This image is the cover for the book Being Miss America, Discovering America

Being Miss America, Discovering America

“[Shindler] tells the story of her year wearing the crown while offering an incisive history and analysis of an always-controversial beauty contest.” —Kirkus Reviews

In Being Miss America, Kate Shindle interweaves an engrossing, witty memoir of her year as Miss America 1998 with a fascinating history of the pageant. She explores what it means to take on the mantle of America’s “ideal,” especially considering the evolution of the American female identity since the pageant’s inception. Shindle profiles winners and organization leaders and recounts important moments in the pageant’s story, with a special focus on Miss America’s iconoclasts, including Bess Myerson (1945), the only Jewish Miss America; Yolande Betbeze (1951), who crusaded against the pageant’s pinup image; and Kaye Lani Rae Rafko (1987), a working-class woman from Michigan who wanted to merge her famous title with her work as an oncology nurse. Shindle’s own account of her work as an AIDS activist—and finding ways to circumvent the “gown and crown” stereotypes of Miss America in order to talk honestly with high school students about safer sex—illuminates both the challenges and the opportunities that keep young women competing to become Miss America.

“Kate Shindle’s sharply observed, smart, and heartbreaking take on Miss America will be embraced by pageant super fans and should be required reading for everyone who’s thought about what it takes to be America’s ideal.” —Jennifer Weiner, New York Times-bestselling author

“This memoir offers a captivating cultural history of the last 100 years in America through the lens of the Miss America Pageant and its white-knuckled struggle to remain relevant.” —Library Journal

Kate Shindle

Kate Shindle, who represented the state of Illinois, was Miss America 1998. Today, she is a working stage actor who has starred in Broadway musicals, including Cabaret , Legally Blonde, Wonderland, and Jekyll & Hyde, and dozens of regional productions. She has sung at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, worked as a correspondent for NBC’s Today, and appeared in TV/film projects such as Capote and Gossip Girl. Shindle maintains relationships with many of Miss America’s volunteers and contestants and continues to speak and write about HIV/AIDS prevention, marriage equality, and other issues in the Huffington Post, salon.com, and Newsweek. She lives in New York City.

University of Texas Press