldred, her childhood was immersed in the beauty pageant world. Her home was filled with memorabilia and from a young age she instinctively knew that to win a pageant, women had to be beautiful and thin, aside from also being a good public speaker and performer.  With this much firsthand knowledge of the beauty pageant world and through thorough research, she explains the history of beauty pageants and how they became acceptable and mainstream. This was due in part to P.T. Barnum’s baby shows, which he popularized at a time when women could not appear in public, but in his shows, they could take the stage while carrying said babies. The book is divided into three parts: Part I: The birth of American Pageantry and the Feminist Movement, Part II: The (Second) wave of Bras and Beliefs, and Part III: Tabloids, Trump, and tits. Her notes appear at the end of the book, which shows the amount of research that went into writing this book.

This year, America’s most popular beauty pageant celebrates its 100th anniversary. Due to ever changing attitudes and codes of morality, many people thought beauty pageants would eventually go away. While admitting that beauty pageants objectify women because they were first invented in 1921 by male businessmen to use women’s bodies to entice a crowd to stay longer in Atlantic City so that businesses could make more money, the author brings up the argument that they have helped bring women into the public sphere, helped them become leaders in business and politics and given them a path to higher education. Besides giving a background on beauty pageants, Hilary Levey Friedman provides historical tidbits including how Barbie came out in the 1950s, not coincidentally at the height of beauty pageants and how Girl Scouts, and beauty pageants, use sashes influenced by early suffragettes. Highlights include the idea that there are different pageants for different groups and ethnicities because when people feel excluded from pageants, they will make their own: pageants exist for Blacks, Asians, Latinas, Natives, disabled, petites, full figured women, seniors, etc. and that for the most part, conservative femininity is the dominant trait of pageants – they insist on a purity trait. The language is down to earth, making this an easy to read and hard to put down insight into pageants. “Here She Is” is not a how-to guide for becoming a pageant queen, nor is it a salacious behind-the-scenes look at beauty pageants. It is an impressively in-depth look at the positive and negative aspects of beauty pageants and is recommended for readers who want to learn about the historical background of pageants, including its controversies and dark past.

“Overall, it is neither an indictment of beauty pageants nor a paean instead showing that beauty pageants have never been all bad or all good – for participants, for women, or for feminism.”

*The author received a copy of this book for an honest review. The views and opinions expressed here belong solely to her.