This project looks at how acute political concerns were translated to popular culture. Miss Europe was a response of multiple crises: a crisis of gender relations, which for many commentators across the continent, but particularly in France, was the cause for the breakdown of family structures; a crisis of modernity, as the wounds of the Great War were yet to heal; and a crisis of European unity, since for increasingly many people across the political divide, pacifism and internationalism were the means for avoiding another outbreak of war.
This paper also argues that Miss Europe helped to cement conservative ideals, but brought with it consequences that its organizers did not foresee. It both institutionalized conservative gender relations and promoted the globalization of the Modern Girl economy. It both reproduced racial prejudice, and provided a forum where such prejudices could be challenged, although not without costs and boundaries. The organizers of the pageant were changing the gendered world of interwar Europe, but never in the way they hoped to.
