Last December 21, Miss America was sitting in an Applebee’s in Bismarck, North Dakota, eating an Oriental chicken salad, when she got a text letting her know an article was about to drop that would reorder her life. Since she’d been crowned on September 10 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, it was rare for her to have a moment when she could simply be Cara Mund, a 24-year-old who had grown up on a quiet, meandering street nearby, an only child whose mother, a school psychologist she describes as her best friend, had been diagnosed with cancer three times and whose father was a civil engineer. Home for Christmas, she was on the first extended break she’d had in months. By the time she checked her phone, the article was up.

Backstage at Miss Connecticut 2018
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Mund bears a resemblance to Miley Cyrus in her clean-cut Disney days and is petite—“Five foot six with the crown!” she tells me when we meet in early June, but five foot three without it—with long auburn hair, eyes that are the shocking blue of a glacial pool, and a warm way of speaking that makes it sound like she’s smiling, which, often, she is. She is composed, good-natured, and fiercely driven. As a 14-year-old, she founded an annual Make-A-Wish fashion show that’s gone on to raise $78,500; in 2011, she was honored for her efforts by Barack Obama, who has, she says, the softest hands she’s ever shaken. The guidance counselor at her public high school didn’t initially take her seriously when she said she wanted to go to an Ivy League college, but in 2016, she graduated with honors from Brown, where she became president of her sorority. Despite the fact that her main political experience is interning for Republican senator John Hoeven for five months, when she says that her goals include not only law school—she’s deferred from Notre Dame—but becoming North Dakota’s first female governor in 2024, it seems not just plausible, but likely. When I ask whether she’d run as a Republican or a Democrat, she says, “As Miss America. I’m an American.” And she smiles.

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Joshua Bright
At the Miss Connecticut pageant.

People are sometimes surprised to discover all this when they meet Mund, but there has long been a disconnect between what Miss America represents to those within the organization—for whom Mund embodies everything the title stands for—and how the competition is seen by those outside it, who assume that it is, at best, a kitschy, anachronistic Americana relic and, at worst, a ritual of conventional objectification. Started in 1921 as a “bathing beauty” contest meant to extend Atlantic City’s summer season, the Miss America pageant added a talent portion in 1935 (though this is defined somewhat loosely—contestants have packed suitcases, given dramatic interpretations of beatniks, and walked on broken glass) and began offering scholarships in 1945. Through the 1960s, more than 60 million people regularly tuned in to watch Miss America walk the runway to Bert Parks crooning, “There she is, your ideal.” But by 1995, Frank Deford, a four-time judge who wrote a book about the pageant, told the New York Times it had become a “kind of” pageant, as in: “You’re kind of good-looking. You’re kind of talented. You’re kind of smart. If you were superior at any of these things, you wouldn’t need to bother with this.” Last year, only 5.3 million watched Mund win. Miss America had been reality TV before there was reality TV, serving for decades as a rare avenue through which a pretty girl from a small town could channel her competitive urges and become abruptly, if briefly, a star. But now there’s America’s Got Talent, The Voice, and Dancing With the Stars. You can become a beauty blogger, a CEO, an Instagram influencer, the Bachelorette. In 1970, the number of women who competed in local, state, and national Miss America pageants was around 70,000. Last year, it was 3,987.

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Joshua Bright
Backstage at Miss Connecticut.

Yet to those who remain involved (Miss America, a nonprofit, is run almost exclusively by thousands of volunteers), it continues to be iconic: an organization that not only prepares women to be leaders and boosts their self-confidence, but also is the largest women-only scholarship provider in the world, granting close to $5 million each year. (Mund has won $95,000 in total scholarship funds.) That people don’t recognize the organization’s positive impact is largely assumed to be a messaging problem, one exacerbated by how often it gets confused with Miss USA, the for-profit corporation once owned by Donald Trump. (The oft-repeated line is: “Miss America is the girl who lives next door. Miss USA is the girl you wish lived next door.”) Both winners get a salary and the opportunity to promote a community service initiative or “platform.” But Miss USA gets a luxury New York apartment and a stylist. Miss America takes on a full-time job as the public face of a nonprofit.

Mund entered her first pageant when she was five, not long after her mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, making up a dance to “It’s Raining Men” and wearing a dress she’d pulled from her costume box. When she got a prize, it didn’t matter that the three other little girls she was competing against did, too. Mund was hooked. She went on to become Little Miss North Dakota, Miss North Dakota’s Outstanding Teen, Miss Oil Country, and Miss Northern Lights, among other titles, competing in the state pageant three times before becoming Miss North Dakota in 2017. This qualified her for Miss America, but she never imagined she’d take home the crown. In the past few decades, most winners have come from “pageant country”—the South and the Midwest. There had never even been a Miss America from North Dakota. When Mund’s name was announced onstage, the face she made as she clung to the runner-up, her mouth a perfect oval, wasn’t so much happiness as shock. Waving at the crowd while walking down the runway, she spotted her parents near the end, and when she reached them, she bent down, touched her crown, and said, “Is this real?”

Over the next few months, Mund traveled about 20,000 miles a month, living out of two overstuffed suitcases. By December, she had walked in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, given slews of speeches, and comforted children at countless hospitals. She had hugged an enormous pumpkin, been honored on the Senate floor, and appeared on Good Morning America.

Who doesn’t want to be empowered, learn leadership skills, and pay for college—and be able to show the world who you are as a person, from the inside of your soul?

Even the tough parts didn’t faze Mund. She knew what to expect. What she didn’t anticipate was the article she clicked on that night at Applebee’s, which revealed that Sam Haskell, then both the CEO and chair of the board of Miss America, had routinely disparaged former titleholders in emails. After the lead writer of the 2014 telecast joked that he’d switched all references to “Forever Miss Americas,” as they’re sometimes known, to read “Cunts” in the script, Haskell replied, “Perfect…bahahaha.” In response to a recent picture of Mallory Hagan, Miss America 2013, Haskell reportedly wrote, “OMG she is huge…and gross.”

The Miss America Organization had weathered scandals before. In 2014, for example, John Oliver debunked its claim that it offered $45 million in combined cash and tuition waivers (the number was closer to $6 million) and pointed out the absurdity of a scholarship organization requiring that contestants be unmarried with, as Oliver put it, a “mint-condition uterus”—at that time, to compete, you had to sign a contract declaring you had never been pregnant. (It now specifies that contestants not be parents.) But December 2017 was the height of the #MeToo movement. A day after the email leak, Dick Clark Productions, which had covered the telecast’s costs, officially cut ties, and the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (CRDA) declared it was reconsidering the $4 million it had promised toward keeping the pageant in Atlantic City. Then Haskell resigned, along with most of the board. Mund didn’t want to lose faith, but she had so many questions. She’d lie in bed, unable to sleep, wondering, “What’s the future of me?” What would become of the organization?

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Joshua Bright
Savannah Giammarco backstage at Miss Connecticut.

The answer came last June 5, when Gretchen Carlson, the new chairman of the board and the first former Miss America to serve in that role, appeared on Good Morning America. As Mund looked on from the wings, a crown pin affixed to her black sheathdress, Carlson stated: “So, we are no longer a pageant; we are a competition. We will no longer judge our candidates on their outward physical appearance. That’s huge. And it means we’ll no longer have a swimsuit competition.” Women of all shapes and sizes, she continued, were welcome: “Who doesn’t want to be empowered, learn leadership skills, and pay for college—and be able to show the world who you are as a person, from the inside of your soul?”

Mund and Carlson spent the rest of the day doing back-to-back interviews, hammering the talking points, which for Mund meant discussing what being Miss America actually entails. “I haven’t worn a swimsuit since the night I competed,” Mund said for the umpteenth time during one radio show. “So why are we putting women in them to choose Miss America?”

In fact, a few times, when she was staying in a hotel room with a whirlpool tub, Mund had filled it up, turned on the jets, put on a bathing suit (because you never knew who’d been in there before you), and slipped into the water. But she hadn’t worn a bathing suit in public. Miss America, it turned out, was allergic to chlorine.

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Joshua Bright
Miss America Crown

What Carlson often says now about her life is that it is surreal, and what she means is that it has a way of circling back on itself. As Miss America in 1989—something Carlson had pursued while on leave from Stanford because when her mom mentioned it, she “felt the familiar tingle of that competitive drive”—she’d gotten a frontline view into the particular conundrum of being an American woman. At her first New York press conference, a female reporter grilled Carlson, who’d been dubbed the “smart Miss America,” about current events and also asked if she was a virgin. Often people assumed she must be a bimbo. Others judged her for her looks. “It seemed that everyone’s sister and girlfriend was better-looking than Miss America!” she writes in her 2015 memoir, Getting Real.

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Joshua Bright
Backstage at Miss Connecticut.

But her experiences as Miss America also piqued her interest in broadcast journalism, and afterward, she built a career in that field, starting at a local station in Virginia and working her way up to Fox News, where she stayed for 11 years. Then in July of 2016, having just been laid off, she sued Roger Ailes for sexual harassment, a move that not only set in motion his ouster (and reportedly won Carlson a $20 million settlement) but helped usher in the #MeToo era.

Carlson has since become one of the movement’s most high-profile advocates. So it made sense that last December, as the Miss America saga unfolded, various former Miss Americas began suggesting she get involved. “My two worlds collided,” she says. She stepped in as the chairman of the board, and then, at the new board’s first annual meeting last March, it decided to get rid of the swimsuit competition.

For Carlson, this was personal vindication—she had dreaded that portion of the event (“Short waist, all that stuff,” she says) and trained for it so intensely in her parents’ basement that at one point, her dad asked her mom, “Is she going to die down there from working out too hard?” It was also, she thought, an empowering reflection of the fact that an organization turned upside down by a #MeToo prompted revelation had become one run mostly by women: At the time of the annual meeting, seven of nine members of the new board were women—all of whom were former titleholders. Regina Hopper, the new CEO, was Miss Arkansas 1983. “Did I like it? No,” she says about the swimsuit competition. “Did I think it was necessary? No.”

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Joshua Bright
Contestants in this year’s Miss Connecticut Outstanding Teen competition wait in the wings during rehearsal.

Since the board’s decision, the CRDA has come back on board, pledging $4.3 million, and the marketing company Young & Rubicam has agreed to work on repositioning the organization, pro bono. The new idea, Carlson says, is for the competition, set to air September 9 on ABC, to play out as if it is a day in the life of a successful woman. “You might be casual when you introduce yourself in the morning,” she says. “Then you put on a business suit and do an interview. Then you go out and do what you’re passionate about, which is your talent. And at night, you put on your evening attire.”

If Miss America isn’t a pageant and outer beauty isn’t supposed to matter, what has it even become?

In many ways, though, all this raises as many new questions as it answers. If it isn’t a pageant and outer beauty isn’t supposed to matter, what has it even become? And if it becomes progressive enough to silence feminist critics, will it lose all its viewers?

To Carlson, this last question is sexist “on its face,” she tells me. “You’re saying that the objectification of women is the only reason people watch.” But for some people, it is. After Carlson’s GMA appearance, Piers Morgan declared in the Daily Mail, “Nobody on the entire planet cares what comes out of the mouths of Miss America contestants unless they say something so dumb it makes us laugh out loud.… They’re there because they’re smoking hot.”

“This will silence the critics,” Carlson said during one of her post-GMA interviews. “What are they going to criticize now about empowering women and giving them leadership skills?”

It turns out there were lots of things. Some argued the swimsuit competition had been useful in showing how contestants could manage uncomfortable situations. (As last year’s judging manual read, “A beautiful and physically fit contestant who is nervous and shaking on stage may not be able to handle the job you are trying to fill.”) Some said it helped imbue participants with confidence. Some believed Miss America should be judged on her appearance. “We have to remember this is the Miss America competition,” says Betty Cantrell, Miss America 2016. “This isn’t some regular competition. She’s the ideal. She embodies beauty, grace, poise, and intelligence.” Most thought judges would still take appearance into account. “So they’re not in itsy-bitsy bikinis and high-heeled shoes,” says Blain Roberts, a history professor at Fresno State. “The focus is still going to be on the body.” Others felt the new board didn’t go far enough. “Taking swimsuit away makes it less sexualizing,” says Susan Bordo, a professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Kentucky. “It doesn’t do anything to break into the association that being a woman is first and foremost, as [novelist] John Berger put it ages ago, to be seen.” (Regarding the show presenting a day in the life of a successful woman, she said, “What a load of crap.”)

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Joshua Bright
At the Miss Connecticut pageant.

These types of attacks are, for the organization, nothing new. “The pageant has been on the defensive since it was founded,” Roberts says. “That’s as much a part of its history as anything else.” Between 1928 and 1933, upright moralists shut it down, claiming it oversexualized women. In 1968, feminists organized what proved to be the first major demonstration of the women’s liberation movement, gathering on the boardwalk to crown a live ewe and throw garters, bras, and women’s magazines into a trash bin that they’d planned to set ablaze—which is how the moniker “bra burners” came to be. (They didn’t actually set fire to anything, since they couldn’t get the proper permit—“Just shows you we’ve been too law abiding,” Gloria Steinem quipped in a 2012 PBS documentary.)

Critics have come from inside the organization, too. Through early summer, drama raged inside the board, bursting into the open in July, when Page Six reported that four members who’d recently left had posted in a private Facebook group to describe the board as “incredibly toxic” and the leadership as unreceptive to oversight. The rift grew with a petition, signed by 22 state pageant representatives, calling for the resignation of the entire board, including Carlson and Hopper. This was countered by a letter, provided to the Press of Atlantic City and listing 30 former Miss Americas as signatories, saying they “fully support Gretchen Carlson…and our unified board.” A few later said they hadn’t had a chance to review the letter before it was sent. (Days earlier, news had broken that a contestant at the 2018 Miss Massachusetts pageant had resigned over a skit from the show. In it, a woman tells a person dressed up as God that she doesn’t understand why the swimsuit competition was eliminated. “Me too, Amy,” God replies, holding a #MeToo sign to huge cheers.)

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Gretchen Carlson just after becoming Miss America.

On July 9, Carlson returned to Good Morning America. “Listen, change is difficult,” she said. Hopper reiterated this when I spoke to her soon afterward. Their opponents contend they are not upset by the changes, but by how they were made. “It is poor leadership, and poor governance,” says former board member Jennifer Vaden Barth. Both sides accuse the other of power grabs and self-interest. At press time, with two months to go before the pageant, the controversy showed no sign of letting up. “I’ve never been part of a civil war before,” pageant coach Chris Saltalamacchio told the Washington Post. “But that’s what this is.… I’m worried fights are going to break out in the lobby bar, if I’m being honest.”

By the time Miss America announced there wouldn’t be a swimsuit competition, a few state pageants had happened, but many had not, and most moved ahead unchanged. The contestants for Miss Connecticut arrived that same June day to the Courtyard Marriott in Waterbury, where they’d be staying leading up to the pageant on Saturday. Almost all of them were asked about the news during their private interviews with the judges. “It was kind of a sink-or- swim situation,” says Bridget Oei, Miss Mountain Laurel, a willowy 22-year-old with the straight-backed posture of a dancer, who plans to be an orthopedist. As for her thoughts: “Change is important. Rest in peace, swimsuit.”

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Joshua Bright
Bridget Oei crowned as Miss Connecticut 2018.

On Saturday afternoon, I walk through the ornate Palace Theater, where the pageant is taking place, and follow the smell of hair spray downstairs to a warren of dressing rooms filled with racks jammed with gowns and suitcase-size makeup kits in various stages of explosion. Next door is a room with the remains of lunch on some tables—empty pizza boxes, taco meat, coconut water. “This is like our greenroom,” says Savannah Giammarco, Miss Southern Connecticut, who has big eyes, bigger hair, and a Sophia Loren vibe. She is sitting with Oei and Treneé McGee, Miss Shoreline, who describes herself as “really a sneaker girl.”

“I don’t mean this to come off any particular way, but people look at me like I’m this glamorous figure,” Giammarco says. (At this, McGee rolls her eyes, though in a friendly way.) “But prepuberty, I was short and chubby and had buckteeth and a unibrow.” After being bullied, she developed what she refers to as an undiagnosed eating disorder. It was pageants, she said, that helped her heal, because preparing for the swimsuit portion prompted her to focus on athleticism: “If you look at Miss America contestants, they haven’t been just skinny twigs.” McGee, on the other hand, welcomes the change. She’s been sharing a room with Oei, and the previous morning she’d popped up and immediately offered “her very presidential thoughts about swimsuits, pageants, and education,” as Oei puts it. That the swimsuit competition is tradition doesn’t seem reason enough to keep it, in McGee’s view. Miss America, after all, required contestants to be “of the white race” up through the 1950s (it wasn’t until 1970 that a black woman made it to the stage). Last year, after competing in Miss Connecticut, McGee was also body-shamed on pageant message boards. Still, she says pageants “helped me become comfortable with my beauty. I needed the glamour side of it, because before, I was never comfortable enough with myself to even think of putting on a dress outside of prom.”

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Cara Mund after winning the title last September.

A few hours later, as 1,200-plus people file into the theater, women downstairs touch up their makeup and help one another recurl sections of their hair. Lauren Malella, a blonde with a cherubic face, opens her blue silk robe to contour her abs. McGee changes into a black jumpsuit. “It’s all in the sleeves, right?” she says. Then the prospective Misses and Teen Misses head upstairs to wait backstage, where blue light turns the rhinestones into a Milky Way’s worth of sparkle.

Finally, with the energy of a taut spring unpopping, the show kicks off: The 21 Miss contestants perform an ensemble dance, and the Teen Misses do a fitness routine. Malella dances the dying swan scene from the ballet Swan Lake, her face in a fury as she bats her wings; McGee delivers a dramatic monologue she’s written, titled “We the Women”; Oei performs an Irish step dance, her feet kicking up to her face. The Misses glide onstage in their evening gowns and then, winnowed down to eight, come on in their bikinis, pulling off a sarong as they walk to the front of the stage and pose once, then twice. The crowd roars. Giammarco rips hers off with emphasis. McGee gives the audience a fierce look. Backstage, a girl murmurs, “I’m so sad they’re getting rid of swimsuit.”

By the end of the night, it comes down to McGee, Giammarco, and Oei, then Giammarco and Oei. “Drum roll, please,” the MC says, and the Teen Misses, watching from the wings, smack their thighs. When it’s announced that Oei has won, she crouches, her face in her hands, then stands. The crown goes on her head and the flowers into her arms; all the women embrace her. “Thank you! Thank you!” she mouths to the judges.

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Joshua Bright
Backstage at Miss Connecticut 2018.


A moment later, the house lights go up, and tiny girls in mini crowns rush up and down the aisles. Onstage, the curtain goes down, and whatever Cinderella story has been sustaining the energy dissipates. Girls cough. They slip off their heels. They plop down on the ground, their dresses surrounding them like fallen clouds of tulle.

Obviously, it is idealizing and banal. It is affirming and undermining, confidence boosting and disempowering, and sometimes all of the above.

What is equally true, watching from the wings, is that for a few hours, the contestants had also just been young women standing in bright, unforgiving lights, making the most of imperfect choices. They were as vulnerable as they would ever be. They were fueled by adrenaline and dreams. They were presenting themselves to the world and hoping that this time, against all odds, it would be kind.

This article originally appeared in the September 2018 issue of ELLE.

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