Lampoon Contest Sought Beauty Among College Women

The Class of 1946 dealt with extraordinary tensions their senior year as conflict enveloped the nation.

Many of the soldiers had yet to return, a railroad workers' strike paralyzed the country's transportation system and prisoners took over Alcatraz.

The turmoil of the nation, however, was not the only conflict for this year's 50th reunion class.

With their lives forever changed by the circumstances of World War II, students at Harvard and Radcliffe found themselves involved in another form of conflict--a beauty contest.

The episode began when a vaudeville impresario questioned the beauty of college women.

Billy Rose, who was married to Ethel Williams, a famous singer, concluded after much searching that "with very few exceptions, beautiful girls just don't go to college."

According to an article from the April 16, 1946 Crimson, Rose made his comment while judging a contest of Mississippi State College's most beautiful women.

For the next four weeks, many at Harvard were involved in what gradually turned into a lively--and sometimes bitter--debate.

Instead of giving a simple account of Rose's statement, The Crimson decided to engage in the debate itself by running the story under the headline, "No Wellesley Women Here to Refute Rose's 'Pretty Girls Don't Go to College.'"

Not satisfied with a text-only story, The Crimson also included a sketch of a homely woman and labeled her a "demure lass" from Radcliffe (see graphic, this page).

The next day, the Harvard Lampoon, a semi-secret Bow Street social organization that occasionally publishes a so-called humor magazine, also decided to enter the fray.

The Lampoon challenged Rose to a beauty contest between non-college women selected by Rose and those the Lampoon would choose from area women's colleges. Rose signed on within hours, and each party agreed to pick six women who would appear in evening gowns and swimsuits for the competition.

With the contest set for May 18, 1946, in the Oval Room of Boston's Copley Plaza Hotel, the Lampoon sent out letters to 50 women's college newspapers requesting two beautiful representatives from each for a preliminary contest.

But some people did not forget about The Crimson's sketch, and while the Lampoon was looking for contestants, members of Radcliffe's Edmands Cooperative House responded in a letter to the editor.

"We were surprised to find a sketch of a Wellesley undergraduate misnamed 'A Radcliffe Girl,'" they wrote. "We realize of course this is a typographical error."

The April 20 Radcliffe News also ran an editorial on the subject.

"The age of chivalry is dead, we realize," the editorial read. "Instead of coming to the defense of Harvard's women students, The Harvard Crimson...not only turned its back but slung a good right."

Radcliffe refused to send any representatives to the Lampoon's competition.

Janice Rowley '46, the editor of the Radcliffe News, announced that neither Radcliffe nor many other women's college papers would respond.

Expecting dozens of women to sign up for the preliminary competition, the Lampoon found itself rejected or ignored by nearly all the women's schools it contacted.

Nearly one week after the request for contestants was mailed, only one school had responded and others had made a point of rejecting the request.

Wellesley's news editor, Mary E. Hurff, said the school also would not participate and referred to the event as a "degenerate, pulchritude tilt."

Desperate for contestants, the Lampoon stretched its definition of college to include modeling schools.

In fact, only one of the six women contestants was enrolled in an academic institution: June Miller of Pembroke College.

By the time of the competition, the Lampoon had decided that Miller would be its number-one contestant.

The winner of the competition may remain a mystery, as no further record of the event after May 18 has been found and alumni interviewed did not recall the outcome.

But in the end, there was no real competition between Radcliffe and Wellesley over Harvard men.

Few Harvard men were around, and those who were found it very difficult to get to Wellesley because of the scarcity of automobile gas.

As Cecily C. Selby '46 said, "We had the men, and they didn't."