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

ACCLAIM FOR J OAN J ACOBS B RUMBERGS

T HE B ODY P ROJECT

A fascinating and important book which tracks girls and their bodies from the era of repression to the culture of obsession. A tough-minded analysis.

Newsweek

A troubling report from the trenches of adolescence.

USA Today

A delightful and painful history [that] allows us to eavesdrop on a wonderful assortment of teenage diaries. The Body Project draws the crucial connection between bad body images and bad choices, between how girls feel about their bodies and what they do with them.

Boston Globe

An excellent and startling book that urges us as a society to acknowledge and respond to the vulnerability of adolescent girls without returning to regressive eras.

Memphis Commercial Appeal

A necessary read for adolescent girls, women, and the parents of girls.

San Diego Union-Tribune

A wonderful book for a mother-daughter study group. Brumberg came up with the fine idea of mining diaries as a source for girls history.

Womens Review of Books

Reading The Body Project is a step forward in The Freedom Project.

Gloria Steinem

The voices emerging from these diaries provide a poignant, realistic, and often funny framework for Brumberg to explore changes in girlhood. The Body Project is a book to read with pen in hand in order to scribble down the margins.

Ms.

J OAN J ACOBS B RUMBERG

T HE B ODY P ROJECT

The author of Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa, Joan Jacobs Brumberg is a Stephen H. Weiss Professor at Cornell University, where she holds a unique appointment teaching in the fields of history, human development, and womens 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.

Awards Brumberg has received include the Berkshire Book Prize for the best book by a woman historian, given by the Berkshire Womens History Conference (1988); the John Hope Franklin Prize for the best book in American Studies, given by the American Studies Association (1989); the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize for the best book in the area of gender and mental health, given by the Society for Medical Anthropology (1989); and the Watson Davis Prize for the best book in translating ideas for the public, given by the History of Science Society (1989).

ALSO BY JOAN JACOBS BRUMBERG

Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa

Mission for Life: The Judson Family and
American Evangelical Culture

For Madeline Rand Brumberg and
Isabel Fenwick Brumberg

I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives hut as nouns.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Our Girls

My hopes of the future rest upon the girls. My patriotism clings to the girls. I believe Americas future pivots on this great woman revolution.

Dioclesian Lewis, Our Girls

Acknowledgments always serve as an important review of an authors intellectual and personal debts. When the going was rough, and I was uncertain about the direction of my writing, I turned repeatedly to two important people in my life, David Brumberg and Faye Dudden, both of whom provided consistent moral support as well as savvy and prompt historical judgments. Although I made enormous demands on them both, they remained good-humored and thoughtful in their responses. In the same way, Ellen Grebinger was a critic-on-demand, willing and able to read pages of copy even on an undulating dock at Tupper Lake.

I am fortunate to have a wide circle of professional colleagues who have supported my goal to bring meaningful womens history to an audience beyond the profession. Many of them are also important friends who sustained my spirit as well as my scholarship. Allan Brandt, Carol Groneman, Ann J. Lane, Heather Munro Prescott, Barbara Sicherman, Nancy J. Tomes, and Susan Ware deserve special thanks for their timely, highly individualistic readings of portions of the book, or for their phone and E-mail responses to particular queries or intermittent expressions of my frustration. Closer to home, at Cornell, the intellectual acuity and the warm friendship of Lois Brown, Jacqueline Goldsby, Phyllis Moen, and Cybele Raver have been critical to the completion of this book, as has the long-standing personal support of Helen Johnson and Jan Jennings. Carol and Michael Kammens keen interest in my pursuit of unconventional historical subjects is also appreciated.

Like many scholars, I am indebted to organizations outside my own university that saw potential in my work: the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists all provided me with critical financial support that translated into extra time for research and writing. No place, however, has been so important to my evolution as a writer as the MacDowell Colony, where I had both exquisite space and uninterrupted time to develop a form and cadence for this particular narrative. At MacDowell, I made many friends whose reactions to my stories about American girls confirmed my faith that history remains an important literary endeavor. My agent, Georges Borchardt, has been a wise and kind adviser as well as a smart and enthusiastic advocate of my work; Kate Medina, my editor, taught me a great deal about accessibility and told me bluntly when I needed to shed the girdle of academese that shapes so many professional historical accounts of the past. Renana Meyers, Page Dickinson, and Molly Stern, all at Random House, made smart and helpful suggestions. Im particularly indebted to Sybil Pincus and Caroline Cunningham for calm and competent production advice.

A good history book requires creative use of sources as well as detective work in libraries. I am grateful to Carmen Blankenship, Amy Blumenthal, Julie Copenhagen, Lance Heidig, Judith Holliday, Robert Kibbee, Fred Muratori, Susan Szasz Palmer, Donald Schnedeker, Nancy Skipper, and Caroline Spicer, all in the Cornell Library system, for their dedicated and informed assistance over the years; and I thank Jenny Daley at the Duke University Special Collections. Laurie Todd helped me with all kinds of research matters and organized my correspondence with diarists in a superbly competent way. Renee Kaplan, Susan Matt, Debra Michals, Shelly Kaplan Nickles, and Margaret Weitekamp also provided competent short-term research assistance when the burdens of teaching, writing, and administration slowed me down. And there were many Cornell undergraduatesespecially Karen Cooperman, Alison Halpern, Lori Karin, Aliza Milner, Erica Sussman, and Haruka Yamashitawhose papers on aspects of girl culture added to my storehouse of knowledge about the adolescent experience in the past and present. I cannot name all the women who shared their adolescent diaries with me, because I must respect their privacy, but I can convey my deepest appreciation to them for their generosity and the trust that these loans implied. I am also indebted to Kirsten Mullen for her generosity with photographs from her collection.