Good Works Versus Good Looks

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

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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."

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." 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 you can feel confident at the beach." Although they admitted that male ogling made them nervous, they also regarded the ability to display their bodies as a sign of women's liberation, a mark of progress, and a basic American right. Madonna was mentioned as a model: she keeps her body absolutely hairless, my students assured me, and she retains a highly paid, personal cosmetologist to do the job.

These young women were bright enough to gain admission to an Ivy League university, and they enjoyed educational opportunities unknown to earlier generations. But they also felt a need to strictly police their bodies. I was intrigued by both their discreet euphemism for genitalia - "bikini-line area" - and their willingness to add yet another body concern to the already substantial litany of adolescent anxieties: hair, pimples, thighs. We talked some more, and I offered my perspective as a historian and feminist, but also as a grandmother. Life in the world of the microbikini is obviously different from life in the world of the corset, I argued, but there are still constraints and difficulties, perhaps even greater ones. Today, unlike in the Victorian era, commercial interests play directly to the body angst of young girls, a marketing strategy that results in enormous revenues for manufacturers of skin and hair products as well as diet foods. Although elevated body angst is a great boost to corporate profits, it saps the creativity of girls and threatens their mental and physical health. Progress for women is obviously filled with ambiguities.

What makes the situation today especially urgent, however, is that the problem begins so early in life, when the female body first begins to gear up for reproduction. Puberty begins earlier today, which means that girls must cope with menstruation and other aspects of physical maturation at a younger age, when they are really still children emotionally. Until puberty, girls really are the stronger sex in terms of standard measures of physical and mental health: they are hardier, less likely to injure themselves, and more competent in social relations. But as soon as the body begins to change, a girl's advantage starts to evaporate. At that point, more and more girls begin to suffer bouts of clinical depression. The explanation of this sex difference lies in the frustrations girls feel about the divergence between their dreams for the future and the conventional sex roles implied by their emerging breasts and hips.

In addition to an increasing risk of depression and suicide attempts, adolescent girls today are more vulnerable than boys of the same age to eating disorders, substance abuse, and dropping out of school. And of course, early childbearing has a greater impact on a girl's life than it has on that of her male sexual partner. The well-known work of Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan is premised on the notion that adolescence is a time of crisis for contemporary girls; so is Reviving Ophelia, a recent best-seller by clinical psychologist Mary Pipher. Gilligan's sensitive studies reveal that between the ages of eleven and sixteen young women lose their confidence and become insecure and self-doubting; Pipher sees adolescence as the time when a girl's self-esteem crumbles.

The body is at the heart of the crisis of confidence that Gilligan, Pipher, and others describe. By age thirteen, 53 percent of American girls are unhappy with their bodies; by age seventeen, 78 percent are dissatisfied. Although there are some differences across race and class lines, talk about the body and learning how to improve it is a central motif in publications and media aimed at adolescent girls. Seventeen magazine tapped into this well of angst when it ran a headline on a story in the July 1995 issue: "Do You Hate Your Body? How to Stop." The article itself proposed ways to stop the agonizing, but the author also admitted that it was awfully hard to do so in a world where "your body is very, very important."

Adolescent girls today face the issues girls have always faced - Who am I? Who do I want to be? - but their answers, more than ever before, revolve around the body. The increase in anorexia nervosa and bulimia in the past thirty years suggests that in some cases the body becomes an obsession, leading to recalcitrant eating behaviors that can result in death. But even among girls who never develop full-blown eating disorders, the body is so central to definitions of the self that psychologists sometimes use numerical scores of "body esteem" and "body dissatisfaction" to evaluate a girl's mental health. In the 1990s, tests that ask respondents to indicate levels of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their own thighs or buttocks have become a useful key for unlocking the inner life of many American girls.

Why is the body still a girl's nemesis? Shouldn't today's sexually liberated girls feel better about themselves than their corseted sisters of a century ago? The historical evidence I present in this book, based on research that includes diaries written by American girls in the years between the 1830s and the 1990s, suggests that although young women today enjoy greater freedom and more options than their counterparts of a century ago, they are also under more pressure, and at greater risk, because of a unique combination of biological and cultural forces that have made the adolescent female body into a template for much of the social change of the twentieth century. I use the body as evidence to show how the mother-daughter connection has loosened, especially with regard to the experience of menstruation and sexuality; how doctors and marketers took over important educational functions that were once the special domain of female relatives and mentors; how scientific medicine, movies, and advertising created a new, more exacting ideal of physical perfection; and how changing standards of intimacy turned virginity into an outmoded ideal. The fact that American girls now make the body their central project is not an accident or a curiosity: it is a symptom of historical changes that are only now beginning to be understood.

Because the body is central to the experience of female adolescence, I also use it as an organizational framework. The Body Project begins with a biological event, menarche, or first menstruation, and moves through a series of chapters that explore the changing experience of female maturation. Ultimately, this is a story about what it means to grow up in a female body, and the ways in which girlhood in America has changed since the nineteenth century. But it also explains how the pressures on young women have accumulated, making girls at the close of the twentieth century more anxious than ever before about their bodies and, therefore, about themselves.

Copyright © 1997 by Joan Jacobs Brumberg.

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.