Dear Diary, Part 2

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

(Page 4 of 5)

By the 1950s, younger girls - those who filled the hallways and classrooms of postwar junior high schools - regularly mentioned their changing bodies and initial sexual adventures. At school and in scout troops, girls in early adolescence were now prepared systematically for menstruation, and this education meant that they knew the anatomical names of their own body parts. "Robin put a wetted piece of toilet paper in Cathy's vagina," a twelve-year-old reported with authority in her description of playing "doctor" at a weekend pajama party in Queens. Because full, pointed breasts were the beauty ideal in the 1950s, girls of this generation wrote wistfully about classmates with larger chests, and their envy led to a rash of commercial breast-development projects that now seem hilarious. Most of all, postwar diarists obsessed about particular boys, and they filled endless pages with the logistics of their first kiss, cast in melodramatic language picked up from films and romance magazines. "His lips were on mine, hard and pressing and insistent, making my head fall back," wrote an earnest fourteen-year-old about that special moment when she and her boyfriend waited for a bus after a dance at the Holy Name School in Brookline, Massachusetts. "I never knew a kiss would be like that," she said. "I grew up tonight. Now I am a woman."

By the 1980s, American girls were writing less romantic, but more graphic, accounts of their initiation into heterosexual and lesbian relationships. Although some girls were almost clinical in their reporting, others still used colloquialisms for body parts. "He wanted me to put my hands on his Beewa," wrote a sixteen-year-old who attended Catholic high school in Michigan, and "when I did he told me I made him happy." A new level of frankness in the popular media, plus more exposure of the body itself, had an effect on girls and the nature of their body projects. Dieting became pervasive, exercise became more demanding, and some young women even began to pierce intimate body parts as a way of making dramatic statements about themselves. By the 1990s, adolescent sexuality had become a routine part of public discourse. "My boyfriend and I have been going out for four months, and we've been doing some stuff," a sixteen-year-old wrote candidly to the editor at Seventeen. "We kissed and he put his finger inside me." From a historical perspective, this behavior was probably not new, but having young women talk about it in public was revolutionary.

The way different generations talk about their bodies and about sexuality is an important theme in this story. As a society, we certainly are more open about many aspects of our sexual lives than we were fifty or even twenty-five years ago. Today's "shock talk" on radio and television obviously provides a way for many Americans, young and old, to taste a wide range of sexual behaviors that used to be hidden and taboo. Advertising and films also show us body parts - often beyond the "bikini-line area" - that past generations rarely saw and probably never worried about. And yet, despite this national preoccupation with sex and the body, there is still a deeply embedded cultural reluctance, even in supposedly "enlightened" circles, to talk honestly or openly about certain aspects of the female body. My own blushing face and halting speech whenever a professional colleague asked me about the subject of my research symbolized the problem: it is hard to talk out loud about menstruation, pimples, or hymens without feeling just a twinge of embarrassment, much like a fourteen-year-old. In the course of writing this book, I came to understand that, in talking about their bodies, women still struggle to find a vocabulary that does not rely on Victorian euphemisms, medical nomenclature, or misogynistic slang. Ironically, we live with a legacy of reticence even in this time of disclosure.

For this reason, I have an ambitious goal for this book: The Body Project is intended to provoke the kind of intergenerational conversation about female bodies that most adult women like myself have wished for but never really had. The chapters ahead were designed to ignite memories about those awkward years and to foster conversation among mothers and daughters, women teachers and students, friends and colleagues. These memories will stimulate laughter as well as concern, but both reactions are appropriate. Adolescence is a time of volatility and exuberance, but it is also a time when many young people make forays into dangerous social and personal territory. As you read about the maturational experiences of young women in the past, I am sure that you will recognize yourself and the ways in which "girls will be girls." You will also see that something critical has happened to girls and their bodies that requires us to confront the differences between the world we have lost and the one we now inhabit.

Over a century ago, in the 1870s, Elizabeth Cady Stanton - a tireless crusader for the rights of women - began talking about the importance of girls' bodies, in a lecture entitled "Our Girls." She gave this lecture in cities on the East Coast and in the Midwest, but also in small towns throughout Ohio, Iowa, Nebraska, and Missouri. By this time, Stanton was a matronly, gray-haired grandmother in her sixties who felt comfortable speaking out against corsets, cosmetics, and tight, high-heeled boots because of the dangers they represented for the physical development of young girls. Although Stanton was clearly interested in improving the overall health of American women, robust, energetic bodies were never an end in themselves for her. "God has given you minds, dear girls, as well as bodies," she reminded her audiences, which often included mothers with adolescent daughters in tow. Instead of pandering to fashion, Stanton advocated loose clothes in adolescence, vigorous exercise, and real intellectual challenges. "I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns," she pronounced pointedly, in a manner characteristic of her lifelong struggle to make women independent, rational actors rather than decorative objects tied to the whims and fortunes of men.

The book that you are about to read echoes themes in Elizabeth Cady Stanton's popular lecture, and it is rooted in her idea that girls' bodies mirror American cultural values. The Body Project is both a story of the Victorian past and a guide to the future. As history, it argues that the body projects now absorbing our girls are a symptom of deep changes in twentieth-century life, changes that have taken a toll on American girls in ways no one could have anticipated in 1900. Understanding what has happened historically to girls' bodies and to their relationships with those who surround them - especially their mothers, teachers, and physicians - provides the first step in crafting an effective, progressive response to a predicament that already threatens the prospects of young women who will come of age in the twenty-first century.

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.