Miss Subways

Here's a really delightful piece from NPR's All Things Considered and Radio Diaries about the Miss Subways beauty contest that started in the 1940s:

For more than 35 years, riders on the New York City subways and buses during their daily commute were graced with posters of beaming young women. While the women featured in each poster — all New Yorkers — were billed as "average girls," they were also beauty queens in the nation's first integrated beauty contest: Miss Subways, selected each month starting in 1941 by the public and professionally photographed by the country's leading modeling agency.

The inclusion of women of color and Jewish women, particularly in those early years, is really quite remarkable.

(via All Things Considered)