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"Miss Subways" was a title accorded to individual New York City women between 1941 and 1976. The woman who was Miss Subways at any one time appeared on posters placed on New York City Subway trains, along with a brief description of her. In 1957, it was estimated that 5.9 million people viewed Miss Subways daily, using 14,000 placards within trains. The program was run by the New York Subways Advertising Company. Around 200 women held the title during the program's run.
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Selection
The method of selecting Miss Subways varied over time, typically taking the form of a beauty contest with the general rule that to be eligible, a woman had to be a New York City resident and herself use the subway. "John Robert Powers, the head of the modeling agency, selected the winners" until 1961 or 1962 and later "for some years, winners were chosen by the contest organizers."
Before 1952, there were monthly selections of Miss Subways. From 1952 to 1957, candidates were picked every two months. Although "Mr. Powers once picked seven winners to reign side by side in the subway." By 1957, they were all hand-picked based on how much they exuded a "girl next door" quality:
All Miss Subways have one thing in common. They look – or are supposed to look – like the girl next door. About 400 wholesome young things enter each of the three yearly contests. The winners are picked by John Robert Powers model agency millionaire. Mr. Powers says he wants "no glamour gal types or hand-painted masterpieces." Professional models, actresses and entertainers are taboo. Anyone else over 17 may enter.The Misses Subways have been secretaries, service women, nurses, sales girls, receptionists.
John Robert Powers was no longer involved in selection by 1963 when the contest changed to "public vote ... by post card" and the New York Subways Advertising Company "redirected the contest to reflect the girl who works – what New York City is all about." Winners were given bracelets with gold-plated (later, silver-plated) subway tokens." Spaulding commented in 1971 that "Prettiness per se is passe. It's personality and interest pursuits that count" and described how "each contest attracts between 300 and 400 entries, submitted by family, friends and colleagues. About 30 are selected for a personal interview 'to judge personality and make certain that the submitted picture is a good likeness.' Most of the winners have been stenographers, clerks, receptionists and some have been teachers and stewardesses."
Subsequent to the postcard system, winners were usually chosen by telephone-based voting, from among a group of nominees whose photos were all placed on the subways. Title holders were photographed by photographers such as James J. Kriegsmann who "specialized in pictures of stage and screen stars, but he also photographed ordinary people, including the women who appeared in the Miss Subways promotion for more than 30 years."
In 2004, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, in conjunction with the New York Post, brought back the program, now named "Ms. Subways", for one year only. A voting contest was held to determine the winner, Caroline Sanchez-Bernat, an actress. Posters of "Ms. Subways" appeared with subway safety tips instead of biographical notes.
Significance
Miss Subways began as a way for the John Robert Powers Agency "to promote his models and for the New York Subways Advertising Company 'to increase eye traffic' for the adjoining ... advertisements." "The contest provided the main plot device of Leonard Bernstein's 1944 musical On The Town, in which a smitten sailor on leave searched for 'Miss Turnstiles.'"
By 1945, the four-year anniversary of the contest was commemorated nationally in Life Magazine. "Unlike Miss America, these queens represented the full spectrum of their constituency, mainly Irish, Italian, Latina and Jewish. The first black winner reigned on the trains in 1947 (36 years before a black Miss America), the first Asian in 1949." Thelma Potter, who was studying at Brooklyn College at the time, was the first black Miss Subways. Potter stated, "It was progressive. ... It stirred things up a bit.'"
The New York Subway Advertising Company was owned by Walter O'Malley, who moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1958. Bernard Spaulding, the sales director for the New York Subways Advertising Company, said in 1971 that it "was a World War II pinup phenomenon and then lost social significance." Miss Subways was of "mythic significance to many", with Mayor Ed Koch saying in 1979:
Even now, I can sit in the subway, and look up at the ads, and close my eyes, and there's Miss Subways", he said. "She wasn't the most beautiful girl in the world but she was ours. She was our own Miss America."
In 1983, when there were public calls for the contest to continue, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority representative stated that it would be "irrelevant and socially unacceptable", and thus not viable, to restart Miss Subways. Tn 2004, journalist Melanie Bush commented:
[The] posters were also covertly feminist, sometimes shockingly so, even to [Bush], a child of the 70s. From the first ('Mona Freeman, wants to be a top notch freelance illustrator') to the last ('Heidi Hafner ... Her goal: a flight instructor's rating'), they focused on women's ambitions, and in the 1940s or the 70s or [2000s], that's a rare rose to find clamped in the teeth of mass advertising. Yet there it was, and there it more or less firmly remained, probably because the contest was structured during World War II, when more than three million women were offered paying work for the first time, and were thus riding the subways, not to mention operating them, in much greater numbers than before.
The posters were at their most radical during the war years, and equally reflect women's later return to the home. Miss Subways' journey tracks a clear underground parallel to the prescribed roles of her sisters' above: While the civilian women of World War II may have been crucial to the work force, the purpose of housewives, as Betty Friedan puts it, 'is to buy more things for the house.'
From the exhilarating peak of December 1942's Marguerite McAuliffe, 'whose aim is to be a doctor as good as her dad,' and November 1943's Cecile Woodley, whose 'main interests are her job and the Navy ... enthusiastically O.K.'s skiing, Mozart and Katharine Hepburn,' we slide submissively toward Irene Scheidt, June 1950, whose 'fondest hope is a trip to Bermuda.' Then up we go again to Eleanor Nash, November 1960, 'young, beautiful, and expert with a rifle.' ... What I waited for each new month was: What did she do? What were her goals? The Miss Subways I wanted to be was the airplane pilot. Or how about 'travel writer'? 'Scientist'? 'Surgeon'? ... Maybe next month she'd plan to be an astronaut. Or president!
What was actually going on here, I saw, was women, real New York women, talking to each other about their intentions and transmitting these messages through the medium of some men's advertising campaign.
Ellen Hart Sturm, owner of the New York diner Ellen's Stardust Diner, was Miss Subways in 1959; her diner features photos of many past Miss Subways on the walls.