From small town carnivals to glittering international events hinting at a fast lane to stardom, the beauty contest is a phenomenon on which everyone is supposed to have an opinion.

Little girls, according to stereotype, dream of winning one. Long after the golden age of television, a resilient audience of viewers enjoys the feel-good buzz, undemanding entertainment and glitz. And feminists still throw up their arms in horror, convinced all the tinkering in the world does not stop contestants being treated as sex objects.

One of the biggest beauty contests of them all is Miss America, an event stretching back to the pre-war, pre-depression age of flapper girls, hedonism and jazz.

As the newly crowned holder of the title, Nina Davuluri, proceeds from city to city on her inaugural “nationwide media tour”, it is tempting to suggest the difference of views essentially boils down to a single question: is it all harmless fun, or an unseemly spectacle demeaning to women?

But in the case of Davuluri, a gynaecologist’s daughter with lofty medical ambitions of her own, the early experience of becoming Miss America 2014 is a little more complicated.

Her small entry into social history goes deeper than being selected as the best of 52 finalists in what the organisers grandly call an event that “transcends being just a beauty pageant”, producing winners who work “to advance the business of scholarship and community service for women”.

The new Miss America also happens to be the first woman of Indian origin to win the title. Had she been alive when it all began in 1921, she would have been disqualified; the spirit of the contest was already established even if it took a few years to evolve into Rule Number Seven requiring candidates to be "of good health and of the white race".

If that seems disgraceful but of its age, it took half a century before the first African-American contestant appeared among finalists. A further 13 years passed before Vanessa Williams became the first black Miss America. She was forced to give up the title after nude photos appeared in Penthouse magazine, though this did not stop her building a successful career in music, film and television.

Beauty contest organisers live in fear – unless they relish publicity of any kind, good or bad – of such scandals, contrived or otherwise. But during this year’s selection process, and her first few days after being awarded the title, Davuluri has been a model of wholesome virtue, remembering to praise the competition for having ”embraced diversity” and promising to use her US$50,000 (Dh183,600) prize money to finance medical studies.

But not every American warms to her origins as the daughter of Teluga immigrants who arrived in the US from the South India state of Andhra Pradesh more than 30 years ago.

Among a string of insulting racist messages on Twitter, some wrongly identified her as a Muslim or Arab – she is Hindu – or made crass allusions to terrorism. Others left little doubt that they would welcome a return of the race rule. “If you’re #MissAmerica you should have to be American”, one tweet read; “when will a white woman win #MissAmerica?” asked another, the spite and ignorance emphasised by upper case letters throughout.

Little matter that Davuluri was born in Syracuse, New York, graduated from the University of Michigan, regards herself as “first and foremost American” and hopes to make a career saving fellow-American lives as a cardiologist. Happily, media coverage of the affair told only part of the story; as one man commenting at a British news site noted, a “tsunami” of other messages offered support and congratulation.

To students of the beauty pageant, however, the unedifyingly bumpy start to her reign is just one more example of the contest’s knack of attracting controversy and polemic.

A closer look at the history of Miss America, and events like it, reveals a reality that extends far beyond the caricature, a procession of demure but dumb bimbos assuring interviewers of a heartfelt desire “to work with children”. But if the aims of pageant organisers have broadened, placing more emphasis on cerebral or worthy virtues than on pure beauty, critics ask whether the fundamental objective – to find the female, human equivalent of “best in show” at canine events – is remotely relevant to the present age?

For the origins of the modern pageant, wind back the clock a century and a half to Phineas Taylor Barnum. An eccentric New Englander whose varied activities stretched from politics to founding the circus that bears his name to this day, he launched an attempt to find a first US beauty queen in 1854. A public outcry, inspired by the notion that only women of “questionable reputation” would dream of entering, forced him to abandon the project. The popular US history textbook, A People and a Nation, and other sources record that he persevered with a more imaginative choice of contestants, from newspaper competitions featuring women’s photographs to shows with line-ups of babies, dogs and even chickens.

But Barnum’s original idea caught on despite the rigid moral code of Victorian times. Rehoboth Beach, in Delaware, is credited with having produced the first successful bathing beauty pageant in 1880, opposition muted by the modest attire of contestants and a strict set of rules on eligibility.

When, much later, Miss America was created, it was a gimmick intended by the Businessmen’s League of Atlantic City, New Jersey, to extend the tourist season beyond Labor Day, the first Monday of September. Winners of local newspaper competitions elsewhere in the US, based on photographs, were invited to take part.

A president of the local chamber of commerce, Frederick Hickman, would later sum up what judges were looking for: “Miss America represents the highest ideals. She is a real combination of beauty, grace, and intelligence, artistic and refined. She is a type which the American Girl might well emulate.”

The first winner, at a spectacle that drew a bumper crowd of 100,000 to the city’s Boardwalk Hall arena, was not initially Miss America at all.

Margaret Gorman, a bright, sporty 16-year-old from Washington, DC, won both categories, “Inter-City Beauty, Amateur” and “The Most Beautiful Bathing Girl in America”, and was duly named Golden Mermaid.

All this seemed too much of a mouthful a year later when Gorman was unable to represent her home city because it had a new Miss Washington, DC. So pageant officials opted to call her Miss America; long after her death at the age of 90, she remains the only holder of the title to have received the honour at the end of her reign and not its start.

Young Margaret may have been the easiest of winners to deal with. Things were to get trickier.

Few white Americans may have batted an eyelid at the ancestry tests imposed on candidates as late as 1940 to establish how American they really were. The 1945 Miss America, Bess Myerson, had to resist pressure to change her name to “something less Jewish”.

The US Public Broadcasting System (PBS) website records that, although Mifauny Shunatona was the first Native American to contest the award in 1941, 30 years passed before the contest included the next. According to the PBS report, it fell to Irma Nydia Vasquez from Puerto Rico and Yun Tau Zane from Hawaii to break the “colour bar” in 1948.

Contestants gradually became feistier, more determined to stick to their principles. Black participation was encouraged from the 1970s and efforts were made to attract professional women as competitors. The 1974 winner, Rebecca Ann King, a law student, publicly advocated legalised abortion; Claire Buffie, a contestant for the 2011 title, chose gay rights as her platform.

And the non-profit organisation of the Miss America contest of today stresses the importance of the scholarships the prize money is intended to fund. “The Miss America programme exists to provide personal and professional opportunities for young women and to promote their voices in culture, politics and the community,” the contest’s official website declares. “Almost all contestants have either received, or are in the process of earning, college or postgraduate degrees and utilise Miss America scholarship grants to further their educations.”

So Davuluri’s decision to devote her winnings to postgraduate medical studies comes as no surprise. Nor does her chosen platform: “Celebrating diversity through cultural competency”.

And against all odds, the formula – beauty, brains and social awareness – may be working. Reports from the US say TV ratings for the finale of Davuluri’s coronation jumped to 10 million, a long way short of the 27 million who tuned in to the first televised contest in 1954, but 1.7 million higher than a year ago.

In fact, the organisers are so jubilant at securing the best audience figures since 2004 that they will almost certainly not wish to be reminded of the later-life reflections of their first Miss America.

“Life has been extremely, I say extremely, kind,” Gorman said in an interview in her mid-70s. “[But] I never cared to be Miss America. It wasn’t my idea. I am so bored by it all. I really want to forget the whole thing.”

weekend@thenational.ae