Book Review: “The Body Project” by Joan Jacobs Brumberg

Book Review: “The Body Project” by Joan Jacobs Brumberg
Thursday, November 24th 2011

“Not surprisingly, there is more self-hatred among women than men, and women tend to be especially dissatisfied about the lower body –the waist, hips, thighs, and buttocks. To put it another way: when an American woman dislikes her thighs, she is unlikely to like herself.”

Brumberg's “The Body Project” is a fascinating account on how women have treated their bodies from the Victorian era through the modern day. Her research is largely based on primary source documents such as newspaper articles, advertisements, and most importantly, the diaries of real women who have dealt with body image issues throughout the ages. Brumberg looks at the history of the feminine form and the female ideal of beauty. “In the Victorian era,” she states, “beauty was thought to derive primarily from internal qualities such as moral character, spirituality, and health.”

Brumberg further looks at a topic that is still somewhat taboo even in the modern day, a woman's menstrual cycle. Brumberg traces the experience of menarche throughout recent history. “In the early nineteenth century, menarche–first menstruation–typically occurred at fifteen or sixteen. . . . Today, however, the average age is just over twelve. . . . We now know, on the basis of historical records kept by public health officials and physicians, that the age at which menstruation begins has declined over the past 150 years in both the United States and Western Europe. In the twentieth century, it has become increasingly rare for girls in these countries to begin menstruation at seventeen or eighteen, but the lower limit of the range–nine or ten–still holds. This means that there is no need to worry about precocious menstruators of seven or eight: there seems to be a biological floor that limits the decline in age, and authorities confirm that the downward progression actually came to a halt thirty years ago.”

Brumberg makes the argument that particularly in the Victorian era when the facade of propriety was of the utmost importance, mothers sometimes neglected to inform their daughters about a menstrual cycle. This, Brumberg postulates, is vastly different from some other cultures of the world. “The Asante of Ghana place a menarcheal girl beneath an umbrella and then sing and dance in her honor; the Yuork Indians of California expect her to isolate herself from her family. Americans, by contrast, generally have no community rituals of initiation or exclusion.”

Brumberg's research puts forth a staggering melange of facts. “By age thirteen,” she writes, “53 percent of American girls are unhappy with their bodies; by age seventeen 78 percent are dissatisfied.” However, “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.'”

At the heart of Brumberg's book is the idea that the modern woman undertakes a body project with socially-defined specifics for perfection. “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.”

Joan Jacobs Brumberg is a social historian and a Professor Emerita at Cornell University. “The Body Project” was first published in 1997.