Margot Mifflin is an author and journalist who writes about women’s history and the arts. She pioneered the study of women’s tattoo history with Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo.  Her second book,  The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman, was a finalist for the Caroline Bancroft History Prize. Her most recent book, Looking For Miss America: A Pageant’s 100-Year Quest to Define Womanhood, is the first cultural history of the Miss America pageant. Margot’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The NewYorker.com, Vogue, Vice, Elle, ARTnews, Bookforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, Feministing, Lapham’s Quarterly, Lit Hub, and other publications.

Margot is an English professor at Lehman College/CUNY and teaches arts journalism at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. She has served as a consultant on exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, The New York Historical Society, and The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and curated the exhibition “Body Electric” at Ricco/Maresca Gallery.

Take it away, Margot!

Why do you think the Miss America story is important today?

We’re in the midst of a painful national reckoning about what it means to be American, and for the past century, the pageant has tried to define that by crowning an ideal American woman. The pageant’s trajectory reflects American assumptions about immigration (it was launched shortly after 20 million immigrants landed on our shores), national purity (for the pageant’s first 50 years, no women of color were crowned) and proper American womanhood (the swimsuit had just replaced woolen dresses women previously swam in, but the question of how much skin it could reveal was being literally legislated city by city.) 

It’s no coincidence that the pageant was launched a year after the 19th Amendment was passed; it championed values in direct conflict with the goals of first wave feminism: domesticity, virginity, and marriageability. (The first question winners were asked was when and what kind of man they would like to marry.) Even the sash itself was an appropriation of the suffragette sashes women wore to denote women’s collective political identity by state: the contestants wore them to signify individual identity, pitting women against each other regionally for a national title that rewarded appearance, not women’s agency or participation in national politics. So as a reactionary institution, each step of Miss America’s evolution tracks with some development in our culture, whether electoral politics, immigration, war, fashion, feminism or (once scholarships were added in the 1940s) women’s higher education.

But wherever you have a repressive institution, someone is going to rebel, and that’s where Miss America gets interesting. Especially in the early 20th century, when women had fewer professional opportunities and competed as a means to financial and social mobility, some ambitious and courageous women flouted the rules. One refused to wear a swimsuit during her reign, causing a pageant sponsor to withdraw and create the Miss Universe pageant. Others used the title for unexpected ends: for example, Miss America 1958 Marilyn Van Derbur revealed—despite the disapproval of the pageant director–that she was an incest survivor and to this day works to support survivors of sexual abuse. I quote her talking about how the social and physical discipline Miss America required was useful to her in “locking up” her body and containing the trauma she experienced at the hands of her father. It was something she—and other winners—had to unlearn for the sake of their own mental health.

At first glance, your three books cover very different subjects of women in history.  Are there common themes that link them?

They all explore female subcultures in which women, under the boot of patriarchy, are trying to gain traction financially or professionally, or both. My book Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo, is a feminist history of Western tattoo art. Tattooing has historically been not only a male dominated but also a very macho profession in Europe and the US; the women who broke in as artists starting in the early 20th century were up against tremendous resistance, and transformed this medium by adapting it, in the late 20th century, to specifically female ends, like mastectomy scar coverups or designs specific to the female form. My book The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman grew out of Bodies of Subversion, but it too describes a woman socially marginalized, having been tattooed on her chin as a member of the Mohave tribe, which adopted and raised her after her pioneer family’s death in a wagon train attack. She was pushed into the spotlight and became a reluctant—but very effective—public speaker in the late 1850s, at a time when women had only just started to campaign for their rights. So, like the other women I’ve written about, she was up against very stubborn expectations of women’s social roles, and transcended them in the process of recounting her bicultural life.

What are you working on now?

I’m at work on a book about another sort-of subculture: Quaker abolitionist feminists of the early 1880s.The two most powerful social movements of 19th century America—abolition and women’s suffrage—were dominated by Quaker women. From its birth in Britain in the 1620s, Quakerism encouraged women’s independent travel, preaching, and gender equality, priming them for lives of advocacy that ultimately helped end slavery and secure the vote for women. Some of these women are well-known–Lucretia Mott, the Grimké sisters, Susan B. Anthony, Abby Kelley, Lucy Stone—but the religious foundation of their activism is not. Likewise, dozens of lesser known, equally dauntless Quaker feminists shaped the course of antebellum history, notably the Black abolitionist Grace Bustill Douglass, a founder of the bi-racial Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. While it was African Americans themselves who launched and led the bravest fight and took the greatest risks in the push for abolition, Quaker women used their public platform to advance it, attempting—not always successfully—to build an intersectional movement.

A question from Margot: Relevant to your book Understanding Socialism:
What are the biggest misconceptions about socialism at play in contemporary politics (especially in the Trump administration)?

The two biggest factual misconceptions are that socialism and communism are the same thing and that any government-owned, -funded, or subsidized program is socialist. However, the most deep-seated misuse of socialism in politics today is based on fear rather than on misunderstanding.

Over the last hundred years, Americans have been both baffled and frightened by socialism.  Periodic “red scares” have shaped America’s domestic and foreign policy at times of national crisis,* beginning in 1919 when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was convinced that socialists were plotting to overthrow the government. Without evidence, he arrested thousands of communists, socialists, and anarchists—most of whom trouble organizing a small political party, let alone a revolution—and held them without trial. (I will leave you to draw comparisons or not as you choose.)

Today, the popular understanding of socialism is still shaped to a great degree by the Cold War, which was often described in terms of a battle to the death between good (capitalism) and evil (communism). As a result, many people equate socialism with an attack on American values, without reference to the many different forms and ideals it has encompassed over the centuries, and use “socialist” as an epithet with no particular meaning.

*Though it is an open question whether such red scares are the cause or the result of the crises they accompany.

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Interested in learning more about Lydia and her work? Check out her website: https://margotmifflin.com/

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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with historical novelist Joan Fernandez, author of Saving Vincent, the story Jo Van Gogh.