In addition to a tiara, this Miss Michigan also wears a combat helmet.
Alma Cooper — who on Sunday was crowned Miss Michigan USA 2024 at the McMorran Place & Entertainment Center in Port Huron — is a pageant princess, an active-duty Army officer, and a data scientist, studying at Stanford University.
How, if at all, will her reign change perceptions of what women can — or should — do? We soon will find out.
“As a lifelong Michigander raised in Okemos, I live the American Dream,” Cooper told the Free Press on Wednesday, adding that she is grateful to many, especially God, her family and supporters, and is “honored to serve this state and this country.”
A 22-year-old second lieutenant from Okemos who recently returned to California, Cooper is among a small group who also are challenging conservative and liberal views of what a modern woman is and what roles in society she should hold.
Arguably making her own path, Cooper has become comfortable with sticking out.
To put it another way, she’s not letting other people determine what she can do or define who she is.
“I am propelled by the stories of those who have aimed high while serving others,” Cooper wrote in a recent essay about why she wanted to be Miss Michigan, adding that if chosen, her “success will be showing others the many meanings of services — and what comes from freeing yourself from limitations.”
Cooper is excelling in arenas that, for centuries, were exclusive to men, like the military and mathematics, while also pursuing things she’s passionate about, like modeling and competing in pageants, that some feminists feel are frivolous.
She is, along with others, challenging others’ ideas about what women should and shouldn’t do.
In January, for instance, Madison Marsh — also a second lieutenant and master’s student, but in the Air Force and studying government at Harvard University ― was crowned Miss America in Orlando. The 22-year-old represented the state of Colorado and is set to be a pilot.
Marsh, in a televised interview with CNN, said she was “really, really excited to be the first military member to hold the crown” because she said she felt like it “breaks a lot of stereotypes in pageants and military for women all across the globe.”
Cooper, in many ways is both similar — and different — from last year’s Miss Michigan, Maya Schuhknecht, who said after she won that she wanted to urge other young women to chase their dreams and advocate for art, which she studied at Michigan State.
Perhaps, like Cooper and Marsh, there will be more beauty queens representing the armed forces and service academies.
In 1975, President Gerald Ford signed the law that allowed women into the all-male academies. At West Point, the first class had 119 women, and only a little more than half, 62, graduated in 1980. What’s more, some in that class have said, it was challenging just to graduate.
Back then, they said, the academy leadership did not know how to address things like women’s haircuts, sexual harassment — and hazing by the male cadets who did not want women there and targeted them and urged them to quit.
Cooper, however, finished near the top of her class academically, held a significant leadership role, and her undergraduate research thesis was on the body-mass index and its implications on the Army’s recruiting goals. The year she graduated was the first time West Point had a woman as a commencement speaker, the vice president.
In her essay, Cooper wrote about why she wanted to win the pageant. She talked about why she decided to seek an appointment to West Point, how she was a “math nerd” and the “only female mathematical science major” in her class, and the virtues of pageants — at least to her.
“Service,” she wrote, “comes in many forms and my only limitations are the ones I accept,” which she called her “guiding credo, an unshakeable belief that has fueled my path as an Afro-Latina woman from a predominantly white, rural Midwestern town.”
She also explained: Her mother, Oralia, was a pageant contestant, and her father, Stacey, was an Army major.
“Every mom wants their daughter to follow their dreams, and also, to be their authentic self,” Oralia Cooper, 54, said, adding that she hopes Alma shows others that “whatever circumstances you are in, isn’t what defines you. Who you are is who you want to be.”
Alma Cooper wrote in her essay that when she was 14, her mom sewed the dress that she wore to compete in the Miss Michigan Teen USA pageant. She added that her mom attached “hundreds of beads to a handed-down gown.”
And, she said, her mother “refused to allow her circumstances to define her destiny.”
Competing in pageants, Cooper added, helped her mom build her “self-confidence and determination.”
At 16, Cooper wrote, she attended a summer leadership program at West Point to experience life as a cadet. And when she earned her appointment and arrived to go to school, she said she had “a vision board covered in photos of math equations, designer bags, and former Miss Michigan USAs.”
Yet she also realized “no matter how much camouflage I wore, I had no chance of blending in.”
“Other contestants may be drawn to pageants for their glitz and glamour,” Cooper wrote. “But I see the stage as an opportunity to represent the many girls of color who often go unseen and unheard, and to inspire others to free themselves from circumstances and perceptions about who they are.”
Cooper — who will be a military intelligence officer — compared the Army, which “offers unlimited opportunities to those looking to excel,” and the Miss Michigan USA competition, which gives her a “platform to inspire others to ignore perceived limitations.”
And as Cooper prepares to compete to be Miss USA in Hollywood, California, many — including her family, friends, current and former classmates, and West Point’s dean, an Army brigadier general — are cheering her on.
Contact Frank Witsil: 313-222-5022 or fwitsil@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Newly crowned Miss Michigan also is a solider and ‘math nerd’