The Miss America pageant has always been a bit of a paradox, clinging to its conservative image while parading around its contestants in swimwear. After capturing the crown in 1951, Yolanda Betbeze of Alabama refused to make promotional appearances in her bathing suit. "To...go into Milwaukee in the middle of the winter and walk around a department store in a bathing suit is not my idea of Miss America," said Betbeze, an aspiring opera singer. Her protest outraged the pageant's spurned swimsuit provider, Catalina, which withdrew as a sponsor and later founded the rival Miss USA competition. Still, pageant director Louise Slaughter supported Betbeze's decision, which was the beauty queen's first in a series of crusades: she later marched in civil rights demonstrations and joined feminists in a 1968 protest against the pageant that once crowned her a champion.