Reacting to Changing Times

The questions that Mrs. NC State contestants were asked in the 1968-1969 academic year reflect topical concerns and respond to changing events.

The conservative iterations of womanhood expressed in the Mrs. NC State contest were increasingly challenged during the later period of the pageant.  What evidence we have of State’s Mates’ response to these challenges comes to us indirectly.

The questions that individual contestants were asked in 1968-1969 dealt with a number of controversial topics of the time, showing that State’s Mates at least made an attempt to respond to such issues as student protests and women’s roles in the workforce.  This is apparently atypical of local contests, where it is considered "unfair" to ask questions about current events.  The fact that the Mrs. NC State pageant did so is a sign that they attempted to remain locally engaged, and also of the heightened political awareness among the student population in the late 1960's.

Unfortunately, we cannot know what most of the contestants’ responses were, so it is hard to say how effectively they responded.  The winner of the pageant, who was asked if eighteen-year-olds should be allowed to vote, stated that they should because they were already old enough to serve in the armed forces.  This response, at least, was acceptable enough not to derail the contestant's win.

Joe Hill's review of the 1967 Mrs. NC State pageant praises the patriotism of one of the speakers.  If the pageants continued to express "good old Americanism" without properly responding to countercultural challenges, it may to some extent explain the increasing marginalization of State's Mates in the late 1960's and early 1970's.

The late 1960's were a challenging time for beauty pageants, because of the rise of the women's liberation movement.  The 1968 and 1969 Miss America pageants were both protested by feminists, who threw away bras and girdles, and burned magazines that they felt treated women as objects.  How the Mrs. NC State pageant portrayed itself, then, was important in the context of this cultural ferment.

This review suggests that at least a part of the beauty pageant affirmed larger conservative concerns: the reviewer praises that one of the speakers “gave a ‘Let’s return to good old Americanism’… flair to the evening.”  It is difficult to know whether a patriotic tone was in fact dominant throughout the pageant, but this particular reviewer did not see anything to unnerve him.  In the absence of other evidence, then, it appears that, within the venue of Mrs. NC State, State’s Mates continued to affirm values that were increasingly conservative in response to challenges from the New Left.

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