In the book “The Body Project”, Joan Jacobs Brumberg examines how the social changes of the last century have affected the ways in which teenage girls regard their bodies and themselves. By the use of various historical documents, including the many diaries of adolescent women, the author looks at the developing attitudes towards such issues as physical occurrences like that of menarche which we know as “menstruation” and skin conditions such as acne. Brumberg also focuses on the shift in emphasis from "good works" to "good looks", and the changing relationships between teenagers and parental importance. The author allows us as a modern day society to come and understand how these historical influences operate providing us with a structure of understanding the harmful attitudes that girls absorb in adolescence which result in an internalized sense of self doubt or insignificance which often leads into the corruption of personal advancement of female adolescence into adult life.
To understand the meaning of the title “Body Project”, one must come to know and recognize the social concerns that females have u
As u go into further reading of “The Body Project”, u soon learn that females have begun to change from concentrating on external controls to concentrating on internal controls. Brumberg states that “the current body problem is not just an external issue resulting from a lack of societal vigilance or adult support; it has become an internal, psychological problem: girls today make the body into an all-consuming project.” She also notes that this obsession with making the body into an all-conceivable project has led to a traditional emphasis on “good works” as opposed to “good looks.” This emphasis deals with the fact that the lives of young women in the nineteenth century had a very different orientation from those of girls today.
Brumberg argues that there is a mismatch between biology and culture in the lives of contemporary adolescent girls. She states that “Although girls now mature sexuality 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 p
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