Life With Daughters: Watching The Miss America Pageant by Gerald Early

The first essay I read was Life With Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant, by Gerald Early. Gerald Early is an accomplished essayist who has a doctorate in English literature and has won many awards for his essays. In addition to his successful professional life, he is married with two daughters, qualifying him to write an essay so family-centric like Life With Daughters. This essay is an exposé on how beauty is viewed in America, and how it is inherently unfair to black girls. Early describes his family watching the Miss America Pageant and the ways his daughters are affected by the standards of beauty set by it. He uses two example to show this, white vs. black barbie dolls and his daughters' journey to accept their natural hair. Early utilizes many anecdotes throughout the essay, particularly to show how his wife and daughters struggled with the standard of beauty set for them. He also uses dialogue to show a conversation between him and one of his daughters on the subject of her hair. This is effective because it shows the child's exact viewpoint, without being paraphrased. Early's audience for this essay is most likely people who are familiar with both racial problems in America and cultural events like Miss America. It is also most likely for older people who may have been through the same things as Early's wife and daughters. Life With Daughters strikes out at a deep-rooted problem in America and Early's purpose was to shed light on this racial issue. He tried to analyze how the Miss America Pageant factored into his daughters' view of themselves and what that meant for black women and girls as a whole in American society. I thought that while Early explored beauty in the past and present using both his wife and his daughters, he just didn't capture the magnitude of this problem. He tried to enhance his argument by focusing in on the beauty pageant but instead narrowed it. This racial issue is a fundamental problem and in my opinion the focus on the beauty pageant cluttered his argument.

Miss America Contestants 2011 (3 out of 50 are black), Grand Rapid News