The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls - Hardcover

Brumberg, Joan Jacobs

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679402977 ISBN 13: 9780679402978

Publisher: Random House, 1997

Synopsis

Girls today are in crisis--and this book shows why. Drawing on a vast array of lively historical sources, unpublished diaries by adolescent girls, and photographs that conjure up memories of the past, The Body Project chronicles how growing up in a female body has changed over the past century and why that experience is more difficult today than ever before.

Girls' bodies have certainly changed--they mature much earlier--but at the same time traditional social supports for girls' growth and development have collapsed. The media and popular culture exploit girls' normal sensitivity to their changing bodies, and many girls grow up believing that "good looks" --rather than "good works"--represent the highest form of female perfection. With an eye for the humor in as well as the pain of female adolescence, Joan Jacobs Brumberg shows how American girls came to define themselves increasingly through their appearance, so that today the body has become their primary project.  
  


With remarkable insight, Brumberg provides an account of what adolescent girls gained and lost as American women shed the corset and the ideal of virginity for a new world of dieting, sexual freedom, and consumerism. She explains how doctors and parents helped to promote an ideal of physical perfection that underlies the current preoccupation with the body and contributes to many of the social and emotional problems identified by Mary Pipher in Reviving Ophelia and by Carol Gilligan in In a Different Voice.
  


The Body Project describes the historical roots of the acute societal and psychological pressures that girls feel today, evoking important memories of girl culture as well as milestones of physical and emotional development, such as first periods, pimples, training bras, first dates, and sexual awakening. A vivid photo essay and excerpts from intimate diaries underscore how girls' attitudes toward their bodies and sexuality have changed in the last century. The Body Project is a superb book, gracefully written, filled with understanding, and very relevant to the lives of girls and women today.

About this title

About the Author

Joan Jacobs Brumberg is the award-winning author of Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa. She is a Stephen H. Weiss Professor at Cornell University, where she holds a unique appointment teaching in the fields of history, human development, and women's studies. Her research and sensitive writing about American women and girls have been recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. She lives in Ithaca, New York.



"Brumberg writes beautifully: her generous use of direct quotes from girls' diaries makes this an interesting, lively, and moving account of girls' worries and obsessions about their bodies and their sexuality. The book is a call to arms; our girls are in trouble and Brumberg offers provocative suggestions for change."
  

--Ruth Streigel-Moore, professor of psychology, Wesleyan University; past president of the Academy for Eating Disorders

"This book should help us all make sense of the body-image concerns girls and young women face today, and should serve as a companion to those interested in female development."
--Dr. David Herzog, director, Eating Disorders Unit, Massachusetts General Hospital, and associate professor of psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

From the Back Cover

are in crisis--and this book shows why. Drawing on a vast array of lively historical sources, unpublished diaries by adolescent girls, and photographs that conjure up memories of the past, The Body Project chronicles how growing up in a female body has changed over the past century and why that experience is more difficult today than ever before.

Girls' bodies have certainly changed--they mature much earlier--but at the same time traditional social supports for girls' growth and development have collapsed. The media and popular culture exploit girls' normal sensitivity to their changing bodies, and many girls grow up believing that "good looks" --rather than "good works"--represent the highest form of female perfection. With an eye for the humor in as well as the pain of female adolescence, Joan Jacobs Brumberg shows how American girls came to define themselves increasingly through their appearance, so that today the body has become their primary project.  

Reviews

YA?From the most private method of sanitary protection to the most intimate place to pierce one's body, this history of feminine hygiene and fashion records young women's obsession with looks and how society has channeled and manipulated them to reflect the values of the times. From diaries, journal articles, advertising, and doctor's records, the author has amassed information about mainly middle-class American girls of the 19th and 20th century that shows how they have been raised first by overprotective, repressive adults to play a submissive role in society and, more recently, to be consumers in an ever-widening marketplace. From skin cream to dieting to figure-altering garments and body piercing, physical enhancements in the last 200 years are reported. Beginning with an account of Abigail Adams's concern about the early maturation of her 11-year-old granddaughter in 1806 and progressing to descriptions of today's independent young women grappling with numerous options of dress and sexual conduct, a thought-provoking social history is revealed. The author begins and ends her treatise with a passionate argument for advocacy for today's girls who are preyed upon by the media and allowed dangerous sexual options without emotional maturity and are lacking the protective umbrella of moral guidelines and supervision provided by earlier generations. Young women will enjoy the numerous photos and will have a giggle about the corsets and belts of earlier times. A fine choice for mother-daughter book groups.?Jackie Gropman, Kings Park Library, Burke, VA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A troubling overview of how today's adolescents have come to view their bodies as the projection of their worth, and how sexual permissiveness can be not only confusing but dangerous. ``More than any other group in the population, girls and their bodies have borne the brunt of twentieth-century social change,'' says the author. Victorians may have denied the body, but they celebrated ``character,'' with an emphasis on ``good works,'' according to Brumberg (Women's Studies/Cornell; Fasting Girls, 1988). The focus today has shifted to ``good looks,'' with teenage girls trying to gain acceptance by slimming and sculpting and even piercing their bodies, decorating them like ``urban aboriginals.'' Using diaries from 19th- and 20th-century adolescents to illustrate the changes in the way girls view themselves, Brumberg looks at menstruation (onset has dropped from late teens to as early as 11 or 12 years old), slimming, obsession with body parts like breasts and thighs, and virginity. The author finds some surprising markers of when adolescents (and their mothers) began to change focus from inner to outer beauty. For instance, as mirrors became commonplace in American homes at the end of the 19th century, so did attention to complexions, at a time when pimples were becoming signs of inattention to cleanliness and ``low social class.'' Mass production of brassieres in cup sizes A, B, C, and D in the 1930s made adolescents feel even more self-conscious and inadequate about their developing bodies if they did not fit the standard sizes. Discussing virginity, the author is concerned that girls are set adrift with few emotional supports in a sexually oriented culture that applauds a perfect body. A brief but moving picture of how adolescent girls may have jumped from the frying pan of Victorian constraint into the fire of an era in which anything goes, as long as you don't have thunder thighs. (b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Brumberg (women's studies, Cornell; Fasting Girls, LJ 3/1/89) notes in her present study that while girls today reach menarche at about age 12, several years earlier than a century ago, they do not mature emotionally or intellectually at the same early age. They are also extremely vulnerable to social and economic pressures to define themselves in terms of their bodies and to become sexually active, often with disastrous consequences. To counter such pressures, Brumberg calls for more societal support and nurturing of girls. This work complements such studies as Lyn Brown and Carol Gilligan's Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girl's Development (Harvard Univ., 1992), Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (LJ 4/1/94), and Peggy Orenstein's School Girls (LJ 8/94). Appropriate for public, academic, and women's studies collections.?Patricia A. Beaber, Coll. of New Jersey Lib., Trenton
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Body as Evidence

At the close of the twentieth century, the female body poses an enormous problem for American girls, and it does so because of the culture in which we live. The process of sexual maturation is more difficult for girls today than it was a century ago because of a set of historical changes that have resulted in a peculiar mismatch between girls' biology and today's culture. Although girls now mature sexually earlier than ever before, contemporary American society provides fewer social protections for them, a situation that leaves them unsupported in their development and extremely vulnerable to the excesses of popular culture and to pressure from peer groups. But the current body problem is not just an external issue resulting from a lack of societal vigilance or adult support; it has also become an internal, psychological problem: girls today make the body into an all-consuming project in ways young women of the past did not.

A century ago, American women were lacing themselves into corsets and teaching their adolescent daughters to do the same; today's teens shop for thong bikinis on their own, and their middle-class mothers are likely to be uninvolved until the credit card bill arrives in the mail. These contrasting images might suggest a great deal of progress, but American girls at the end of the twentieth century actually suffer from body problems more pervasive and more dangerous than the constraints implied by the corset. Historical forces have made coming of age in a female body a different and more complex experience today than it was a century ago. Although sexual development--the onset of menstruation and the appearance of breasts--occurs in every generation, a girl's experience of these inevitable biological events is shaped by the world in which she lives, so much so, that each generation, at its own point in history, develops its own characteristic body problems and projects. Every girl suffers some kind of adolescent angst about her body; it is the historical moment that defines how she reacts to her changing flesh. From the perspective of history, adolescent self-consciousness is quite persistent, but its level is raised or lowered, like the water level in a pool, by the cultural and social setting.

Back in the 1830s, Victoria, the future queen of England, became intensely self-conscious about her body at the age of fifteen and sixteen, and although her first menstrual period was never announced officially, it was generally known that Victoria crossed the threshold into womanhood at about that time. At age eighteen, before she became queen, Victoria expressed general dissatisfaction with her looks. She mused over her hair, which was getting too dark; her hands, which she considered ugly; and her eyebrows, which she thought so inadequate that she considered shaving them off in order to encourage their growth. She also made awkward attempts to disguise her physical flaws: she tried covering up her stubby fingers with rings, but then found she had difficulty wearing gloves, which were obligatory for someone of her status. Some of Victoria's self-consciousness was a response to the attention she received as a future monarch. But it also had to do with the biological changes of adolescence, changes that breed both awkwardness and awe. The American poet Lucy Larcom, who tended looms in the textile mills of nineteenth-century New England, lived a life vastly different from Victoria's, but she, too, became "morbidly self-critical" in adolescence. When her body began to change visibly, her older sisters insisted that she lengthen her skirts and put up her hair--markers of sexual maturation in those days.1

Almost a century later, in the 1920s, the feminist writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir ruminated about her changing body. At fifteen she thought she looked simply "awful." She had acne, her clothes no longer fit, and she had to wrap her breasts in bandages because her favorite beige silk party dress pulled so tightly across her new bosom that it looked "obscene." Later in life, de Beauvoir described adolescence as a "difficult patch."2

Although Margaret Mead's 1928 classic Coming of Age in Samoa suggested that there are cultures where girls do not experience self-consciousness in adolescence or discomfort with their changing bodies, in the United States and in Western Europe they clearly have experienced both for at least a century.3 A matronly queen, a popular poet, and a mature feminist--each left indications that she felt self-conscious in adolescence, as most girls do.

In the nineteenth century, the "growing pains" of adolescence were diminished by society's emphasis on spiritual rather than physical matters. There were rigid standards of decorum that made discussion of the body "impolite." Yet among girls in the middle and upper classes, there was concern about the size of certain body parts, such as the hands, feet, and waist. To be too large or too robust was a sign of indelicacy that suggested lower-class origins and a rough way of life. Even the exalted Victoria and her mother, the Duchess of Kent, worried about body size. Victoria's feet were admirable because they were tiny; yet she was warned periodically by her mother against becoming too stout, and she was chided for eating too much. A future queen, after all, was not supposed to look like a husky milkmaid or mill girl, and her body must never imply that she did demanding physical labor.4

Still, there is an important difference between the past and the present when it comes to the level of social support for the adolescent girl's preoccupation with her body. Beauty imperatives for girls in the nineteenth century were kept in check by consideration of moral character and by culturally mandated patterns of emotional denial and repression.5 Nineteenth-century girls often noted in their diaries when they acquired an exciting personal embellishment, such as a hair ribbon or a new dress, but these were not linked to self-worth or personhood in quite the ways they are today. In fact, girls who were preoccupied with their looks were likely to be accused of vanity or self-indulgence. Many parents tried to limit their daughters' interest in superficial things, such as hairdos, dresses, or the size of their waists, because character was considered more important than beauty by both parents and the community. And character was built on attention to self-control, service to others, and belief in God--not on attention to one's own, highly individualistic body project.



Good Works Versus Good Looks

The traditional emphasis on "good works" as opposed to "good looks" meant that the lives of young women in the nineteenth century had a very different orientation from those of girls today. This difference is reflected in the tone of their personal diaries, a source I use extensively to tell the story of how the American girl's relationship to her body has changed over the past century. Before World War I, girls rarely mentioned their bodies in terms of strategies for self-improvement or struggles for personal identity. Becoming a better person meant paying less attention to the self, giving more assistance to others, and putting more effort into instructive reading or lessons at school. When girls in the nineteenth century thought about ways to improve themselves, they almost always focused on their internal character and how it was reflected in outward behavior. In 1892, the personal agenda of an adolescent diarist read: "Resolved, not to talk about myself or feelings. To think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self restrained in conversation and actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others."6

A century later, in the 1990s, American girls think very differently. In a New Year's resolution written in 1982, a girl wrote: "I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly can with the help of my budget and baby-sitting money. I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories."7 This concise declaration clearly captures how girls feel about themselves in the contemporary world. Like many adults in American society, girls today are concerned with the shape and appearance of their bodies as a primary expression of their individual identity.

At the end of the twentieth century, the body is regarded as something to be managed and maintained, usually through expenditures on clothes and personal grooming items, with special attention to exterior surfaces--skin, hair, and contours. In adolescent girls' private diaries and journals, the body is a consistent preoccupation, second only to peer relationships. "I'm so fat. [Hence] I'm so ugly," is as common a comment today as are classic adolescent ruminations about whether Jennifer is a true friend, or if Scott likes Amy.

In my role as a teacher of women's history and women's studies at Cornell University, I have heard variations of this kind of "body talk" for almost two decades. It usually takes the form of offhand comments, but it recently surfaced in a seminar discussion about the health of women and girls in the nineteenth century. Clad in a variety of comfortable clothes, ranging from leggings and jeans to baggy sweaters and dresses, my students deplored the corset and lamented the constraints Victorian society imposed on women. Clearly, they considered themselves much better off than the young women who had braved public criticism to study at Cornell a century earlier.

Then the conversation drifted to the present, and somehow we ended up talking about a current body project that I had known little about. My students told me how they remove pubic hair in order to wear the newest, most minimal bikinis. As we talked, a few uttered a disapproving "No way" or "Ouch," but others felt compelled to offer a rationale for this delicate procedure. "It's necessary," they said, "so ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679402977
• ISBN 13: 9780679402978
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 267