Yolande Margaret Betbeze Fox (November 28, 1928 – February 22, 2016) was an American singer, feminist, activist and beauty pageant titleholder who was crowned Miss America 1951.
She captured her first crown in 1949 when she won Mobile's "Miss Torch" pageant.[3] In 1950, Fox (then Betbeze) entered Miss Alabama for the scholarship opportunities the pageant presented.[4] As Miss Alabama, she traveled to Atlantic City, New Jersey, to compete in the Miss America 1951 pageant. Having been educated in a convent school, she was reluctant to pose in a swimsuit and refused to do so after she won Miss America.[5] That led the swimsuit company, Catalina, to withdraw their sponsorship of the Miss America pageant and eventually brought about the creation of the rival Miss USA pageant.[2]
Fox's Miss America title, although won in 1950, was for 1951 and is the first Miss America title to be "postdated" in this manner. Due to the change, there was no Miss America 1950. The Miss America Organization has claimed that Fox's (then Betbeze's) actions were pivotal in directing pageant progress towards recognizing intellect, values, and leadership abilities, rather than focusing on beauty alone. From then on, the Miss America pageant concentrated more on scholarship than beauty.[2]
Fox was an opera singer and did gain a reputation in that area. She continued to sing, appearing with the Mobile Opera Guild (now the Mobile Opera), and helped found an off-Broadway theater.[3]
In the early 1990s, Yolande Fox was contacted by the writer Philip Roth, who was researching the Miss America beauty pageant for his novel American Pastoral. Roth studied Fox's scrapbooks and interviewed her about the culture surrounding the pageant in the late 1940s; he later said,
"She was very smart, very funny....She just opened up whole ideas for me that I couldn't have had on my own."[10]
Fox died on February 22, 2016, in Washington, D.C. of lung cancer.[1]
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