What transpired in American history and culture to turn the first girl into the second is the subject of Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s fascinat- ing and important new book, The Body Project (Random House. $25), which tracks girls and their bodies from the era of repression to the cul- ture of obsession. ““Before the twentieth century, girls simply did not organize their think- ing about themselves around their bodies,’’ she writes. ““Today . . . they believe that the body is the ultimate expression of the self.''
Brumberg, a Cornell professor of history and women’s studies, draws on 150 years of girls’ diaries as she traces the rise of Clearasil, training bras and junior-high sex. Many of these changes came about because girls have been reaching puberty at ever younger ages–just over 12 today, compared with 15 or 16 two centuries ago. But a major spur was commerce. Until the 1950s, for instance, girls simply waited to wear a bra until their breasts grew big enough to fit the adult sizes. But new synthetic, stretchable fabrics, developed during the war, needed a civilian market. Hence the era of what department stores called ““junior figure control.’’ Magazines like Seventeen advertised ““Bobbie’’ bras and girdles, which came in sizes small enough to fit the skinniest preteen, and home-ec teachers showed their classes such films as ““Figure Forum,’’ supplied by the Warner Brassiere Co.
Perfect breasts, flawless skin, gleaming hair, slim legs–one after another these fetishes accumulated until, as Brumberg writes, the chief mantra for American girlhood was ““I hate my body.’’ Even her students, whom Brumberg describes as very savvy about the way they’re targeted by commercial and pop culture, admit to living with a nonstop voice-over criticizing what they eat and how they look. Pathological insecurity has become a feminine reflex.
That nonstop voice plays a crucial role in The Secret Language of Eating Disorders (Times Books. $25), a provocative new analysis of anorexia and bulimia by the Canadian therapist Peggy Claude-Pierre. As a graduate student, Claude-Pierre was abruptly introduced to eating disorders when both her teenage daughters developed anorexia. Doctors pronounced the disease incurable, Claude-Pierre says, so she treated them herself, cobbling together a therapy as she went. Her daughters recovered fully, doctors began referring patients to her and in 1993 she opened the now famous Montreux Clinic in Victoria, B.C. Claude-Pierre has appeared on ““Oprah’’ and ““20/ 20,’’ and one of her best-known supporters was the Princess of Wales. Although Diana was not her patient, the two met several times, and the princess was to appear at a benefit for the clinic this fall.
Eating disorders are notoriously difficult to cure, in part because doctors still don’t fully understand what causes them. Claude-Pierre’s methods appear to make sense: they include round-the-clock personal attention, a tremendous emphasis on showing unconditional love and support and careful strategies to encourage eating and ward off destructive behaviors. (Other programs offer similar approaches.) But while she says nearly all her patients recover completely, the book offers no statistics or outside verification to back that assertion. Nor does she call on outside expertise to support her homemade scientific theories about eating disorders. She writes a great deal about what she calls Confirmed Negativity Condition–essentially, feelings of unworthiness and self-hatred that in some people unleash a kind of pit bull in the brain. Claude-Pierre’s ““Negative Mind’’ is Brumberg’s voice-over, carried to a deadly extreme, but the theory is more convincing as cultural history than as hard science.
For all the jargon and sentimentality in Claude-Pierre’s book (““You are altruistic angels,’’ she writes in a ““Letter to Sufferers’’), she provides a gripping, often chilling view of what it’s like to battle these horrific diseases. Her patients’ victories are hard-won. But her cry for public understanding would be a lot more power- ful without the pseudoscience. For the most illuminating insights into growing up female, read Claude-Pierre’s case his- tories–and Brumberg’s tough-minded analysis of the culture behind them.
