Byline: Jonathan Storm

What makes the American woman tick?

American men don't know what makes any woman tick.

The American culture can never figure out who its favorite daughter _ homemaker, CEO, sex bomb, scientist _ is supposed to be.

The American woman herself, all 140 million examples of her, seems to have a different idea of her identity about every 10 minutes.

So here you have this pageant, with pages of rules that specifically categorize the qualities it seeks in a woman. And the woman it chooses every year is flamboyantly and repeatedly declared, in one of the most annoyingly memorable songs of all time, to be "our ideal."

It would be a miracle if millions of people didn't gripe about Miss America. And if millions more didn't love her.

Documentarian Lisa Ades, an American woman herself, has created a striking history of the pageant, the two-hour "Miss America," part of PBS's "American Experience" series. It airs Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on PBS, and will delight and inform those who have glued themselves to a TV set on the second Saturday after each Labor Day and declared, "How could they pick that bow-wow?"

Which is...