She Let the World Call Her Ugly to Feed Her Children

Mary Ann Bevan spent years being advertised as “the ugliest woman in the world.”

People bought tickets to stare at her. Newspapers joked about her. Circus posters turned her face into entertainment.

The strange part is that Bevan had once worked as a nurse and lived a fairly ordinary life.

Then her body began to change.

And when her husband died, leaving her with four children to support, she eventually found herself in the uncomfortable position of making money from the very thing people used to humiliate her.

This is not really a story about an ugly woman.

It is about a woman who discovered that if the world was determined to stare at her, she might as well make it pay.

Her face had not always looked like that

Mary Ann Webster was born in East London in 1874, one of eight children in a working-class family.

She trained as a nurse and, in 1902, married Thomas Bevan. They went on to have four children.

Then, sometime in her early thirties, Mary began noticing changes.

Her hands and feet became larger. Her facial features grew heavier. She suffered headaches and problems with her eyesight.

Today, doctors would recognise the pattern.

Mary had acromegaly.

Acromegaly happens when the body produces too much growth hormone, usually because of a benign tumour in the pituitary gland. In adults, it can gradually enlarge the hands, feet, jaw, nose and other tissues. Headaches and vision problems are also common.

It is worth remembering that Mary was experiencing this more than a century ago.

Doctors were only beginning to understand the connection between the pituitary gland and excessive growth. Harvey Cushing, one of the pioneers of modern neurosurgery, was experimenting with pituitary surgery for acromegaly during this same period.

Mary’s appearance kept changing.

Then life became much harder.

Her husband died and left her with four children

Thomas Bevan died suddenly in 1914.

Mary was around 40.

She now had four children and no husband helping to support the household. Contemporary and later accounts describe her struggling to find reliable work as her appearance became increasingly unusual.

Eventually, she made a decision that sounds almost impossible today.

She entered an “ugliest woman” competition.

And she won.

That victory eventually opened up a much stranger career.

In 1920, American showman Samuel Gumpertz hired her to appear at Dreamland on Coney Island in New York.

Mary Ann Bevan became a professional sideshow attraction.

Her billing was brutally simple:

The World’s Ugliest Woman.

She was not some half-remembered circus legend either. A 1924 photograph in the American Philosophical Society archives identifies “Mary Bevan and her children,” while a surviving 1924 issue of Billboard lists Mary Bevan among the performers at Dreamland’s Coney Island sideshow.

People really paid to see her.

Imagine having your illness turned into your job

Sideshow entertainment was enormous at the time.

People with unusual bodies, disabilities or medical conditions were advertised using labels that would be considered grotesque today.

The tallest.

The smallest.

The fattest.

The bearded woman.

The armless wonder.

And Mary, the ugliest woman alive.

There is something uncomfortable about looking at her photographs now because we know what the audience often did not.

They were not simply staring at somebody who happened to look unusual.

They were looking at the visible effects of a serious disease.

One person who understood that was Harvey Cushing.

By 1927, Cushing was one of America’s most respected neurosurgeons and Mary had become his patient.

When Time magazine made fun of her appearance, Cushing wrote to the magazine.

He explained that she had once been a healthy, attractive young woman and was now suffering from acromegaly. He also pointed out that she endured people laughing and heckling her because the work allowed her to educate her four children.

Then he ended with a sentence that still lands nearly a century later:

“Being a physician, I do not like to feel that TIME can be frivolous over the tragedies of disease.”

That letter changes the way you look at the famous photographs.

She was not simply sitting there because somebody had put her on display.

She knew what the display was.

And she knew why she was doing it.

The cruel title became useful

There is a temptation to tell Mary Ann Bevan’s story entirely as tragedy.

That misses something important.

She found a way to make an economic system that was cruel to her useful to her.

The face that made ordinary employment difficult became something people were willing to pay to see.

She appeared at Coney Island and with Ringling Brothers. Contemporary reporting from the 1920s described her as a recognised attraction, and later accounts record that she sold photographs and postcards of herself as part of the business.

We should be careful with viral claims about exactly how much money she earned. Different retellings give different figures.

What we do have is something better.

Cushing’s 1927 letter, written while Mary was alive, explicitly says she tolerated the ridicule to provide for and educate her four children.

That part is not an inspirational meme invented a hundred years later.

Someone who actually knew her wrote it at the time.

Then people made fun of her again, 70 years after she died

Mary Ann Bevan died in 1933 at the age of 59.

You might think that would have been the end of people turning her face into a joke.

It wasn’t.

More than 70 years later, Hallmark used photographs of Mary on a birthday card sold in Britain.

The joke was based on the television dating programme Blind Date.

A Dutch endocrinologist named Wouter de Herder happened to see the card while visiting the UK.

He recognised her.

Not as a funny-looking woman from an old photograph.

As a woman with acromegaly.

De Herder complained, and Hallmark eventually stopped distributing the card. The company said it had not realised that the woman in the photograph had suffered from a medical condition.

There is something almost absurd about that.

Mary spent her lifetime turning people’s willingness to laugh at her into money for her family.

Then, decades after she could benefit from it, somebody was still trying to make money from the same joke.

Maybe “the ugliest woman in the world” was never the interesting part

The photograph that keeps circulating online invites you to stare at Mary Ann Bevan’s face.

That is exactly what audiences were doing a century ago.

But once you know the story, the face becomes almost the least interesting thing about her.

She was a nurse.

She became a wife and mother.

She developed a disease that dramatically changed her body.

Her husband died.

She had four children depending on her.

And when respectable society offered her very few ways to support them, she walked into the sideshow and turned society’s cruelty into a salary.

The internet version usually says Mary Ann Bevan sacrificed her dignity for her children.

I’m not sure that is quite right.

Her audience may not have behaved with much dignity.

Mary seems to have kept hers.

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