Brumberg discusses substance of young girls' 'body projects'

Professor Joan Brumberg addresses a Call Auditorium audience during her Summer Sessions lecture July 8. Frank DiMeo/University Photography

By Justine Dougherty

In the women's main level restroom of Kennedy Hall on the evening of July 8, two young women were at the sinks, examining themselves in the fluorescent-lit mirror. One twisted her hair around her finger, while the other, attentive to her friend's woeful expression, reached out and stroked the brown locks, attempting to comfort her with the suggestion, "It just needs more body."

Ironically, Joan Jacobs Brumberg was across the hall, lecturing to a large crowd in David L. Call Alumni Auditorium on just that: body, and how girls today are being taught that good looks are more essential in defining personhood than good works.

"There are girls who are 8 and 9," said Brumberg during her lecture "From Corsets to Body Piercing: An Historian's Introduction to Female Adolescence," "who are dieting. And 78 percent of girls report themselves as being dissatisfied with their bodies by the age of 17. You have no idea," she added, "how many 16-year-old girls have asked for plastic surgery for their birthdays."

Brumberg, a Cornell professor of human development and of women's studies as well as a Stephen J. Weiss Presidential Fellow, has been studying why contemporary girls have concentrated their efforts of self-definition on physical rather than character-oriented expression. Such inquiry is the topic of her latest book, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (Random House, 1997), a work that has gained national attention and that draws heavily on actual diary entries of young girls. Brumberg was surrounded by fans after her Cornell lecture, some confessing that this, actually, was their second time purchasing the book, since they had given their first copies to friends.

"Society has come to believe in the perfectibility of the body," said Brumberg, "and girls are bearing the brunt of this social change. In this post-virginal world, they are experiencing the pressure of appearance upkeep from almost every angle: technology, economics, medicine, advertising, family life, consumerism, all of which are pushing the idea that the body is more important than the mind."

A highlight of Brumberg's lecture was her slides, a collection that visually traced the history of opportunities for self-scrutiny in terms of its relationship to consumer culture. Brumberg linked this change to items such as the mass-marketed mirrors that were sold by Sears in its catalogs in the 1880s and the hand-held compact, which came out in the mid-1920s and allowed women to scrutinize themselves more easily and often.

"We need to watch how we treat young girls," continued Brumberg, "we need to pay attention to our greetings. Do we first say when we see them, 'oh, don't you look cute,' or do we place the emphasis on their interests or hobbies, asking instead, 'so what are you reading now?'"

Besides making clear that there is a need to teach girls that they are more than the sum of their body parts, Brumberg also suggested that they receive more "intergenerational mentoring," such as was available to girls in earlier times when they often had relationships with a woman half way between their own age and their mother's."

While a question from the audience brought Brumberg to acknowledge that boys, too, go through a great deal of adolescent pressure, she also pointed out that while boys are praised for becoming bigger and stronger, girls aren't. "The ideal of womanly beauty right now is to be a rail, and not adult-like at all," Brumberg said.

Brumberg's slides of 1897 sanitary belts, 1917 rubber aprons and tampon ads of the 1970s put in perspective, for many in the audience, how health and beauty have been increasingly linked over time, with the bathroom now becoming one of the most important rooms in an adolescent girl's life.

"In this post-virginal world," Brumberg summarized, "all this 'bad body fever' does not empower girls; instead, it makes them more vulnerable to manipulation, coercion and abuse because they want to be 'wanted' above all else." Pimples may no longer be thought of as the result of masturbation, but as Brumberg ended, quoting a piece of graffiti she'd found on the side of Cornell's Center for Theatre Arts, "our bodies make us worry."

The lecture was one of series offered free by the School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions on Wednesdays at 7:30 in Call Auditorium. The final summer lecture will be July 29, "Words at Play: How Words Change and Change Us," presented by Diane Ackerman and Paul West.