The Body Project

In 1997, the American historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg published The Body Project, a work that tries to trace the evolution of Western – and in particular American – girlhood from the beginning of the 19th century to today. Concerned with the increasingly body image-focused nature of teen girls’ interests, Brumberg draws out the ways in which girls are no longer interested in their own inner lives. The book uses a variety of fascinating primary sources to analyze the girls of the Victorian era: diaries, photographs, advertisements, and postcards that all help depict shifting attitudes towards girls and girlhood through the past 200 years. Unfortunately, although the book raises many interesting questions about why we value the things we do about adolescent girls, Brumberg is so fixated on her dogmatic approach to excoriating 1990s culture that many of her answers are unsatisfying at best and naïve at worst.

Brumberg’s main thesis is that today’s young women form their identities entirely from their outward appearance – that it is their bodies and faces that get their exclusive attention, rather than their minds and characters. The book tries to substantiate this claim by tracing the way cultural perceptions towards these bodies have shifted, focusing in particular on menstruation, clothing, and sexuality.

The book lays out the biological and social realities of menarche and the onset of menstruation. Brumberg points out the scientifically unarguable fact that because of healthier lifestyles and diet, the age at which girls first begin to menstruate has decreased from 15-16 years old in the 1800s to 11-12 years old today. The problem with this, according to Brumberg, is that this physical development doesn’t happen at the same time as psychological or emotional maturity – and that there are no support systems in place to help girls process their new bodies. Instead, increasingly younger and younger girls learn sexual mores from the media they consume – media that glamorizes outward sexual maturity without context.



Because of this media infiltration, girls have been taught to fixate on their appearance. We tend to think of the Victorian wardrobe as being confining and constrictive, what with its layers of corsets, stays, and petticoats. The irony, Brumberg points out, is that the ever-narrowing standard of perfection that girls try to attain by dieting, depilating, piercing, and scrubbing their bodies is a much more oppressive and controlling norm.

According to Brumberg, the time spent on this “body project” – the attempt to “fix” perceived problem areas – means that girls are growing up valuing good looks over good works. Basing her argument on the extremely shaky idea that during the Victorian era women’s appearance was less important and less prized than today, Brumberg laments that we no longer have the same emphasis on character and morality. It’s true that Brumberg’s odd claim about beauty being unimportant in Victorian times is easy to disprove by opening any novel written during that time. Still, her question about girls have escaped from the external control of their families, doctors, and religion, only to immediately imprison themselves in the rigid bonds of beauty enforced by the capitalist system is a valid one.

Perhaps at the very core of Brumberg’s concerns about the early onset of menstruation, girls’ preoccupation with body image, and the lack of support or emphasis on interior development, is her concern with the sexuality of girls. Because physical development happens early, but marriage happens significantly later in life, there is a period of almost two decades in the lives of girls where they are subject to the pressures of being sexually expressive without the protection of surrounding culture. In this section, Brumberg’s argument is again oddly skewed in a way that reads as ahistorical. She praises the way Victorians worried about the virginity of young women, without at all commenting on the obsession with purity, chastity, and the commercial value of an intact hymen – a form of social pressure that was just as controlling and intense as its obverse is today. Moreover, however supportive Brumberg believes Victorian families were of wholesome girlhood, she doesn’t describe the ways in which any perceived slip beyond the sexual boundary – even in cases of rape – would lead to ostracism, poverty, and potentially a life on the street.
The book ends with a section that argues that we should work to establish a less invasive, less restrictive girl culture. Brumberg points out that we should feel responsible for all girls, including poor teenage single mothers and other vulnerable girl populations. But there are no suggested ways to create this kind of protective buffer zone, so the idea reads more like wishful thinking than proactive planning.



The Body Project has received mixed reviews, with most critics pointing out that Brumberg raises great questions about the problems facing young women in our culture today. However, the same critics complain that the book doesn’t offer much in the way of answers or suggested action going forward. Some of the problem is that the book tends to be vague in its terms, never completely committing to defining what is meant by broad phrases like “consumer culture” and “media.” Since its publication, the book has also become dated since Brumberg was unable to anticipate the way social media and the internet has eroded the line between the private and public spheres that she broadly characterizes as “good” and “bad” throughout the text.