The Body as Evidence At the close of the twentieth century, the female body poses an enormous problem for American girls, and it does so because of the culture in which we live. The process of sexual maturation is more difficult for girls today than it was a century ago because of a set of historical changes that have resulted in a peculiar mismatch between girls' biology and today's culture. Although girls now mature sexually earlier than ever before, contemporary American society provides fewer social protections for them, a situation that leaves them unsupported in their development and extremely vulnerable to the excesses of popular culture and to pressure from peer groups. But the current body problem is not just an external issue resulting from a lack of societal vigilance or adult support; it has also become an internal, psychological problem: girls today make the body into an all-consuming project in ways young women of the past did not. A century ago, American women were lacing themselves into corsets and teaching their adolescent daughters to do the same; today's teens shop for thong bikinis on their own, and their middle-class mothers are likely to be uninvolved until the credit card bill arrives in the mail. These contrasting images might suggest a great deal of progress, but American girls at the end of the twentieth century actually suffer from body problems more pervasive and more dangerous than the constraints implied by the corset. Historical forces have made coming of age in a female body a different and more complex experience today than it was a century ago. Although sexual development--the onset of menstruation and the appearance of breasts--occurs in every generation, a girl's experience of these inevitable biological events is shaped by the world in which she lives, so much so, that each generation, at its own point in history, develops its own characteristic body problems and projects. Every girl suffers some kind of adolescent angst about her body; it is the historical moment that defines how she reacts to her changing flesh. From the perspective of history, adolescent self-consciousness is quite persistent, but its level is raised or lowered, like the water level in a pool, by the cultural and social setting. Back in the 1830s, Victoria, the future queen of England, became intensely self-conscious about her body at the age of fifteen and sixteen, and although her first menstrual period was never announced officially, it was generally known that Victoria crossed the threshold into womanhood at about that time. At age eighteen, before she became queen, Victoria expressed general dissatisfaction with her looks. She mused over her hair, which was getting too dark; her hands, which she considered ugly; and her eyebrows, which she thought so inadequate that she considered shaving them off in order to encourage their growth. She also made awkward attempts to disguise her physical flaws: she tried covering up her stubby fingers with rings, but then found she had difficulty wearing gloves, which were obligatory for someone of her status. Some of Victoria's self-consciousness was a response to the attention she received as a future monarch. But it also had to do with the biological changes of adolescence, changes that breed both awkwardness and awe. The American poet Lucy Larcom, who tended looms in the textile mills of nineteenth-century New England, lived a life vastly different from Victoria's, but she, too, became "morbidly self-critical" in adolescence. When her body began to change visibly, her older sisters insisted that she lengthen her skirts and put up her hair--markers of sexual maturation in those days.1 Almost a century later, in the 1920s, the feminist writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir ruminated about her changing body. At fifteen she thought she looked simply "awful." She had acne, her clothes no longer fit, and she had to wrap her breasts i Excerpted from The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls by Joan Jacobs Brumberg All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
