Antonia Byatt, Director of the Women' Library
"The collections at The Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University, have their roots in the suffrage campaigns. Dame Millicent Fawcett, the President of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, was keen to preserve the story of women’s incredible fight for the vote and so the Library was founded bringing together the papers of organisations and individuals involved as well as an extraordinary collection of campaigning material from banners to badges. Over time the papers of other campaigns concerned with women’s equality have been collected in the Library’s collections from campaigns for equal pay to rights for lone parents. One such collection of material reflected women’s concerns during the 1970s about beauty contests and documented protest material against Miss World.

When an archive containing the story of the Miss Great Britain context became available the Library snapped it up, as it contained information about the other side of the story. Not only does the Miss Great Britain archive document the history of the beauty contest at the British seaside, it also gives us a clue about the lives of ordinary women who took part in the contests, who they were and the attitudes displayed towards them. The exhibition contains evocative material including a swimsuit still stained with fake tan, evoking the whole business of the show and the amount of dressing up and disguise from daily life that went on. Films and photographs of the parade make comment on the nature of both the male and female gaze during the second half of the 20th century. The archive also provides interesting information about perceptions of body shape and beauty and how these changed over the last 50 years.

I was thrilled when Dawn Shorten agreed to initiate a complementary project with Fine Art students at Sir John Cass. The students came in and looked at the archive, at the fantastic photographs selected for the exhibition and some of the documentation around the contest and used them to stimulate their thoughts and their work. I was equally pleased when funding was achieved from the Royal Female School of Art Foundation so that artist Jessica Voorsanger could work with the students and we are lucky that her own piece, an exquisite pastiche of ‘Miss Congeniality’ is included in the exhibition. Together the works in the exhibition question the nature of a contest and our attitudes to beauty from Alison Reddish’s photographs of a cattle show to the mechanical and comic ‘Beauty Contest’ in Edita Marelic’s animation. Jane Todd’s photographs of her childhood beauty dreams reference female desires as Caroline Hallidays’s gathered comments question them and P Farnum Hilliard’s remarkable ticker tape of vital statistics is a powerful reminder of idealised concepts of the female body (and the reality!). Nazmeen Latif’s work makes reference to many other aspects of our collections by using a traditional form of female craft to question values around beauty. It is wonderful having such an immediate contemporary response to historical material and the project brings the exhibition into a present day context.

We are very keen that our archives are not solely used for historical research – they are too rich and vibrant and an invaluable resource across many disciplines. The Library contains a large amount of highly stimulating visual and social material which provide wonderful resource for artists and I hope that this project will be the first of many."