Joan Jacobs Brumberg
is the Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and Professor at Cornell University
where she has been teaching history, human development, and women's studies
for twenty years. Fasting Girls, her l988 book about the history
of anorexia nervosa, won the John Hope Franklin Prize, the Berkshire Book
Prize, the Eileen Basker Prize, and the Watson Davis Prize. Her sensitive
research and writing about American women and girls have been recognized
by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities,
the Rockefeller Foundation, the Society of American Historians, and The
MacDowell Colony. From l985 to 1988, she was Director of Cornell's Women's
Studies Program. She lives in Ithaca, New York.
A message from Joan
Jacobs Brumberg
"America's adolescent girls
are in crisis. Growing up in a female body is more difficult today than
ever before because girls' bodies have changed and so has American society.
Menstruation and sexual activity begin much earlier and there is also
much greater emphasis on the body as a way of defining the self. Using
intimate materials drawn from the unpublished diaries of American girls,
The Body Project provides a lively and engaging story of how growing
up as a girl has changed over the past one hundred years, and why the
pressures on girls are now so intense.
Girls today grow up believing
that "good looks"--rather than "good works"--are the highest form of female
perfection. In the past, greater maternal involvment and more single sex
groups, such as the Girl Scouts, supported the whole girl, placing greater
emphasis on internal rather than external qualities. But in the twentieth
century, that "protective umbrella" disappeared, popular culture became
more powerful, and expectations about physical perfection increased so
that American girls came to define themselves more and more through their
bodies.
Today, the body has become
most girls' primary project, creating a degree of self-consciousness and
dissatisfaction that is pervasive and dangerous, leading to the social
and emotional problems identified by Carol Gilligan, Mary Pipher, and
Peggy Orenstein. For everyone concerned with adolescent girls--parents,
teachers, librarians, physicians, nurses, and mental health professionals--The
Body Project is a "must" read because it puts so many contemporary
adolescent issues in historical perspective.
A fascinating photo essay
comprised of photographs, advertisements and postcards shows how girls
and their bodies have changed since the nineteenth century. From corsets
to body piercing, the book demonstrates how the preoccupation with the
body has intensified and why adolescent girls and their bodies have born
the brunt of social change in the twentieth century.
Although The Body Project
acknowledges a problem, it is still an entertaining read because it evokes
so many memories in the lives of girls and women--particularly personal
milestones such as first periods, pimples, training bras, first dates,
and sexual awakening. The Body Project is perfect for generating mother-daughter
dialogue, and it is remarkable for its insight about what adolescent girls
have gained and lost as American women shed the corset and the ideal of
virginity for a new world of dieting and body sculpting, sexual freedom
and self expression."
--Joan Jacobs Brumberg
