According to the official website for The Body Project this book provides a detailed pictoral history of adolescent girls' development over the last 100 years. According to critics, Joan Jacobs Brumberg has captured the essential issues of body image and maturation and the external and internal pressures that girls encounter and have encountered over the ages.Janell Lynn Mensinger wrote:
(Brumberg's) goal is "to initiate a multigenerational dialogue that speaks to the reality of earlier maturation, the need for sexual expression, and the nature of contemporary culture" (p. 209). More specifically, her wish is that The Body Project will generate discussions leading to the eventual creation of a new sexual ethics in hopes to eradicate our culture's condoning of the rapacious treatment of women's bodies.Salon critic, Michelle Goldberg was not as overwhelmingly positive though she felt the book was a welcome addition to the debate about teenage sexuality and development. Goldberg thought Brumberg idealized mother-daughter relationships in the Victorian era, and was a bit too nostalgic for the good old "repressive" Victorian days...
Among her many scholarly works, Brumberg has also written Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa. The Body Project website also has an extensive list of resources for and about adolescent girl development.Brumberg has such a romantic notion of the mother-daughter bond of previous decades that she seems totally oblivious to the hatreds and resentments that can make those relationships so stifling. Just because complaints about parents didn't surface in many Victorian diaries doesn't mean that everything was cozy.
Random House Books posts author Brumberg's synopsis of the book:Girls today grow up believing that "good looks"--rather than "good works"--are the highest form of female perfection...creating a degree of self-consciousness and dissatisfaction that is pervasive and dangerous, leading to the social and emotional problems identified by Carol Gilligan, Mary Pipher, and Peggy Orenstein.
Book club member Lisa submitted this video link as more information on this topic:
http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=206&template=PDGCommTemplates/HTN/Item_Preview.html and asked in her comment - "have we really come a long way, baby?"
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The moment this title came up for the book club I couldn't get out of my head a video and lecture I had during my studies at IIN. The lecturer was Jean Kilbourne and the topic was the effects of advertising on body image. Here is a link to the video http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=206&template=PDGCommTemplates/HTN/Item_Preview.html
I'm not finished with the book yet and i have some thoughts on it. I would say the video is a continuation of some of the themes in the book especially how young women are effected by advertising.
Have we really come a long way, baby? I wonder...
I am so impressed with the content of this book. When is the last time anyone said Menarche out loud? I toyed with posting on FaceBook - "Have you talked to your daughter about menarche?" But I knew that would cause huge intakes of breath and I really wasn't that courageous. I am very glad to see this book, and plan to send it to all of my friends with daughters. I don't think we are really very far along at all.
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