Titles given how many Southern States there are. They did especially well in the 1950s and 60s class some of the nations most beautiful girls assembled for the annual miss usa beauty contest. I love a parade, dont you . Among the three decision favorite smith texas, no Deputy Sheriff 80 but very interesting. Miss alabama, via louise hitchcock, a college student. Miss california susan allen bradley. The winner, miss alabama and tears of joy replace the victory. One of the things that can be difficult to remember is that a lot of the practices and rituals that we associate with beauty were initially very controversial. In the south. So in the early 20th century im talking here about the teens and 20s, there was a lot of potency about white women entering beauty contests. They would have been bathing beauty contests, they would have called it at the time. These would have been held at seaside ports like galveston texas. Up and down the eastern coast in virginia, north carolina, South Carolina and these contest held there but not everybody relished this development because respectable white southern women were not supposed to be sensitive and to stand up for a group of onlookers and flirt around in their swimsuits so there was a lot of controversy. Of the things that i argue really help these competitions become more palatable. Is the agricultural affairs. Which as we know, have a very strong history in the rural south, every county had an agricultural affair. Three years. And what is important about the agricultural affair in terms of beauty contests is that the fair is always about helping men and women lead more Productive Lives and over the course of the year, they are on their farm. Hopefully growing better cotton, tobacco, corn, whatever it is. Internalizing lessons that are being taught, being sent out by state colleges. And these agents are sent to teach men how to grow these crops and there sent to women teaching them how to also do what they need to do to contribute to their household economy. Well, early on in this process, some of these agents start to sponsor better baby contests. And a better baby contest is pretty much what this file says, its a contest in which farm women would bring their babies to the judge and the winner, the best baby would win the prize. The idea was that this would be a way for these foreign families to learn the important lessons they needed to learn in terms of hygiene, nutrition, because there were a lot of problems in these schools. So these farm families needed these lessons and the innovations would do this so that her baby contest, judged these infants, sometimes they would be collars on the basis of which was the best baby but the issue here is that there was often a kind of fine line between the healthiest, best baby and the baby that looked the most attractive. So the agricultural affair had a way of introducing a contest that was really about judging the body, a very young body. You do this for a couple of years, by about the 1930s beauty contests art seeming quite as controversial as they once were. Because you can look at a Health Review in which you have these young men and women being judged and it doesnt take much to get to the beauty contest the light argue really was the gift was the depression. And what happens is that you have all of these areas in the south that are suffering at first. And your prices for crops dropped. You have a lot of agricultural trade wars, they are trying to figure out how they can govern theirtobacco, their cotton. Through national and International Markets at a time when theres not a whole lot of money. And so what these agricultural trade wars do is tap into this tradition for these better baby contests, these held reviews and they start to have very explicitly beauty contests for rural women that are associated with agricultural festivals and you start to see tobacco courts. Cotton queens, peanut queens, etc. And i think the idea there was to get the benefits of a beauty contest and these beautiful women, to sell our agricultural products, across the rest of the world, the number might be a little bit of opposition to saying this is a beauty contest and to inviting young women to come in and appear in their swimsuits, to be judged for their beauty and so i think by putting them in the agricultural products, these people found a way to deflect criticism. You can find these really interesting pictures of these young women wearing all these tobacco outfits on stage. The other thing that happened is these white beauty queens really served a kind of Public Relations function. For the white south. The white south did not always farewell in the International Media and for good reason. They reacted violently to black demands for equality, weve all seen the famous images places like mississippi, birmingham alabama. Where white southerners and the police are using attack dogs and fire hoses, so the white south did not look very good during these years. From the national media. One of the things these white beauty creams do is to service Public Relations in ambassadors and in a way likely impact those negative images that were emanating from the region. So you could open up an issue of say, Time Magazine or newsweek from the fall of 1956 and one of the things you will see our pictures of white southerners in places like clinton tennessee. Fighting against the desegregation of the local School System and you will see these white writers essentially outfoxing members of the press , attacking africanamericans but in the same issue of that magazine you will see a picture of a newly crowned miss america who hates this out. So the images serve this function that really says no, we are not a region of violence. Were not a region of brutality. Were also region of a tradition of grace and tranquility and beauty. Not just southerners but all of america, all of americans come to see what southern women and especially beautiful, as the rightful owners. Of female physical beauty. For black women, this is really difficult. Black women have struggled since slavery to claim beauty. And for white women to be getting this stage, is kind of a slap in the face and there are a couple of examples of black women talking about this. How they relate and the consequences of this. I think if you wanted to say in a nutshell. The relation to white southern women versus black women, i think white southern womens relationships with beauty, essentially their pursuit of beauty, more often than not serves to strengthen jim crow. Segregation. Black womenby contrast more often than not , their pursuit of beauty was more about trying to end jim crow and the segregation, respected, fight it, attack it at some point. So one of the things that was interested in is the way in which beauty could provide black southern women and opportunity early on, specifically being a beautician. I think a lot of americans today, they are facing life steel mandalas who came out in the 1980s, about a small beauty shop in louisiana, a lot of americans might say it was a southern beauty shop with white southern women. Certainly they become important but early on, with beauty shop as an institution. It is really really integral to the black womens lives in the south. And nonwhites. And this was because there were a number of really important black female entrepreneurs in the beauty business in the south. Several of them became quite famous, madame walker is one. Maybe malone is another. But there were actually dozens and dozens all over the region, the most famous but if you open up any africanamerican newspaper in the early 20th century, you will see ads placed by the local beautician who has created her own system to help black women groom their hair. But what was revealing the week or two i was working with census data and i decided to look at the number of women with mutations in the south and i was looking at blackwomen and white women , in 1920 the number of black beauticians in Southern States was really extraordinary. And far outpaced the number of white women in Southern States who identified as beauticians. So in mississippi for example, there were over 500 black women who were beauticians in 1920. There were over 22 white women who were beauticians. So what black women figure out early on is this is a line of work that paid, that gave them some flexibility. And crucially, gave them Financial Independence from whites. If you are a selfemployed businesswoman and you dont have to answer to a whiteboss in the jim crow south, thats going to be very, very attractive. It was. So by the time, the classical phase of the Civil Rights Movement began, these beauty parlors have emerged as really crucial sites for the Civil Rights Movement. I would argue that they have played the civil rights roll all through the 20th century but certainly you see them taking on the role of the Civil Rights Movement and beauty is a famous civil rights activist in mississippi wrote of age in the 60s. She was arrested in a jackson mississippi sitting in 1963 and one of the things that happened in that sitting is that all of these white people doused her with confidence and this happened a lot at citizens. You would leave the sin and end up eventually retreating into a beauty shop because she knows the beautician there will be sympathetic and will help her kind of repair her body and soul because its a humiliating attack and she does. All the women were there waiting to get their hair done and moody is moved to the head of the line so beautician can wash her hair, take off her stockings, washes all of the government out of them. Something like beauty, the pursuit of beauty was very much tangled up with other social and political realities of jim crow. The pursuit of beauty was one way to strengthen jim crow. It was one way to attack jim crow. It was a set of rituals, a set of practices that were available to women living in the south. How they used it depended on who they were. What they wanted. But it was there and it was true, this women did use it in this way. Now book tv visits Fresno California with the help of our Comcast Cable partner to talk about author tim holyoke who argues for stronger lobbying regulations and advocacy in his book the ethhical lobbyist reforming washingtons influence