Interwar Britain

Beauty contests are frequently dismissed as sexist exploitation which encourage audiences to judge women solely upon their looks. This criticism can be traced back to Women’s Liberation protests at the 1968 Miss America and 1970 Miss World contests in Atlantic City and London, respectively. One former protester recalled that the Miss America contest ‘taught young girls that the important thing in life…was to get a man, to be sexy, to be superficial’.

Such objections continue to be voiced today. Professor June Purvis recently opined that modern beauty pageants cannot be separated ‘from the decades of objectification and sexism that they are originally associated with…It has passed its sell by date’. For critics, Miss World is Miss Exploited, and should be Miss Anachronism.

These claims do hold truth. Contests often idealise highly conservative visions of youthful womanhood. Miss World cannot be divorced or have children. As a fig leaf to equality, neither can Mr England. Contest organisers also exercise extensive control over winners’ images. In 2019, Miss Nevada had her crown taken away for posting right-wing comments online. Likewise, Miss Crimea nearly lost her title for singing a song, perceived to be pro-Ukraine. Beauty queens, then, appear to be constrained by organisers’ desire for the role to be ‘apolitical’.

Yet, contests continue to be wildly popular. In 2019, almost 20,000 women entered the Miss England contest. When asked why they chose to participate, the buzzword refrain of most beauty queens is that they feel ‘empowered’ by competing. It is, however, left unsaid exactly how it empowers them. Taking these contestants seriously, it is worth considering how beauty contests can be perceived as a form of empowerment.

One means of answering this question is to look at one of the first major British beauty contests: the Railway Queen. Established in 1925 and running until 1975, Railway Queens were crowned annually at the Railway Employees’ Carnival at Belle Vue stadium, Manchester. Eligible candidates were daughters, aged between 12 and 16, of unionised railway employees. Wearing full regalia of tiara and velvet robe, Railway Queens served terms of a year performing sundry official engagements: giving speeches, cutting ribbons, and presiding over civic occasions.

The chief duty of Railway Queens was to serve as an ‘Ambassadress of Peace’ for the railway trade unions. After the devastations of the Great War, the Railway Queen advocated that no war could be ‘great’. Their chain of office was symbolic of this. Dubbed the ‘International Chain’, it was comprised of gold links given to each Railway Queen during official overseas visits. It symbolised the uniting of railway employees around the world in an ever-growing ‘chain of peace’.^[1]

During their international tours, Railway Queens undertook the role of diplomatic envoy. In 1935, fourteen-year-old Gracie Jones undertook a five-week tour of North America, travelling from New York to Montreal.^[2] The countless formal gift exchanges, speeches, and ceremonial duties Gracie performed were key to underpinning cordial transatlantic relations between Anglo-American trade unions. These overseas trips were also major media spectacles. When Railway Queen Audrey Mosson visited Moscow in 1936, she was filmed meeting Josef Stalin. This was then projected in cinemas across Britain and the Soviet Union.

Railway Queens’ own voices were palpably heard during such tours. Jones was interviewed by the Washington Post in the United States, where she stated ‘‘I had heard they [Americans] were rude and abrupt but I find them attractive, attentive, and altogether pleasing’.[3] During Railway Queen Ena Best’s 1928 visit to France, she was the only member of the party who could speak French. Alongside her many official speeches, she also had to order everyone’s meals. Railway Queens, then, were prominent trade union ambassadresses who undertook a demanding and skilled diplomatic role. Thus, becoming a Railway Queen was one of the few means by which young, working-class women could participate directly in international politics.

Serving as a beauty queen, therefore, did not reduce winners to objectified ornaments, nor ‘apolitical’ ciphers. For Railway Queens, it was an overtly political platform that enabled working-class women, typically overshadowed, a prominent, active role in transnational trade unionism.

So too, contemporary beauty queens continue to act as spokeswomen for various causes or ideals, whether supporting suicide prevention charities or campaigning for increased smear testing. Some women have even started to use beauty contests as a platform to diversify, even challenge, societal beauty standards. Women of colour participate to show beauty is not exclusively white; others project body positivity as Ms Curvaceous; still others compete without makeup to rail against convention.

Despite the looks-focused nature of such competitions, for many women it is evident that beauty queens are not merely gratuitous objectification. Indeed, for those whose perspectives and identities are otherwise marginalised, competing is a vital means of securing the limelight. Ultimately, where some women decry Miss Anachronism, others see Miss Empowerment.

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Conner Rivers Scott is a WRoCAH-funded PhD candidate in the department of history at the University of Sheffield. His doctoral research looks at British inter-war newsreels and their place in everyday life. In particular, this research will examine the ways in which newsreels (re)presented the public to itself between c.1920-c.1939, a time when the public was politically and socially reconstituted. More broadly, his research interests include twentieth-century British gender history, media history, and histories of everyday life.

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[1] Daily News (21 Aug 1928), 10; Daily Herald (27 Aug 1928), 7.

[2]The New York Times (20 Jun 1934), p.22; Los Angeles Times (22 Jun 1934), p.5.

[3]The Washington Post (21 Jun 1934), p.12.

Image source: Joseph M. Maurer, ‘Miss Universe 1930 Winners’ (1930), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Miss_Universe_1930_Winners.jpg

The cinema of the interwar era (1919-1939) is commonly acknowledged as being an essential factor in influencing girls and women. From their fashion choices and hairstyles to what was considered at the time to be “unfeminine” behaviours like smoking and drinking.[1]  With the introduction of sound to the cinema in 1927, a new attribute that could be influenced was acknowledged, the voice.

In 1927 a Daily Express columnist claimed that ‘we have several million people, mostly women, who, to all intent and purpose, are temporary American citizens’.[2] The increasing popularity of Hollywood films over British films perpetuated the fear of Americanisation of the British culture and its perceived effects on demoralising society, by introducing their lax attitude towards manners, morality and speech. The perception that Hollywood promoted democratising and egalitarian values to a British population who had nearly tripled their electorate with The Representation of the People Act (1918), presented a danger to the concepts and ideals of Britishness.

Films with synchronised sound and dialogue, dubbed “talkies”, soon became the primary experience of the film viewing public, replacing silent pictures as the new norm. Film played an important part in offering a presentation of “proper” British speech, behaviour, and morality that could be consumed and imitated by audiences. With the introduction of the Hollywood talkies, the concern of American influence was exacerbated due to the alleged corruption of the British language with Americanisms and slang.

The preferred voice of the British screen was that of “Received Pronunciation” (RP), the uniform way of speaking to allow not only for the audience to understand the dialogue without confusing regional dialects, but to introduce a “correct” way of speaking by broadcasting the ‘superior speech’.[3] Yet in what Rachael Low calls ‘class-ridden Britain’, the audiences complained more about the ‘oxford accent’ and the ‘BBC voice’ associated with RP than the American slang and idioms of Hollywood films.[4] But how did this affect the relatability of female characters? Did hearing the voice of an actress ruin the illusion created of her on the silent screen, or would young women be more inclined to embody her, including the way she talked?

The female voice was subjected to unsubstantiated concerns over its suitability for broadcast, as women were considered incapable of retaining the attention of listeners because their voices were less commanding and could be at times “monotonous […] and shrill”, creating an unpleasant listening experience. Claims even went as far as suggesting that even if women’s voices were used, they wouldn’t have anything interesting to say anyway.

The introduction of sound to pictures only increased the list of things that a woman could be criticised for and added another aspect of femininity that could be idealised, learnt and conformed to. Larraine Porter suggests that sound cinema ‘created a vogue for particular kinds of voices’ and expected women’s voices to transform towards feminine desirability.[5]

Before the introduction of sound to film, cinema had already created visual forms of women that represented feminine desirability, sexuality, and the different tropes of female characters, to be instantly recognisable to an audience. This meant that women’s voices needed to match the aura of the character; high-pitched and girly for a youthful innocent image, lower-pitched for one of sexual promiscuity, and even manlier images. With the wrong voice, she may ruin her allure, desirability, and feminine image.

Cinema-goers when watching their favourite star had already formed an idea of their voices despite never hearing them which made it near impossible for actresses to meet expectations of their on-screen persona. The impossibility for these already successful silent actresses to meet vocal expectations set them up for inevitable criticism at every turn, they may be too high, too low, too monotonous, too fast, too slow, too weak and thin or too strong and mannish. Each critique set back the female voice, becoming evident that women were being punished for speaking at all, for occupying what radio considered to be a male vocal space.[6]

In The Film Gone Male written by Dorothy Richardson in 1932, she argued that the silent film was a feminine space that had been masculinised by the introduction of sound. The silent film produced images of feminine experiences and realities, and these male voices took away from the female audience’s experience, describing women as ‘humanities silent half’.[7] In silent film, the female audiences could easily envision themselves or insert their own voices and experiences onto the female characters being portrayed. Antonia Lant too, argues that the silent film was considered by female audiences to hold a feminine universalism, transposing onto silent film the value of femininity. After the introduction of the more dominant male voice in cinema, many women critics felt like on-screen women lost their voice, and in turn women in British society did too, suggesting that men became established as the possessor of the voice.

The arrival of sound to British film cemented pre-existing silent film gender tropes and set a precedence for the marginalisation of women’s vocal presence in film. Despite the fact that the majority of cinema audiences were made up of women, early sound cinema had developed an aversion toward the female voice that remains in film to this day.

Rachel Bogush is a PhD student at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on modern femininity in interwar British media. She tweets at @rachelbogush.

Cover Image: Exhibitor’s Herald, April 9th 1921. Still of the cast and production crew from the American comedy drama film The Affairs of Anatol (1921). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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[1] C. Grandy, Heroes and Happy Endings: Class, Gender, and Nation in Popular Film and Fiction in Interwar Britain, (2014), p.3

S. Harper, Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, (2000),

[2] Daily Express, 18 March 1927, p. 6.

[3] A. Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars, (1991) P.215

[4] R. Low, The History of the British Film 1929-1939: Film making in 1930s Britain, (1985), p.89

[5] L. Porter, ‘“Have You a Happy Voice?” Women’s Voices and the Talkie Revolution in Britain 1929–1932’, MSMI, Vol.12:2, (2018), p.141

[6] Ibid., 152

[7] Richardson, D., Continuous Performance: The Film Gone Male (1932), in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, (1983)