Dear Diary

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

(Page 3 of 5)

What was it like to develop breasts or begin your periods a century ago? Did these biological events occur at the same age in the Victorian era? Have American girls always regarded the body as their most important project? In pursuit of answers to questions like these, I culled girls' diaries, particularly old ones, which are remarkably similar to the diaries many of us have written and stored away at the bottom of dresser drawers or in attic trunks. Unfortunately, I threw my own diary away in my early twenties, in a moment of "emotional housekeeping," but I still remember the way that red leatherette volume - with its tiny lock and key - harbored my innermost secrets and private obsessions.

I found girls' diaries everywhere. I found them in libraries and archives, but I also acquired them from friends, from students, and from lecture audiences - people who were more than willing to dig them out and dust them off. When I advertised my research interest in girls' diaries in The New York Times in 1982, I received many useful and fascinating responses, including one from a New York City sanitation worker who sent me a diary he had rescued from a garbage can. Although many people regard the literary remains of ordinary girls as silly or worthless, this man intuited that a small beat-up diary might contain private ruminations with a great deal to say about the experience of life as a female adolescent.

Throughout this book I intermingle my own voice as a historian with girls' voices drawn from their personal diaries. And because diaries reveal so much about the heart of being a girl, I use them whenever possible to provide entry into the hidden history of female adolescents' experience, especially the experience of the body. Unlike samplers, which died out with the decline of young women's sewing and embroidering, adolescent diaries persist, providing generations of girls with a way to express and explore their lives and feelings. Old diaries are a national treasure, providing a window into the day-to-day routines of family, school, and community. They also recapture the familiar cadences of adolescent emotional life, and they provide authentic testimony to what girls in the past considered noteworthy, amusing, and sad, and what they could or would not talk about.

As emotionally intimate as diaries can be, more often than not girl diarists have been silent on the subject of their own changing bodies. A century ago, menarche was a private affair, and girls handled the first sign of menstrual blood with enormous reserve. Some Victorian adolescents made brief comments in their diaries about being "unwell," or they repeated a pattern of cryptic marks, such as X's, every twenty-eight or thirty days; but most said nothing at all. In the early 1890s, Lou Henry, a fifteen-year-old high school girl in Pasadena, California, who would later become Mrs. Herbert Hoover, noted in her diary that her mother made her stay home on the lounge all day, and that she was excused from gym "for reasons best known to myself." This sparse commentary suggested that Mrs. Henry limited Lou's activities during her periods, and that her school made allowances for girls on those special days. But this was all that nice middle-class girls, the kind who kept diaries, ever really said about their physical transition into womanhood.

Similarly, little was said about intimacies with young men. Consider Antha Warren, a young woman who taught school in St. Albans, Vermont, in the late 1860s. When she was in her late teens, Antha "kept company" with Henry Munsell, who fought in the Civil War when he was only eighteen and brought back dental skills learned in a military hospital. Whenever the couple kissed, Antha put an asterisk (*) in her diary, and since Henry came to call at least four or five nights a week, these symbols mounted up. "Too many * to count," she wrote one evening with some satisfaction. Antha's tone suggested that she took pleasure from her growing intimacy with the young dentist (whom she married in 1870), and that the couple may have done more than just kiss. Yet she always wrote about these interactions in a coded way, either because she feared that her diary might be read by others or - more likely - because she did not have the vocabulary to describe what happened: "After tea H[enry] and I went into the parlor, shut the door, and had a visit; he tried to sleep in my lap but couldn't. Had such a good time - [here she drew some squiggles] buttons."

Antha's squiggly lines and her reference to buttons certainly piqued my curiosity. Did Henry simply play with her buttons and pine for the time when they would be married? Or did he unbutton Antha's dress and engage in what would come to be called, in the 1920s, petting? Until the twentieth century, most adolescent diarists were as reticent as Antha Warren and Lou Henry. Sexuality was generally restrained (if not secretive) among the middle-class girls who kept diaries. And even if they had the inclination to write about their changing bodies, it was hard to find the right words to express what was happening.

Even in more recent times, most diarists are not as forthright as Anne Frank, who, you may remember, called menstruation a "sweet secret" - despite its "pain and unpleasantness." In 1956, when I first read Anne's account of menstruation, I was twelve years old and I was thrilled by her honesty. What I did not know then was that her father, Otto Frank, a man born in the nineteenth century, was so uncomfortable with her commentary on the body that he had those lines edited out of the 1947 Dutch version of the diary. Otto Frank and his editors thought it was unnecessary, if not unseemly, to speak of such things.

From a historical perspective, the great deluge of explicit "girl talk" about the body and sexuality is a relatively recent American phenomenon. As language about sex and the body has changed, so have the body projects of different generations of American girls. As you will see in the chapters ahead, by the 1920s young women were mentioning (with some delight) intimate interactions with boys at parties, in cars, and at the movies. They also began to write about their efforts to develop sexual allure through clothing and cosmetics, and, for the first time, they tried "slimming," a new body project tied to the scientific discovery of the calorie. The dieters and sexual players of the 1920s were generally girls in middle to late adolescence who were finishing high school or heading off to college and jobs in the business world - not young teenagers, as they are today.

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.