The Campus Queen in Context

If we agree the campus queen merits our attention, we must chart her timeline. Thus, Queen Question #2 is one of origin: When and how did the tradition of high school royalty begin? Akin to an origin story, the second chapter includes a brief history of high school royalty in the United States, followed by a definition of how I use the eponymous term campus queen as a means of differentiating school royalty from other variations of teen queens (as in beauty queens, pageant queens, debutantes, heiresses, monarchs, queen bees, teen celebrities, and so on). Considering culture’s preoccupation with femininity and power, this section catalogs how depictions of the archetype have evolved over the past eighty years or so, but the familiar frame of the genre remains.