Mary Washington students have always been adept at finding ways to amuse themselves, and such efforts rose (or sank) to a new level in the 1970s with the improbable appearance of something called the “Wo-Man Contest.”
The event was conceived in the fall of 1977 by the Afro-American Association, whose only male member, freshman Cedric Rucker, took the lead in its development and promotion. Rucker, who would eventually return to then-Mary Washington College to become dean of student affairs, recalled years later that the genesis of the idea had been the disdain expressed by the organization’s women over the sexism of the Miss America contest. “They were saying, ‘Men never have to go through that sort of thing. What would it be like for men to have to wear swimsuits’” and compete against each other? To which Rucker proposed a solution: “Why don’t we do something about that? Let’s have a contest and see if we can get guys to go through this process.”
People are also reading…
A drag show was certainly something new for Mary Washington and, indeed, would not have been feasible prior to the advent of coeducation in 1970. Even Rucker himself was not optimistic about the prospects for success. “Whoever thought we would get men to wear women’s swimsuits,” he recalled, “or come up with talent? . . . We didn’t think that it would be successful, but it was.”
Indeed it was. The (literally) howling success of the inaugural event resulted in its annual return for a dozen or so years under the sponsorship of Hamlet House, the Honor residence for male students. Throughout the 1980s, despite its vulgarity (or maybe because of it), Wo-Man was one of the highlights of the fall social calendar, regularly drawing hundreds of students to Dodd Auditorium, where they witnessed the contestants go through their paces: modelling formal wear and swimsuits, performing their “talent” (if such it could be called), and answering questions from the emcee ex tempore. It was not for the thin of skin or high of brow. According to one columnist for The Bullet, the school’s newspaper, it was “absolutely the most outrageous night of the year.”
The contestants themselves seemed to enjoy the affair immensely from start to finish, beginning with the selection of a female “sponsor” — an assistant who would preferably be, in the words of one contestant, “talented, bold, wild and downright kinky.” Her duties included advice on attire, makeup and talent — most often a dance routine, usually a suggestive one. A major responsibility was assisting the contestant in purchasing his “Madonna-wear” for the evening from a local thrift shop, the preferred couturier for such events.
As for the actual event, the humor was usually low-wattage, the talent minimal. Skits were sometimes inventive and topical, but for the most part, in the words of one student, the humor was “on about a fourth-grade level.”
It was difficult to know who had more fun with the spoof, the audience or the contestants. One of the aspirants in the 1981 contest described in a self-mocking Bullet article how it felt to be a pageant participant:
“I’m willing to concede that what I did in front of upwards of eight hundred people may in fact be a violation of several statutes, but, after all is said and done, I had a great time. . . . All told, fourteen males without even the most rudimentary sense of self-esteem became involved in this warped display of just how low a human male will stoop to get attention and be funny,” adding, presumably in jest, “By the way, does anyone need two yards of feather boa, a leopard-skin skirt, or five-and-a-half-inch platform shoes?”
Students continued to attend the event in large numbers, even as its standards of decorum, never high, spiraled downward, and its attempts at humor, both visual and verbal, became more ribald.
Eventually criticism began to develop, as increasing numbers of people were offended by what they regarded as the sexist, homophobic tenor of the event. Such attitudes were expressed in a letter to the administration prior to the scheduled 1988 performance, signed by 40 faculty members. The petition urged that the college cease to allow Wo-Man to be held on campus, calling it a “particularly inappropriate sort of activity” in light of the institution’s Statement of Community Values.
The administration refused to intercede, and when the event sponsors persisted in their determination to hold the contest, opponents organized a protest against it. Joining faculty members in picketing the performance were representatives from several student groups, as well as the National Organization for Women (NOW).
The Hamlet House sponsors, of course, did not see it that way. The house president, who was Black, rebutted the critics’ charges. “I’ve experienced racism first-hand,” he said. “If Wo-Man was racist or sexist, I would be the first person to disassociate myself with its production. . . . It’s just good clean American fun. The guys dressed up in women’s clothes are not mimicking or stereotyping or making sexist jokes; they are just clowning around . . . . I see this as making fun only of contestants, because they are making fools of themselves.”
When, after all the verbal skirmishing, the 1988 edition of Wo-Man did take place, the small number of protestors outside of Dodd, compared to the huge, cheering crowd inside, indicated where the preponderance of opinion lay on the issue. The Bullet also endorsed the event editorially, claiming that First Amendment rights were being threatened in what it portrayed essentially as an effort by killjoy faculty members to censor student expression.
Unfortunately for Wo-Man’s advocates, the repugnant behavior of some of the contestants in 1988 — as if to verify the critics’ accusations — furnished further evidence of the event’s descent into tawdriness. Accordingly, whether prompted by the badgering of their critics or by the emergence of a long-latent impulse of decorum, the residents of Hamlet House voted unanimously not to sponsor Wo-Man in 1989. But it was only a brief hiatus, as they announced plans for its return the following year, thus touching off yet another round of controversy, with many of the same arguments proffered on both sides.
Pleas from opponents to President William Anderson urging cancellation of Wo-Man were rebuffed. Though not personally fond of the event, Anderson nonetheless defended the students’ right to produce it. The student newspaper agreed. “We applaud the administration’s hands-off policy,” read an editorial. “This is a simple First Amendment issue. . . . No one should dictate who can participate in or view such exhibitions of stupidity.”
The local Free Lance-Star took much the same position. A regular columnist for the paper, who attended the 1990 production, expressed approval, not because of weighty constitutional issues, but simply because he found the production harmless. In a piece titled “Whoa, man—what’s all the fuss?” he wrote, “These Hamlet boys put a little vamp in their revue, at times sashaying in a way that would never be allowed in Bible school. But there were no hurtful comments aimed at women, gays, straights, Arabs, Jews, Anglo-Saxons, Moors, Muslims, poetry-lovers, or left-handers. . . . I’m sorry, [but] it’s time for these [opponents] to chill out, to quit taking everything in life so seriously. This show is a joke, people. Just a bunch of goofy guys dressing up in girls clothes to get laughed at and raise some money for charity … .Big deal. Don’t like it? Don’t go.”
It had appeared that the 1990 version of Wo-Man might be a bit more restrained than prior performances, as plans for that year’s show prohibited some of the problems evident in earlier productions, notably excessive alcohol use by the contestants. “We want to show that it can be done in good taste, and can be a classy event,” said the new Hamlet president.
Alas, in the pageant’s opening segment, a junior contestant bared his buttocks, whereupon he was removed from the stage, arrested for being drunk in public, and incarcerated in the local jail.
That, as it turned out, was pretty much it for Wo-Man. Though it still had its defenders, the event was generating increased disgust. Even one Hamlet resident commented, “It’s … extremely offensive to gays and women,” he said. “I’m ashamed to live in Hamlet.”
The truth was that the show, however innocent its original intent, had changed—and not for the better. Much of its initial comedic appeal had come to seem dated at best, demeaning at worst. “It became overly crass,” declared The Bullet, “when the contestants consistently relied on sexual innuendos to gain crowd approval … . I wouldn’t consider watching someone drunkenly dance and fall all over the stage [to be] talent.”
The buffoonery of Wo-Man, from the outset, had occupied a narrow space between the amusingly risqué and the merely raunchy and, as time went on, many Wo-Man performers, inspired more by alcohol than by wit, tended to cross that boundary. By 1990 interest began to flag when the performances veered from the clever to the crude, and the once-sprightly burlesque came to be viewed merely as a sodden exercise in boorish exhibitionism.
The demise was put succinctly by one student. “The time has come,” he said. “Wo-Man isn’t funny anymore.”
Author and historian William B. Crawley is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg. Crawley created the school’s popular Great Lives lecture series, which was renamed in his honor in 2016. He wrote “The University of Mary Washington: A Centennial History” in 2008.
