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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