Miss Canada

“Miss Canada” is a representation of the nation of Canada, often illustrated with Uncle Sam (a representation of the United States) or illustrated with Johnny Canuck (a male representation of Canada). There is no standard representation, but Miss Canada sometimes wears the Canadian flag as a dress.

“The day is not far off when Miss Canada will ask to be spliced to Uncle Sam” was printed in the Pensacola (FL) Gazette on October 27, 1849.

A Miss Canada beauty pageant was founded in 1945.

The Canadian Encyclopedia
Miss Canada
The representation of Canada as a sweet but coy young lady was a Victorian convention that was abandoned about the time of WWII. A popular depiction of Miss Canada was in winter garb - wearing skates, an overcoat, a tuque and a sash. At other times she was shown royally resisting the blandishments of a conniving Uncle Sam, symbolic of the US, siding instead with a portly John Bull, representative of Great Britain. Miss Canada was also a title awarded annually from 1946 to January 1992, on the basis of beauty, talent, personality, etc, to contestants with regional titles by the Miss Canada Pageant.

Wikipedia: Miss Canada
Miss Canada is a beauty pageant for young women in Canada. It was founded in Hamilton in 1945. No title was awarded from 1993 through 2008. According to the new Miss Canada and Miss Teen Canada web site, the title was re-established with a focus on personality over physical appearance. The Miss Canada competition is Canada’s oldest extant beauty pageant.

The first broadcast of the Miss Canada pageant aired in 1963 on CTV with news anchors Peter Jennings and Baden Langton hosting. Jennings remained as solo host until 1966 and was replaced by game show host Jim Perry, who hosted the pageant until 1990. Dominique Dufour, the winner of the Miss Canada Pageant in 1981, co-hosted with Perry from 1982 until 1990. The final pageant, airing in late 1991, was hosted by Peter Feniak and Liz Grogan.

27 October 1849, Pensacola (FL) Gazette, pg. 2, col. 5:
The day is not far off when Miss Canada will ask to be spliced to Uncle Sam.
(Correspondence by J. A. H. L.—ed.)

Newspapers.com
24 November 1849, Hartford (CT) Daily Courant, pg. 2, col. 4:
AN ELOPEMENT IN CONTEMPLATION.—The Rochester (N. Y.) American is responsible for the following:
Courting Scene.—Miss Canada—Please sir, will you marry me?

Uncle Sam—I cannot disguise my affection for so amiable and beautiful a young lady, but your papa must be consulted, and I must procure his consent.

Miss C—O never mind. I’ll ask him myself, and if he refuses, we’ll get up an elopement.

Newspapers.com
29 July 1850, Buffalo (NY) Daily Republic, “A Round About Compliment,” pg. 1, col. 2:
... prompted by a laudable curiosity to see what sort of critter was this Uncle Sam, to which Miss Canada proposes annexation, the party determined to push on to Buffalo.

OCLC WorldCat record
Miss Canada’s Rescuer : [broadsides].
Author: Industrial League.
Publisher: Toronto : [Industrial League], 1891.
Edition/Format: Image : Graphic : Picture : English

OCLC WorldCat record
Miss Canada. March - two step. [P.F.].
Author: Will J Davis
Publisher: Ottawa : J. L. Orme & Sons, [1906]
Edition/Format: Musical score : No Linguistic Content

OCLC WorldCat record
Miss Canada’s reception : a play
Author: James B MacDougall
Publisher: Toronto : McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart, ©1917.
Series: CIHM/ICMH microfiche series, no. 99094.; All Canadian entertainment series.
Edition/Format: eBook : Document : Drama : English

OCLC WorldCat record
The wooing of Miss Canada : a play
Author: Edith Lelean Groves
Publisher: Toronto : McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart, ©1917.
Series: CIHM/ICMH Digital series = CIHM/ICMH collection numérisée, no. 74281.; All Canadian entertainment series, 5.
Edition/Format: eBook : Document : Drama : English

OCLC WorldCat record
Miss Canada : Fox-trot
Edition/Format: Musical score : No Linguistic Content
Publication: Passe-temps. Vol. 29, no 726 (17 février 1923), p. 49, 56-57

YouTube
The birth and torment of Miss Canada and Johnny Canuck
Apr 23, 2008
Musée McCord Museum
http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/key…
“The birth and torment of Miss Canada and Johnny Canuck, or the beginnings of the federation”
Michèle Dagenais, Université de Montréal
Creating the country called Canada was a great achievement. Many cartoonists of the era personified the difficulties faced by the new country in the characters Miss Canada and Johnny Canuck, or Young Canada. Among the challenges were uniting in one nation people from many different worlds and traditions, linking a huge and virtually unsettled land mass, and affirming Canada’s sovereignty in the face of an already powerful neighbour to the south.

OCLC WorldCat record
Erotic Attachment, Identity Formation and the Body Politic: The Woman-as-nation in Canadian Graphic Satire, 1867-1914
Author: Carmen J Nielson
Edition/Format: Article Article : English
Publication: Gender & History, v28 n1 (April 2016): 102-126
Summary:
Using depictions of ‘Miss Canada’ in editorial cartoons and political campaign posters published in English Canada between 1867 and 1914 as a case study, this article argues that the repetitive deployment of feminised and eroticised images of the nation summoned particular gender, sexual and political identities into being and entangled viewers’ psychic investments in masculine, heterosexual and nationalist subjectivities. It also considers how Miss Canada’s normative representation as white conflated racial whiteness and Canadian-ness, and how images hailed viewers into racial subjectivities that were leashed to national identity. Rather than querying how or why the woman-as-nation trope elicited nationalist sentiment in an already-constituted subject, this analysis examines how imagery provoked viewers’ identification with subject positions that were co-constituted with nationalism. Impassioned and even violent nationalism becomes more comprehensible when we consider that the woman-as-nation was capable of producing attachments to national identity that, for some, were inseparable from and tantamount to psychic investments in gender, sexual and racial identities. While Canadian scholars have recognised that Miss Canada was a significant popular culture icon during the long nineteenth century and acknowledged this icon’s embeddedness in gender, sexual and national discourses, studies have tended to describe Miss Canada’s role in consolidating hegemonic ideologies and power relations and underestimate visual culture’s constitutive capacities. The extent of Miss Canada’s hetero-erotic coding has also largely escaped historians’ notice. Although a few scholars have explored visual culture’s role in Canadian national identity formation during this era, this study makes a unique contribution by foregrounding the productive work of popular imagery in co-constituting and entwining national and sexual subjectivities

Twitter
Stefan Dollinger
@CanE_Lab
Nice work! Note, please: there was not just Johnny Canuck, but also a female gendered icon… Miss Canada! http://dchp.ca/dchp2/Entries/view/Miss%252520Canada
Quote Tweet
Mark Sundaram
@Alliterative
· Jul 2, 2017
What’s the history behind the Vancouver Canucks’ name? Find out in our #Canada150 video: https://youtu.be/tVTo81wwPbM #canucks
5:56 PM · Jul 2, 2017·Twitter Web Client