6. Miss America During WWII
As mentioned earlier, an artist named Howard Chandler Christy was a judge in the Miss America Pageant for several years, because he was an artist who used models in his paintings. He specialized in war bond advertising, and became famous for the picture of a young woman in a sailor suit. The tradition of associating Miss America with attracting people into buying war bonds with the face of the “Girl Next Door” became popular, and it continued on for decades.
Venus Ramey won Miss America in 1944, and she spent her year of touring the country to ask citizens to buy war bonds to help the soldiers overseas. She personally raised millions of dollars, which was more than any other celebrity endorsement or advertisement in the movie theater.
During the war, a lot of airplane pilots would paint pin up girls on the sides of their airplanes. At least one of them featured a woman who looked like the spitting image Venus Ramey riding a bomb. Even after the war was over, and Venus returned to live at her family farm in Kentucky, she ended up in the newspapers again, after using a shotgun to blow out the tires of men who were trying to rob her.
It was no secret that people loved Miss America, and she became a symbol of patriotism. Pictures like the one seen above became the new idea of what an American girl should be, and it was just a beginning of style changes and so much more to come in the future.