Introduction
Child beauty pageants have been around for a long time. Brockman suggests they began in the 1960’s, although an article “Child beauty pageants” claimed the first one was staged in a hotel in Atlantic City in 1921, and that since the times of those earlier pageants, the pageant “industry” has grown to feature almost 25,000 pageants annually in the U.S. alone – a $5 billion per year business. As well as becoming much more common (and much more costly to enter), those pageants have also become highly controversial in a number of respects. This essay discusses some of the issues involved and ...
