Research Paper on:
The Body Project by J.J. Brumberg

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
society in her book The Body Project. While feminist scholarship has targeted the messages being sent to culturally to adolescent girls concerning their body image, the general consensus has  been that at least attitudes today are more sensible than they were a hundred years ago when corsets constricted the rib cages of both girls and women. Brumberg differs  with this assessment. Brumberg asserts that girls "today make the body into an all-consuming project in ways that young women of the past did not" (xvii). Turning to original diaries  of young girls beginning in the 1830s, Brumberg describes how a teenage girl sat down in 1892 and made a list of her plans for self-improvement. Her list included a  resolution not to talk about herself, to work seriously, and bet more dignified. A century later, an adolescent girl sat down to a similar task. In her list, she resolved  to improve herself by losing weight and getting new contact lenses. Brumberg charts her thesis around the social forces that brought about this change. Brumberg does not assert  that the nineteenth century situation was ideal, but by citing diaries, medical guides and other primary sources, she argues modern American girls may not be better off than their historical  counterparts. Rather than a lack of information about their bodies and sex, a situation that was common in the nineteenth century, modern girls are inundated by a bombardment of sexual  information that could leave girl who feel modest about their bodies feeling that they are either childish or foolish, that the external corset of the nineteenth century has been replaced  by the internal control of body through severe dieting. Brumbergs goal in resenting this history of adolescent body image is ambitious. She states that her goal is "to initiate a