Gwendolyn Mumma, if you’re out there, you should know you’re one hot chick. Or at least you were in 1955. That’s the year The Peer, a monthly news and humor magazine at Duke, named you “Peer Girl of the Month,” and they put that glossy pic of you applying your lipstick coyly on the back page. Congrats.
You know those beauty pageants at other schools, the ones were they crown Miss State University or parade the blonde girls in strapless dresses around the football field? Yeah? Well, guess what? They did that here too. And then some.
For nearly fifty years Duke crowned its queens—Beauty Queens, Homecoming Queens, May Queens. But they weren’t all blonde, big-breasted bods. If anything, Duke’s beauty and personality competitions were a way for the girls who ruined the curves in class to show off their own, the girls who ran the campus groups to show that their lipstick, their strapless dresses, their big boobs were their other extracurriculars.
Don’t let it get you down, boys.
Judi Rudolf-Stratton was editor of the yearbook in 1966, six years before the Woman’s College merged with Trinity College. She was just Judi Rudolf then, a senior from the Midwest. But she also was in charge of running an election of sorts, where the entire student body voted for the Top 20 prettiest girls at Duke. She then recruited Van Johnson to pick The Chanticleer’s annual Beauty Queen out of a handful of their photographs. Johnson was about as nondescript as it gets, a B-list actor who had starred in such classic movies as The Big Hangover and Duchess of Idaho. It was all the rage to find such a guy to determine who was the prettiest girl at Duke, since photographs obviously told the whole story, and for some unknown reason these handsome cinema stars just jumped at the chance. Um, right.
Rudolf-Stratton’s Chanticleer crowned Esther Moger Stokes that year. And, for you skeptics out there, her biography mentioned nothing of housework or marriage, but instead said young Esther planned to “either work in the field of publishing or do graduate work in history, her major.” She now owns a landscaping company in Atlanta.
Duke women are smart, they always have been. And Duke women are beautiful, they always have been. You can be smart and beautiful despite what anybody says—even Van Johnson.
Yet as the contests and pageants—once so open and visible at Duke—slipped away, a more powerful undercurrent began enforcing the rules of beauty and giving way to that slippery slope, a mudpile at the bottom oozing with “effortless perfection.” Though the campus no longer gives birth each Thanksgiving Eve to overdecorated dances, and though newly minted President Richard Brodhead will never have to coronate a “sweet and lovely” young woman, the Duke community holds its own internalized beauty pageants in library bathrooms and 9 a.m. lectures.
Donna Lisker, head of the Women’s Center, and her colleagues found something unusual in the process of interviewing alumnae for the Women’s Initiative in 2003. “The beauty issue came up in different ways. Younger alums, from the last 10 years, talked a lot about the importance of looking good and fitting a certain ideal in terms of body size, clothes and make-up,” she says. “For older alums, the day to day experience was not like that at all. Certainly they dressed up for certain occasions, but they were more comfortable and less forced than the current students are now.”
Claire Marcom Whitehill was walking out of class one day in 1957 when a guy asked their professor if Whitehill was only getting an A because of her soft forehead curl, a baby’s smile and one killer set of dimples. “They were just mad because I made better grades than them,” laughs 1957’s class valedictorian, who later went on to earn a doctorate.
You know how hard it is to get a date at Duke these days? Things didn’t look so great back then either—unless, of course, you were on the Beauty Queen court. For Whitehill, who finished runner-up in the yearbook’s centerspread contest her freshman year, the pageantry was more an aside to the academic experience, with the added—and only—benefit of getting her a date.
“It improved your dating success a lot,” she says. “I was on a full scholarship and I had one pressure: to make good enough grades. I felt no pressure at all to look nice. My whole thrust was academics, and this beauty stuff, as far as I was concerned, was all just extra. I always thought that beauty was something that was a matter of chance and required no personal achievement.”
So for those who ever thought women at Duke came not for a B.A. or a B.S. but to earn their M.R.S., you were wrong. The all-women’s school was not for Southern debutantes in search of husbands. “The Woman’s College was never a finishing school,” says Tom Harkins, a University archivist.
Even while they were being told when they had to wear hose and if they could wear pants, Duke women strutted across West Campus, while all the boys who lived there gawked at these beauty queens who ran the show. “Everyone wanted to be glamorous, but there weren’t any pressures really. At least I didn’t feel any,” said Annette Cooper Lynch.
Lynch can still remember the night she was crowned Beauty Queen. It was 1964 and actor Jack Lemmon, a few years after starring in Some Like It Hot with Marilyn, picked her photo. They did the whole “Co-ed Ball” thing with the crepe paper and the white linen table clothes, the candy cane invitations and the girls in white gloves. When the spotlight made its way past the line of pretty young things in long white dresses, it stopped to illuminate Lynch in her sequins, a dapper first-year medical student outfitted in a tuxedo by her side.
“I was in disbelief. It was very flattering, but I mean embarrassing too,” she says. “People then who knew me know that I am not a very outlandish person.”
For Lynch, who earned a B.A. in French, those 15 minutes under the spotlight on that Thanksgiving eve meant little compared to 15 minutes with the microscope in her biochemistry lab. But the night has stayed with her longer than the crown—she celebrated forty years of marriage with her escort, Charles, this past May.
“I do not believe that anyone would truly object, male or female, to being told they might be attractive,” Lynch says. “But nobody bowed down to me. It was not such a large item in a life, not even a college life.”
Slowly, but surely, the number of pages in The Chanticleer dedicated to displaying the full-page portraits of the Beauty Queen and her court gave way. Women’s Studies courses popped up on the radar screen in 1968, and the campus queens merited only a listing in the back of that yearbook. By 1971 the campus tone had changed—people were braiding hair on the Quad, sporting long flowery skirts and tokin’ up at two o’clock.
Then the centerspread in The Chanticleer screamed, in bold white print on a black backdrop: WOMEN AT DUKE AND ELSEWHERE ARE DISCARDING THE FEMALE STEREOTYPE PLACED ON THEM BY SOCIETY. No beauty queens on promenade that year.
Sue Wasiolek, currently the Dean of Students, was a Duke undergrad in 1973, and still hasn’t left the school. “At the time when we’re just sort of coming off of the ’60s and the ’70s it was just not cool to do anything that appeared supportive or related to the establishment,” she says. “If it was something that was connected to the institution, students at that time really rejected it. There were a lot of spoofs on homecoming queens, you know, people would enter dogs, men. That was seen as really sort of showing the insignificance in many peoples’ minds and the stupidity of having a homecoming queen.”
Campus clamor brought a Women’s Studies program in ’83 and a major in ’93. Oh yeah, and Duke’s first female president, Nan Keohane, showed up that year too. Certainly no beauty queens then.
In the late 80s Susan Motyl-Smith was one of a dozen Dukies to be featured in a “Candids Calendar.” There were 12 guys too, but if you flipped it over, there was Nancy smiling for one month, Shiela posing for another, and Susan purring as Miss July 1987 in a tiger print bathing suit. But the beatnik, who usually wore patched jeans and bells, says she felt like a “fish out of water”—a woman who had been handpicked to be a beautiful girl but who, in the face of a mounting pressure to conform, felt solitarily unbeautiful.
“They thought, ‘My goodness! Who’s this hippie?’ I did feel a bit out of sorts [at Duke] because there was a lot of pressure to have that Southern look,” says Motyl-Smith, who grew up in South America and went to a liberal boarding school in Massachusetts. “You know, curling your hair every morning, putting make-up on your face, wearing cute little color coordinated outfits. I never fell into it, I kept my way.”
Once again, Duke women were being forced—though not told—what to wear and when to wear it. But Miss July didn’t think it was worth the effort, even as her picture would hang on the very walls of those girls who made her feel ugly. “The beatnik thing slowly faded, but I never became that kind of Southern Belle look,” she says. “I think that perhaps even in the calendar, with this tiger bathing suit, it was my way of saying that I’m not going to succumb to this look.”
A decade later, Heather Sue Mercer wanted to wear a lot more than a tiger bathing suit—she wanted to wear a football uniform as kicker for the Blue Devils. But Duke football coach Fred Goldsmith thought she’d make a better Miss December. “Why do you insist on playing football? Why not try something like beauty pageants?” she said the coach asked her.
Wearing a tiara meant something different now. Duke had no more official pageants, no more school-wide votes. Sure, the ’90s brought Duke its fair share of graduates who’ve excelled outside of class in pageantry—the kind of competition that now supposedly emphasizes the interview and a candidate’s platform over how she looks in a swimsuit. Dana Lane was Miss Wyoming 1995 and Kristen Luneberg was chosen as Miss North Carolina USA 2003. Law school alumnus Marjorie Vincent was crowned Miss America in 1991 and Ashley Wood currently reigns as Miss South Carolina 2004. But the private pageants linger on.
September 22 marked the finals of the Miss America Pageant, and by the time you’re reading this, the polished young woman wearing the crown will have undoubtedly made her rounds on Good Morning America and the Tonight Show. Maybe, just maybe, it’ll be a Blue Devil underneath that silver. Will they still say she still has that old-fashioned combination of beauty and brains? Or will she just be one hot chick?
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