The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls by Joan Jacobs Brumberg

The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls by Joan Jacobs Brumberg Vintage, 1998 ISBN: 978-0679735298 336 p.p.

In The Body Project, historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg explores diary excerpts and media images from 1830 to the present to determine why fifty-three percent of present day girls are dissatisfied with their bodies by the age of thirteen, and many begin a pattern of weight obsession and dieting as early as eight or nine.

A decade ago, the ideal body was being laced into corsets by women who were teaching their daughters to do the same, yet inner beauty was the focus during that time. Good deeds and a pure heart could not be measured by the size of one's waist but women still felt it necessary to constrain their bodies to look a certain why.

Today, American women have more social choices and personal freedom than ever before, yet dissatisfaction with the body is extremely common among girls and women. Brumberg explores girls’ attitudes toward topics ranging from breast size to cosmetics. She looks into the shift from Victorian concern with inner beauty to today’s focus on outward appearance. She discusses how this shift can be attributed to advertisements feeding girls and women that the only sexy body type is model-thin and therefore if they do not see that when they look in the mirror, they are not satisfied.

By "body projects," Brumberg refers to the focus women have on changing things about themselves at a particular time in history. Throughout history, changes in the body, face, and sexuality have been seen. The usage of diary entries allow other voices to be heard throughout the book and help reinforce the facts Brumberg presents. She looks into these particular projects and digs further into the history of menarche while also discussing the history of the social aspects of virginity and how female sexuality has been perceived and discussed within the family and society.

The author explores the gains and losses adolescent girls have inherited since they ripped off the corset and the ideal of virginity for a new world of sexual freedom. She is deeply appreciative of the enormous benefits of the sexual revolution, especially in terms of the availability of sexual information and the growing willingness of our society to see women as active sexual agents, yet she is troubled by the eagerness of our culture to sexualize and exploit the bodies of adolescent women who are simply not prepared to cope with the emotional, social, and physical impact of early sexual experience.

Brumberg makes a major point to remind the reader that girls today are maturing earlier in a world filled with sexualized images and messages, yet we are denying them education as to how to safely use these new bodies they have developed. She states that we are doing girls a disservice by not assisting them with creating their own moral codes and standards, which is a very important point. This book is an eye opener about the role society plays in the way girls and women are taught to look at themselves and their bodies.

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Joan Jacobs Brumberg is a social historian and academic who lectures and writes about the experiences of adolescents throughout history. She is the author of Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa which won the Berkshire Prize in history and the John Hope Franklin Prize in American Studies, among other awards. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls which won the Choice Award from the American Library Association and Kansas Charley the true story of Charles Miller, a seventeen-year-old orphan who was hung in Wyoming in 1892 due to a horrific double murder committed when he was only fifteen. Joan Jacobs Brumberg is a Professor Emerita at Cornell University.