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T A B L E+T A L K

"Dickens is a God," declares one Salon reader. Worship at his feet in Table Talk.

F E A T U R E

"Sister Carrie"
By Garrison Keillor
Why did they ever ban a book this bad?
(10/13/97)

R E C E N T L Y

Parting from Phantoms
By Christa Wolf
Nonfiction
(10/17/97)

Gods of Death
By Yaron Svoray
Nonfiction
(10/16/97)

Bleeding London
By Geoff Nicholson
Fiction
(10/15/97)

The Subtle Knife
By Philip Pullman
Fiction
(10/14/97)

The Last Time I Wore a Dress
By Daphne Scholinski (with Jane Meredith Adams)
Nonfiction
(10/13/97)

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______ T H E+b+o+d+y+P R O J E C T
______ AN INTIMATE HISTORY OF AMERICAN GIRLS

267 PAGES

BY MICHELLE GOLDBERG | most feminists would agree with Joan Jacob Brumberg, author of "The Body Project," that teenage girls' obsession with their bodies has reached crisis proportions. What they may have more trouble with is Brumberg's assertion that girls were better off in the flesh-denying Victorian age. "Life in the world of the micro-bikini is obviously different from life in the world of the corset," Brumberg writes, "but there are still constraints and difficulties, perhaps even greater ones."

Like Naomi Wolf in "The Beauty Myth," Brumberg argues that the stunning new freedoms women achieved in the 20th century were accompanied by a new set of shackles, onerous beauty requirements or "body projects." Unlike Wolf, though, Brumberg doesn't see the increased fixation on female bodies as a backlash against feminism -- she charts it as a natural outgrowth of increased sexual exhibitionism and decreased privacy.

Her book promises to tell the story of girls' changing relationships to their bodies over the last century through their diaries. Unfortunately, she under-uses them, paraphrasing when the adorable, melodramatic cadences of teenage girls' own words would be more powerful. Still, the snippets Brumberg does include -- with their dreamy musings on love, frightening self-hatred and deadpan social observations -- are delicious, as are the sections on the history of tampons, bras and other girlie things.

Brumberg looks approvingly at the attention that Victorians paid to girls' internal characters, in contrast to contemporary society's fixation on external beauty. "Our ancestors had a deep commitment to girls that we need to revisit as we look for ways to deal with the implications of the new time-table that is remaking the life course of American girls," Brumberg writes. That "new time-table" is the increasingly early onset of puberty -- the average age at first menstruation has dropped from 16 in 1890 to 12 today, mostly because of improvements in health and nutrition. Brumberg believes there are sexual perils in store for adolescents with adult bodies in our "sexually brutal and commercially rapacious" society. But the usual suspects also figure -- advertisers and doctors who make huge profits from female insecurity, a media that's relentless in its worship of physical perfection and social changes that have allowed girls more sexual freedom and more independence from their mothers.

It's the last point that rankles. While it's refreshing to see Brumberg take on the adamantly "pro-sex" feminists, whose hippie hedonism is as irrelevant to most girls today as hysteria-inducing Victorian moralism, there's a reactionary subtext to much of the book. A section on confidentiality between girls and their gynecologists is alarmingly titled "The End of Parental Rights." 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 -- Brumberg doesn't deal at all with the neurosis and psychosomatic illnesses caused by familial repression.

Despite this, "The Body Project" is a valuable book. Historical looks at the construction of beauty are always helpful in keeping our own obsessions in perspective. Even if she sometimes seems a bit out of touch, Brumberg's call for a sanctuary for girls in a world of intense sexual scrutiny is hard to disagree with.
SALON | Oct. 20, 1997

Michelle Goldberg is an editorial assistant at Salon.

Read an excerpt from "The Body Project" in Mothers Who Think.