Making and Visualising British Beauty: workshop, seminar and reception with Amanda Vickery

Abstract: This paper examines the Miss Great Britain beauty pageant staged at Morecambe in Lancashire between 1945 and 1970, as an exercise in white Britishness, and a microcosm of female opportunities.  Beauty dramatizes the history of culture, bodies, class, race, gender and national identity. The Miss Great Britain contest was a highly visible performance of ideal femininity, hall-marking that which was desirable and conventional for post-war women.  It was not a bizarre spectacle remote from ordinary people’s lives.  Before the rise of television and the package holiday, the seaside beauty contest was interwoven in the leisure and parochial culture of the working and middle classes, ‘as big a part of British summers as ice creams and donkey rides’. The very title ‘Miss Great Britain’ raises issues of national identity, ethnicity and race.  Miss Great Britain sustained highly specific conventions of femininity: white, Anglo-Saxon and ladylike in the 1940s and 50s, graduating to white, Anglo-Saxon dolly birds in the 1960s and 70s. Despite the presence of black musical celebrities and Jewish variety performers on the judges’ bench, the acknowledgement of non-WASP ideals of attractiveness was very late and grudging. The contests expose just how thoroughly accepted and unproblematic was the transaction between female beauty and male power – even in its banal local council manifestation.  On the other hand, the beauty contestants flaunted their figures and self-belief, in a manner unthinkable for their grandmothers. Sexism was woven into the beauty contest, but so was the possibility that a nice girl might exhibit an appropriately disciplined body without shame.