S1: good evening... my name is Sidonie Smith, and i am the Director of Women's Studies, on behalf of the Women's Studies Program, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and the Michigan Initiative, in Women's Health, i want to welcome you, to this, the second annual, Vivian R Shaw, lecture. the Vivian R Shaw lecture series, has been made possible, by a generous gift from Ellen Agress, a nineteen sixty-eight graduate of the College of Literature Science and the Arts, who is currently Senior Vice President and Deputy General Council, for Communications for News America Publishing, Incorporated. Ellen donated her gift to the Women's Studies Program, and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, in honor of her mother, Vivian R Shaw, who died of breast cancer, at age fifty, when Ellen was a junior here at Michigan. to honor her mother, Ellen specifically wanted this lecture series to bring to campus scholars, and public figures, who would address a real issue, afi- a real-life issue, affecting the lives of women and girls. it is especially appropriate then, that this year the Vivian R Shaw lecture, is part of a yearlong series, of public lectures, on women's health, historical perspectives, and policy dilemmas. this series of public lectures has been made possible by a broad coalition, of co-sponsors, bringing diverse campus units together to support discussion of women's health in historical perspectives, and in its policy implications, and, uh you may want to refer to the back of the um program, it lists the um co-sponsors of the series itself... at the inaugural Vivian R Shaw lecture last year, Ellen's daughter Emily was present to introduce her mother. tonight Emily, now a senior here at Michigan, double-majoring in musical theor- theater and in psychology, returns once again, to honor her grandmother, by introducing, her mother. please join me in welcoming the granddaughter of Vivian R Shaw, Emily Vivian Agress. 
<:08 APPLAUSE SS> 
S2: thank you very much. hello. i have been given the incredible honor for the second year in a row, to introduce the woman who has made this entire event possible, my mother and mentor Ellen Agress. my mother, uh my mother never ceases to amaze me. uh she, all_ though she managed to, fulfill a full-time executive career, she also was able to be a full-time mother to both my brother and i. she is by far the smartest person i know. i'll confess i still send her my papers to proofread. <SS LAUGH> um, not um, she has also been an inspiration, not only to me and my family, but also to many young women. she has set a powerful example of how far women can go, both in the professional world and in the home. Vivian R lecture series, is meaningful to me on a few different levels. first, it helps me preserve the memory of my grandmother Vivian, who i never had the opportunity to meet. second, it allows myself, other students, and members of the community, to become further educated in important women's issues. and third, my mother's endowment sets an example, to all women, of how important it is to acknowledge issues concerning women, so with no further ado, may i introduce the woman, i look up to, admire and love, my mother Ellen Shaw Agress.
<:10 APPLAUSE SS> 
S3: um i hope you all have the opportunity to uh, endow a lecture series so that perhaps one of your children can, <SS LAUGH> say such nice things about you. um, i'm sure you're gonna all understand how uh much it means to me uh given the sort of the auspices of this lecture series to have Emily here, to share the evening, with me, and if that were not enough this year my sister Elizabeth, and her daughter Kate, have travelled uh all the way from Dallas, to be here this evening, so um <:04 SS APPLAUSE> so, my mother's uh two daughters, and her only two granddaughters, are here tonight, making it a very special occasion for our family and for the women of our family. um i'm also very excited about the topic of tonight's lecture because i think the issue of self-image, and particularly body-image, is of critical importance to girls young women and even mature women. unfortunately despite women's liberation we seem to be more caught up on our physical attributes than ever. i'm sure tonight's address will give us some insight into our body projects, that will help us to understand and deal with this preoccupation in our own lives, and in the lives of our friends our sisters and our daughters. and finally i want to reiterate uh a pitch that i made last year, on female philanthropy. women even those who support it, just don't contribute as much money as men do, to non-profit institutions and causes. because money talks this means that issues of concern to women often don't get the attention they deserve. i know philanthropy is the furthest thing from the minds of students who are struggling to pay for room board and tuition, but someday you'll have discretionary dollars, and when you do i urge you to devote some portion of them, to the support of an institution or an issue, that means something to you. it will make a difference, and take it from me, it will also make you feel good. i wanna thank Abby Stewart, and Sidonie Smith for again organizing a wonderful evening, Joan Brumberg for agreeing to give tonight's lecture, and all of you for attending i'm very excited to see so many people here. thank you very much.
<:07 APPLAUSE SS> 
S4: well it's my turn. i'm Abby Stewart Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and i'm delighted to welcome this wonderful family, um, back to Ann Arbor, and uh my special, job, and pleasure, is to welcome Joan Brumberg to Ann Arbor and to tell you a little bit about her before she, tells us about, The Body Project. um... the range and breadth of Professor Brumberg's knowledge and expertise will i think be made clear to you by many things, but one indicator is the fact that she is currently the Steven Weiss Presidential Fellow and Professor of, History, Human Development, and Women's Studies, at Cornell University, and that's a very unusual package, to be a professor of all three of those things, uh and her books, make obvious, how much_ how deep and wide is her knowledge in these different fields and others, like medicine. she's taught at Cornell, since completing her education at the University of Rochester, Boston College, and the University of Virginia. most of us in this room know Professor Brumberg as the author of The Body Project, An Intimate History of American Girls, and um we do have it here courtesy of Shaman Drum and you're invited to uh meet with, Professor Brumberg after the lecture, uh if you'd like to have her sign your book or talk to her a little bit more. many of you probably also know that she's the author of Fasting Girls, the Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa As a Modern Disease, and Mission for Life, the Judson Family, an American Evangelical Culture. she has truly distinguished herself, as an authority both on the experience of adolescence among girls and the particular developmental v- vulnerabilities girls face. the hallmark of her work is the combination of rich psychological insight, acute social analysis, and creative historical research, all delivered in the books, with a beautiful writing style. in her recent work, she is clearly interested in the ordinary vicissitudes, of adolescence for girls in contemporary America as well as in the past. she retains, though a concern about the potential for the deeper trouble, that some girls end up in, as she was uh exploring in Fasting Girls and anorexia. Professor Brumberg has been recognized with teaching awards from her institution, as well as by a Guggenheim Fellowship, grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Rockefeller Foundation, as well as the MacDowell Colony Residency. she's worked on a number of public history projects, i think part of her commitment to, the broader issues of citizenship that, some, academics are concerned about. she's consulted on a film project on the history of the Girl Scouts, an exhibit on the history of asylums in New York state, and historical site interpretation for museum educators. she's currently working on a project on girls diaries, which doesn't surprise me at all because she used girls diaries in the pr- Body Project with great success. so i know i'm looking forward to her new work. meanwhile i'm eager as i'm sure you are to hear what she has to say tonight, because i know many people have shared my own experience of having read the Body Project, and having found that Linda Kerber was correct when she wrote on the book jacket, that <READING>Joan Jacobs Brumberg tells a stunning and troubling story.</READING> what is even more important, though, is that she not only tells us a fascinating and disturbing story, but she has some important ideas about how we might do better, in providing what adolescent girls need, to survive. she made me feel it was urgent that we figure out how to do that. so, now i'd like to welcome her to the lectern so you can hear what she has to say.
<:12 APPLAUSE SS> 
S5: i'm, delighted to be in Arb- in Ann Arbor. i always feel that there are connections between Michigan and Cornell, um having admitted women about the same time, um, and delighted to see how strong and vital your, um, opportunities are here for the study of gender, uh at both the Center and in Women's Studies so, it's been_ it's really nice for me. and i wanna thank also, um, uh, i i'm delighted to be part of the Vivian Shaw, lecture series. so lemme start what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna talk for a while, and then i'm gonna show some slides and then i'm gonna come back and, talk a little bit more, just to give you a a road map. um, a century ago, American women were lacing themselves into corsets, and teaching their adolescent daughters to do the same thing. but today's teens, some with rings in their eyebrows and noses, shop for thong bikinis on their own and their middle class parents are likely to be uninvolved, until the moment when the credit card bill arrives in the mail. now this this transition in the experience of young women tells us a great deal about what's happened, to female adolescents in the contemporary world. it's also kind of a useful imaginative backdrop for my remarks to you this evening which are based on, The Body Project, an Intimate History of American Girls. a little bit of intellectual biography, first. in nineteen eighty-eight when i published Fasting Girls which was a book about the history of anorexia nervosa, i was already thinking about the relationship between American culture, and adolescent female bodies. those who've read the book know that cultural imperatives, particularly the link in the twentieth century between slimness, and female perfection, are an important part of my explanation of the increasing incidence of eating disorders. however although my work is very much in the social constructionist vein, i never argued, that anorexia nervosa was caused by culture alone. there clearly are some intervening personal, psychological and familial variables, that explain the etiology of anorexia nervosa, as well as other eating disorders. but in the years since the publication of Fasting Girls, i gave a great deal of thought to what it is about American culture, that makes female adolescence so difficult. important work by Carol Gilligan Mary Heifer Peggy Orenstein, the (Satfers) i'm sure some of you have read this material. it all sounds a clear alarm, for American girls more so than boys adolescence is a time of declining confidence, silence, and danger. and many of you in the audience may also be familiar with the unsettling fact, that, uh studies show that until puberty, women really are the healthier sex, by all measures. mental health measures as well as, biomedical measures. now because so much contemporary social science literature suggests, that the body is a serious problematic for girls, beginning in puberty, i decided to focus my attention, on the adolescent female body, to give it a history, and to map the ways in which the inevitable physical transformations, of this stage of life, have been negotiated in different generations, of American girls. so instead of writing a history of bulimia, which some people expected me to do, i moved away from pathology, to normative experience. my new book rests on the assumption, that the female adolescent body has a history. maybe a distinctly American one. and that what happens to girls, in the process of physical and emotional development changes, to some extent, over time. i say to some extent because i want to acknowledge the tension, between, what is hard-wired into the organism, and into the developmental process, and what is culturally constructed. unlike other history books, i begin with a biological event and that event is menarche, the first period. and the narrative then moves through a profoundly important sequence of physical developments, such as the appearance of breasts the eruptions of acne, the emergence of sexuality. body parts usually don't appear in works in history, unless they're lost on the battlefield, but they're <SS LAUGH> critical, to my interpretation of what's happened to girls in the course of the past century. among other things, i suggest that some body parts, have all but disappeared, such as the hymen, what the Victorians called, the meaningful membrane, <SS LAUGH> while new ones such as the bikini line area, have been acquired. <SS LAUGH> nobody in my generation worried about that one very much. <SS LAUGH> um, in essence, i use the strategies and the techniques of a social and cultural historian, to show how the body projects and preoccupations of girls, have changed in different generations, and how and why American girls, came to understand the body, as a critical personal resource, a social symbol, and the penultimate source of self identity. so i wanna begin tonight with a simple but very important comparison. at the end of the last century, in the eighteen nineties, a middle class American girl was likely to menstruate fifteen or sixteen, and be a blushing virgin when she married, usually in her early twenties. in contrast, in the nineteen nineties, a girl of the same social class is likely to be sexually active, before the age at which her great-great grandmother even began to menstruate. this is an enormous, life-course change that has meaning for girls' bodies, and for their social experience. now although most people think of the biology of the human body as relatively fixed and static, from one generation into the next, the bodies of female adolescents in America, have in fact changed over time, largely as a result of improved nutrition, combined with the decline of infectious diseases. today, American girls follow a new biological timetable by that i mean earlier menarche, as well as a new social timetable by that i mean earlier age of first intercourse, but the combination of the two, earlier physical maturity and greater autonomy and freedom, has not necessarily worked to their advantage. now my reading, of the situation of contemporary versus historical girls, is based on an analysis of over a hundred and fifty personal diaries, written by adolescent girls ages thirteen to eighteen, in the years between the eighteen thirties, and the nineteen nineties. and as i read, i asked what was it like to develop breasts or begin your periods a century ago? what role did uh mother's families uh physicians in the community, play in the transition, from girlhood, into adult womanhood and, how did girls, in the past, think about their changing bodies, as they negotiated their way into adulthood? now at the outset, with a, an acute audience like this at the University of Michigan i have to acknowledge that there is a class bias, in my sample. diary keeping in adolescence has almost always, been a middle class activity. for a variety of reasons that have to do with affluence, privacy, who had a room of her own, uh and styles of nurture. middle class diaries are also if you think about it more likely to survive, because of collecting policies in historical repositories museums and historical societies, which are biased in favor of community elites. what's interesting though about the, epidemiology of diaries is that they appear regularly among different ethnic minorities, Jews African Americans, Italians, Asians, at that moment in the family history when the family, has achieved, middle class status. for example, amom- among American Jews a few daughters of immigrants kept diaries in the nineteen twenties, but the real explosion of Jewish girl diaries came in post-World War Two America, as a result of increased affluence, and probably also the influence of Anne Frank, uh whose diary was published in nineteen fifty-two. among African Americans, the girls diarists of the early twentier- twentieth century are almost_ are also linked, by social class status. everyone that i have seen, was the daughter, of a teacher, or preacher, in other words the backbone, of the African American middle class. now as emotionally intimate as diaries can be, girl diaries in America have been fairly silent on the subject of the body until the early twentieth century. for example, a century ago, menarche, first period, was a private affair for women and girls, and they handled it with enormous reserve. some Victorian adolescents made brief comments about being unwell, that's a term that still survives i think, or they repeated a cryptic pattern of X's on the top of the page every twenty-eight or thirty days i had to count, to realize what was going on. and some wrote M-P, for menstrual period. uh in the early eighteen nineties Lou Henry a fifteen-year-old Pasadena schoolgirl, who would later become Mrs Herbert Hoover, noted that her mother made her stay home on the lounge all day, and that she was excused from gym she said, for reasons best known to myself. <SS LAUGH> thi- this sparse commentary suggests tha- that the mom, Mrs Hoover limited, Lou's activity that she was uh, uh monitored, during her period, and that the high school, made allowances for girls on their, on those special days so this is kind of the, historical origins of the gym excuse. <SS LAUGH> uh, intimacies with young men, were also hidden, or coded subjects in the nineteenth century. consider for example Antha Warren, a young woman who taught school in Saint Albans Vermont back in the eighteen sixties. when she was in her late teens, Antha began keeping company with Henry Muncell a young dentist, who was a Civil War vet. whenever the couple kissed, Antha put an asterisk in her diary. and since Henry came to call at least four or five nights a week, these asterisks mounted up. one night she wrote with some satisfaction, too many <HAND GESTURE INDICATING ASTERISK> to count. <SS LAUGH> Antha's tone suggested that she took pleasure from her growing intimacy with Henry whom she married in eighteen seventy, and that the couple may have done more than kiss. yet she always wrote about her interactions in a coded way. either because she feared that her diary might be read by others, or more likely i think because she did not have the vocabulary, or the language, to describe what was happening to her. listen to this entry. she writes, <READING>after tea, Henry and i went into the parlor, shut the door, and had a visit.</READING><SS LAUGH><READING>he, he tried to sleep in my lap, but couldn't. had such a good time,</READING> and then she draws four squiggly lines and writes, buttons. <SS LAUGH> i was left wondering. <SS LAUGH> did did Henry simply play with her buttons or did they engage in what would come to be called, petting, in the nineteen twenties? now most American girls were as reticent as Antha Warren and Lou Henry until the twentieth century. but i wanna give you some examples that ki- that map some of the changes in girls' ability to talk, about their own sexuality. by the nineteen twenties, i've jumped ahead now from the eighteen sixties to the nineteen twenties so i've covered a bit of time, a sophisticated eighteen-year-old by the name of Yvonne Blue, later Mrs B F Skinner, wrote about an evening necking and petting in the back seat of a car in a Chicago suburb. <READING> i'm technically still a nice girl, she explained, <SS LAUGH> but she vacillated between feeling guilty and happy, about her experiences and she writes, <READING> once in a while i feel terr- uh slightly ashamed of myself, for indulging in the greatest American sport, <SS LAUGH> but something must be the matter with me because while i think, it's wrong and think is written in caps, and bold, and underline and, apostrophes you know the way adolescent girls often do, so she says while i think it's wrong i really really can't feel, that it is. feel is also, <SS LAUGH> underlined and in bold. now by the nineteen fifties, jumping ahead thirty years, younger adolescent diarists such as Ruth Teishman, a thirteen-year-old in Queens, i actually got this diary from a New York's, City sanitation worker, who found it in a garbage can. um it's an interesting story and i'd be happy to talk about how i get diaries later. anyway Ruth, Ruth displayed an open curiosity about sex and, some uh linguistic evidence of training in anatomical language in other words, she had some sex ed, she writes about a pajama party, where the girls pretended to be having sex with the boys and she says very nonchalantly, <READING> Robin put a wetted piece of toilet paper into Kathy's vagina, and then she goes on to describe what they ate. <SS LAUGH> peanut butter and jelly, pizza, um, um, but the the language the language is important. by the nineteen eighties, American girls were writing graphic accounts of their initiation into, heterosexual relationships. um, this is where my age shows, um, i i always take a deep breath before i have to read the rest of this, although some girls were almost clinical in the reporting, others still used colloquialisms for body parts for example, Gabby Brown, a sixteen-year-old who attended Catholic school in Michigan, Ypsilanti i believe <SS LAUGH> um, wrote <READING>he wanted me to put my hands on his biwa and when i did he told me i made him happy.</READING> <SS LAUGH> in Florida sixteen-year-old Laura Ramirez wrote about her first real boyfriend and, this is all one sentence so i'm reading it the way she wrote it, <READING>he did what i guess you would call finger coitus for about twenty-five minutes and neither of us said anything during the whole time it was fantastic, and i enjoyed it immensely.</READING> <SS LAUGH> um, the point is, from a historical perspective these behaviors probably are not new, right but having girls talk about them, even to themselves is revolutionary, and w- i would wanna, add as an important addendum here, that in the same era, in the nineteen seventies, uh writing about lesbian relationships begins to appear for the first time, in the adolescent diary, usually among girls who are somewhat older, eighteen or twenty, and i th- uh there's there's quite an interesting coming out diary in The Body Project. but my book The Body Project is about more than this, i think rather well-known move from sexual repression, to sexual expression. it's also about the evolution of a new way of thinking, a paradigm shift if you will, that's had critical importance for the psychological development of adolescent girls, and to make my point i'm gonna turn again to the voices of girls themselves, but this time to two young women, who made New Year's resolutions ba- uh that were separated by almost a century. the first one is a Victorian young woman sixteen years old in Boston, and the date is January one eighteen ninety-two, and she writes, <READING>resolve not to talk about myself or feelings, to think before speaking, to work seriously, to be self-restrained in conversation and actions, not to let my thoughts wander, to be dignified, interest myself in others.</READING> and notice there the emphasis on, internal character but outward behavior as a reflection of internal character, and also, the affiliative nature the connected nature, of that comment she wants to be connected to other people i mean in some ways, it's a Gilligan-esque, example, um and you find that over and over again, uh in diaries from this period. now a New Year's resolution written in nineteen eighty-two provides a stark contrast this is a young woman, sixteen years old from Stuyvesant High School, in New York City, some of you may know that that's a selective school in New York. she writes <READING>i will try to make myself better in any way i possibly can with the help of my budget and baby-sitting money. i will lose weight, get new lenses already got a new haircut good makeup new clothes and accessories.</READING> <SS LAUGH> i mean notice here that they in, visual presentation of the self, the emphasis on the outside of the body, and the need to consume, in order_ to buy, in order to be better, and i'd also add that i think it's a highly individualistic strategy as opposed to, an affiliative one. the contrast between these two girlish voices one projecting good works, and the other good looks, captures a critical change in the experience of America's adolescent girls, over the past one hundred years. now this is not to say, that girls in the nineteenth century didn't care about their looks. their diaries in fact reveal that they paid close attention to their hair, and skin in particular. Margaret Fuller, one of my favorite nineteenth century feminists apparently did battle with adolescent acne. uh Lou Henry Hoover who i mentioned to you before, spent a great deal of time with her girlfriends in the eighteen nineties, learning how to bang her hair, it was in the eighteen nineties i think that adolescent women discovered, that you could hide, um, kind of a a row of um, adolescent zits with su- with a ruffle, of hair. she was very involved in that, um, <SS LAUGH> but in the nineteenth century beauty imperatives for young women were kept in check, by considerations of moral character, and by some harsh patterns of emotional denial, and repression. Victorian girls often noted in their diaries when they you know acquired something new and pretty such as a, hair ribbon or lace co- collar, but these purchases were not linked to their self-worth, in the same ways that they are today. in fact, girls who are preoccupied with their looks, were likely to be accused of vanity, or self-indulgence. many parents tried to limit their daughters' interest in these superficial things such as hairdos or, the size of their waists, because character was considered far more important, than beauty. so another way of saying this, is that before the twentieth century, at least from their writing, girls simply did not organize their thinking, about themselves around the body. but at the end of the twentieth century, adolescent girls regard the body as their primary project. today many worry about the contours of their bodies especially its size shape, and muscle tone, because they believe that the body is the ultimate expression of the self. their diaries reveal, that when they're unhappy, with something at school in the family or in relationships, they turn routinely, to a form of self-critique that centers on the body. what clinicians call body angst, or i like this term better, bad body fever, <SS LAUGH> alright, and i_ what i mean by that is a continuous internal dialogue with the self, about what's wrong, with and you can fill in the blank, alright your weight, uh or a particular, body part, and i would suggest that from a historical perspective that the body part can change, over time. um today, this kind of bad body fever is expressed you know routinely in girl talk, and on T-V, programs in the afternoon people talk, about thunder thighs about arm alarms, about butt bummers my students have_ tell me that there're even more, uh of of kind of of formulations like this. now adolescent girls today face the issues girls have always faced who am i who do i want to be? but their answers more than ever before revolve around the body. the increase in anorexia nervosa and bulimia in the past thirty years, suggests that in some cases the body becomes an obsession, leading to recalcitrant eating behaviors, that can result in death. but even among girls who never develop eating disorders the body is still central today, to definitions of the self, although there are some class and race differences, most clinicians note that body angst is high among contemporary young women, and the most recent polls suggest that seventy-eight percent, of American girls are dissatisfied with their bodies by the time, they're seventeen, and pediatricians routinely are telling me, that there are more and more girls who are coming in, to_ uh at eight or nine, and and complaining that they are too fat or they are already on diets. so why is the body still a girl's nemesis shouldn't today's, sexually liberated girls feel better about themselves than their corsetted sisters, of a century ago? well, from the perspective of history, i think that adolescent self-consciousness is probably quite persistent, but that its level, is raised or lowered like the water level in a pool, by the cultural and social setting. although young women today enjoy greater freedom and more options than their counterparts a century ago, i believe that they're also under more pressure, and at greater risk, because of the unique combination, of biological and cultural forces, that have made coming of age or growing up in a female body, extremely difficult at the end of the twentieth century. the fact that American girls now make the body their central project is not then an accident, or a curiosity. in fact it's a symptom, of historical changes that have accumulated over time, making contemporary girls who are anxious than ever before about their bodies and therefore about themselves. now in order to demonstrate, uh the way in which the pressure on girls' bodies has escalated and intensified, over the past century i'm gonna turn now to some visual images. and these images really uh convey, uh the nature and the direction of social change for girls in the twentieth century, and they in effect uh tell the story of what's happened, from corsets uh to body piercing. i've also thought about this uh slide show, in a way as an exhibition that could be called something like landmarks in the history of girls' bodies. <P :05> you might wanna move in to the middle if there're some extra seats... give me time to you know (xx) this is an ad from a Ladies' Home Journal, in uh eighteen ninety-eight, and i show it to you this_ make this point, that there are some ways in which girls will always be girls in other words there are ways in which we can put the emphasis on continuity, as well as change. hair for example has always been a perfect way, for girls to say something about the self hair is a_ is after all personal, but it's also malleable, and uh uh it's personal but public and it's also malleable. hair is one a number of body projects that i talk about, in terms of their changing meaning for adolescents, and this slide shows a girl with that long luxuriant Victorian hair, looking in a mirror, and i'm gonna return to the subject of mirrors, in a moment. note that someone on the right, in the corner is helping this young woman groom her hair. it could be a mother could be a sister, i would suggest it could even be a domestic servant. next you're gonna see an unusual series of a single girl one girl Pattie Cooper, uh growing up in California, uh at the end of the nineteenth century what's interesting here is that you see her at twelve, sixteen, and eighteen in just a moment, and it demonstrates the pattern of what happens to hair, in the nineteenth century, the pattern of long hair to hair up on the head, at sixteen and then, a- at eighteen to the hair up but also the corsetted body, um which is a feature, of, adolescent growth and development in that time period. now if we jump ahead to the nineteen twenties, young women look quite different this is the bob, you will all have seen pictures like this this is an anonymous American girl, uh F Scott Fitzgerald wrote about the bob and everybody seems to have done it it had a lot of symbolic value, in terms of uh signalling modernity and it fit with the new, chemise silhouette of the flapper in the twenties, but if you've_ i i_ in my book i suggest that it it also means something else long hair, uh such as the hair i showed you in the first slide, required grooming brushing combing braiding, and that was generally done at home, usually in the evening in the company of one's mothers mother and sisters. in other words there was a great deal of mutual grooming, and uh the bob really meant a break, in the mother daughter connection. hairstyles obviously have political meaning. by the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, many African American women had rejected, the kind of hair straightening and processing products, promoted in this ad. uh and note this is for mothers and daughters to use together. instead in this time period they chose a more natural look, uh as a symbol of pride in race and African origins, and their use of natural cro- uh close-cropped hair was you know oppositional it was a rejection, of mainstream white beauty standards and this use of hair as symbol continues, today this haircut uh on a student of mine, she explained it to me, as a rejection of traditional, uh, femininity. now in The Body Project i also talk about the history of menstruation. and the history of menstruation is important for what's happened to girls and their bodies. this is an eighteen ninety-seven ad from the Sears and Roebuck catalog, uh tells us a lot about menstrual technology at the end of the <SS LAUGH> nineteenth century, in the second column you see a series of sanitary belts, uh and then also, uh an early ad for mass produced napkins. um, menstruation was rarely acknowledged publicly in this era and most women, still made their own napkins from extraneous, cloth that they collected in a rag bag, and then washed by hand. only women of some means would have been able, to buy napkins like this at this point in time, and i guess i should say, uh to those in the audience who are um under, thirty that the world before paper tape, was very different, and, <SS LAUGH> uh, you had to secure a napkin you know to a belt, and uh this was a fixture of of, female life for uh a very long time. i traced the scientific and commercial transformations, in menstrual practices and its effects on girls, uh by nineteen seventeen the time of this ad, there was a sanitary products industry, and those on top are rubber aprons that you wore underneath your clothes but on top of, <SU-F LAUGH> (they'd be) pretty hot i would think. um, by the nineteen twenties, a trade journal, for drugstores, showed the druggist how to display, these heretofore unmentionable products, and notice what it says <READING>whispering never built a business.</READING> <SS LAUGH> uh... increasingly, as menstruation was demystified in other words as it was spoken about more and more in women's magazines you begin to see ads like this, uh where the mother and daughter are engaged in the critical conversation. um, and, usually, uh the p- the company, usually Kotex, is saying if you don't know what to say to your daughter, uh write to us for a pamphlet, and we will provide you, um with the language. this ad from the nineteen twenties also featu- uh features that critical mother daughter connection, but notice the m- the daughter looks a little surly, <SS LAUGH> she's uh, i think it's meant to suggest that she's uh they didn't use the term then but she is a, sexually active teen, um and the product Lysol, interestingly enough um, and i do not recommend this, <SS LAUGH> Lysol was used as a vaginal douche at this time <GROAN SS> and and so the the that Lysol is also sending out, uh pamphlets for, uh mothers and daughters. thi- this ad also plays to the mother daughter connection which is there but not there mothers who don't know how to talk to their daughters, looking for a third party to help them, in this case this is an ad from the American Girl magazine for Girl Scouts, and it's aimed at the girl who's mother isn't talking right it says if your mother hems and haws, write to us, we'll provide you with the information, on menstruation... now um, sorry i just lost my place. <SS LAUGH> this ad from Seventeen in the nineteen seventies is a telling indication, of social change. uh the mother has disappeared, right? and there's a new kind of menstrual product a tampon or internal protection. again there are enormous generational differences here, among women even in this audience on this particular dimension. tampon use by teens well into the nineteen sixties, um, was uh, not regarded favorably. the Church, Catholic Church took an active ro- uh position against uh internal protection, um all of this of course means that the hymen is losing its sanctity, virginity is declining in importance, but so, are mothers, and here the real source of information about female bodies is a girlfriend, who's mother conveniently happens to be a nurse. i think what's important here about the image is it's a girl without a sexual mentor, despite an increa- the increasing permissiveness of society. now in my book i argue that we have in America a uh culturally constructed, menstrual script. by that i mean, that there i- really is an American way to menstruate, and learning how to do that, was important, to different, generations of immigrants. uh there are however some very interesting ethnic differences in cultures where, the connections between mothers and girls around their bodies are still quite strong, this ad for tampons is from a contemporary Spanish language magazine, and still acknowledges the mother's traditional role as, counselor and, sex educator. now the American girls' body projects, have also been influenced by, two important developments that i, outline and talk about in some detail in my book. the first is, new and emerging opportunities for self-scrutiny, we're back to mirrors we're gonna be talking about mirrors in a minute. and also the shift, from external control of the body epitomized in the corset, to, internal control represented by, dieting, and aerobics. alright so i wanna go back to this issue of of self-scrutiny. uh i explore the impact of, new technology such as mass produced mirrors, advertised by Sears in the eighteen eighties. as well as, the modern bathroom i wish i had a better slide to make my point, but lights, mirrors and running water, have contributed to both improved hygiene, but also, much closer scrutiny, of women's faces. the modern bathroom is a very important site, for American girlhood, and when the domestic bathroom scale, is added to this, and it becomes a fixture, of American middle class life after World War Two, women and girls' attention to their weight, escalates. i mean before the bathroom scale, most women were not aware of the number that they were, in other words they didn't fixate, on having an identity through weight. now i also considered the role of movies and their influence on girls. this early ad for Kleenex demonstrates that the new movie stars of the teens and twenties were role models for girls. by nineteen twenty even nice middle class girls began to use cosmetics, and play with their appearance in ways, that they never had before, in Victorian America. so the point here is this that by the early twentieth century, self-scrutiny, was not devalued in women in fact, certain forms of vanity, were now part of modern femininity, such as looking at yourself in the small, hand-held mirror, known as a compact. these were marketed cheaply, by nineteen twenty-five, by nineteen twenty-seven, when this Ladies' Home Journal cover appeared, the compact had_ and and a and a woman looking at her herself uh her face on the street like has become an icon, uh for the era. i mean fifty years before, a woman who d- who did this, would, either be considered, a lunatic or a lady of the night. <SS LAUGH> i mean it was just not something that nice women did in public. now, the mandate for self-scrutiny intensified by the nineteen fifties. <SS LAUGH> i include this for everybody in my generation. this is from Seventeen, in nineteen fifty-six or nineteen fifty-seven, and this slide points to the elaboration of the market for mirrors. there are more and more mirrors to consume, and they're increasingly specialized there're makeup mirrors full-length mirrors magnifying mirrors, three-sided mirrors you name it, and i think we are one of the few cultures in the world where you can get into an elevator, and have a mirror on the ceiling or go to the bathroom and have mirrors all around you while you're even seated, on the toilet. <SS LAUGH> um, now mirror mirrors provide a good segue into my nes- next subject which is acne. and you know really until you could see, your, pimples, they were s- merely tactile they were not a visual problem for you, um acne is an in- they were a problem for someone else perhaps <SS LAUGH> um, acne is an inevitable part of adolescence but even pimples i argue change their meaning over time. in the late nineteenth century when this photo was taken for a medical text, pimples were still connected to sexual sin and perversion. um masturbation and syphilis in particular. later, adolescent blemishes were regarded as a sign of uncleanliness, and as an emblem of lower class status. now um, i find it very interesting that pimples seem to have always had more cultural meaning for girls than boys. what i mean by that is that girl pimples get more attention than boy pimples and w- you know y- figure that out from looking at the records of early dermatologists, and who was there, in the waiting room, i mean who's investing their, money, in this new imperative to fix the skin for health, but also for beauty, and, black girls of course have had to deal with the double burden of pigment, color and also pimples, and i chase the chain uh traced the change in, skin care experiences of American girls, giving some attention to race products that promised, like this one, uh to whiten, the skin. by the nineteen fifties this imperative for uh improved health but also beauty the m- the mingling of these two, really absorbed uh middle class parents, and doctors, advertisers, uh everybody who was waging war against acne in the fifties, they also realized that baby boom pimples were very big business. this Clearasil personality of the month campaign was one of the most successful, advertising campaigns in post-World War uh America, it was always the same story some of you may remember this, the girl who's using the product has pimples, she uses the product, she triumphs over pimples and she becomes popular at school. what, <SS LAUGH> what i never realized when i was reading these as a girl of course was that, the Clearasil personality of the month never, had an ethnic name, she was never, even a McNamara, or_ but she certainly was not um, a Goldberg, or a Zuckerelli, um, you know she had_ and she certainly was not a woman of color. now American middle class parents made enormous investments in the skin of their daughters and i used the social history of acne to talk about, the ways in which beauty, and physical and mental health concerns have all merged so that, Americans today, basically believe more than ever before in the perfectibility, of the human body, and i would point to the uh fig- the rising uh tide, of plastic surgeries in this country as a good indication of that. but there is an important_ there's another important development in this story of the twentieth century, and that has to do with, hygiene, and the point i would wanna, make with, this audience tonight is that modern hygiene, means that the body requires more, not less upkeep and expenditure, so i wanna move quickly through some slides to show you how the pressure, has escalated from dental hygiene, in the early nineteenth century when teeth were a very important indication of, social status, to uh underarm hair, in the nineteen twenties uh th- an ad for one of the early depilatories Zip, uh to leg hair in the fifties i had one of these pink, Lady Schicks an electric razor, and a friend of mine who's a historian of women gave me this slide, of her daughter's sixth grade class all shaving their_ the girls shaving their legs together and i showed this recently, uh last year in Japan and people thought it was really, exotic, <SS LAUGH> um, but but i i think it's so much a part of our culture that we we don't even think about, the extent to which, girls in early adolescence, begin to do some of these things together uh, in a group. um, fast_ uh body odor okay? a major concern in the fifties with the enormous push for heterosexuality, um, fashionable correction of eyesight, another kind of beauty health issue, what's interesting to me and i'd never really thought about this until fairly recently, is that eyeglasses were not gendered until after World War Two. most of the gl- eyeglasses are androgynous before World War Two after the war, there tend to be boy gla- glasses and girl glasses, and of course we also move into contact lenses, um which <PRESENTS NEW SLIDE S1> <SS LAUGH> it's from Look magazine in the fifties lenses were were by and large invented for men, to improve their performance, in airplanes uh during the war at sport, uh hunting and fishing, but it's very clear, by the late fifties that the major market is going to be adolescent women, uh who are doing this for both, beauty slash, improved uh, eyesight. orthodonture, of course is another middle class investment, uh that involves both the the mingling of of of beauty and health concerns. weight loss camps, uh <SS LAUGH> from the back of the New York Times you're probably familiar with these. um, again my point being more and more upkeep here more and more expenditure in time and energy. this is a new procedure, that i just learned about, permanent makeup called micropigmentation. you can have your, eyeliner drawn on forever, um <SS LAUGH> i guess in many ways it's like uh decorating or tattooing, and finally you know the most popular plastic surgery in America today is liposuction, and also something called botox which i cannot explain to you and if there's somebody in the audience who can explain it to me i'm not quite certain what it is but i just, read something about that. now um, a final point here in these slides, in the late nineteenth century, in this ad, okay this is a- an ad for ham and it makes an important point, and it makes <S1 LAUGH> a point about changing aesthetics, uh that is the way in which uh, different uh parts of the body are valued, or fetishized by different historical periods. uh in the eighteen nineties a small waist was important so girls endured tight lacing. by the first World War, legs, were getting, much more cultural attention and exposure. this is a postcard that was sent by a Cornell student, a male, to a woman student at Wells College which was up the road a piece, and notice how this card uh legitimates the male gaze and the interest in women's body parts. uh also i'm showing you this one also a postcard just to make the point that weight was not yet a private matter, uh the way it is for most women today most women today would rather give away their social security number, than <SS LAUGH> the number on the scale, uh and a lot of young women in um, the twenties, who just began to diet and_ or they didn't call it dieting they called it slimming, were weighing themselves either at drugstores or at university gymnasiums because they didn't yet have scales at home. in the nineteen twenties long sleek legs, and a flat chest, were a necessity, for wearing a classic, uh chemise dress and there are lots of stories of you know girls uh even in, famous feminists like uh Simone uh de Beauvoir who, bound her breasts in the twenties. um, slimming becomes part of the culture and, some of that has to do with the invention of the calorie, and the first exercise salons for women in urban centers, uh begin to appear but nothing like the numbers that we are dealing with dealing with today. now by the nineteen forties again the aesthetic, had changed it's clearly anti-fat, or what i call obeseophobic, there are many popular putdowns of large women, such as this postcard, from the World War Two era, and concerns about overweight spread to middle class parents and to girls, <SS LAUGH> this ad from Seventeen, shows a line of special clothing for girls who were larger than, normal. note the assumption, can a chubby girl, be happy? so increasingly fat is cast as a psychological issue, as well as a beauty issue. now in nineteen fifty, adult mainstream culture idealized large pointed breasts. in the nineteen eighties Madonna mocked this idea, of what i call mammary madness, but, at the time, believe me having read, a lot of fifties diaries it generated a lot of anxiety, among young women growing up and i heard in fifties diaries, the same refrain over and over again and it was, often, expressed very baldly, as, i wish i could be big, and these girls are not talking about being taller and heavier. um smart marketers with the endorsement of American pediatricians, began to sell training bras, and foundation garments, uh to the post-war generation arguing that both girls and early brassieres, were essential, to good health and development into successful, womanhood. in the nineteen sixties the aesthetic changed again and the national infatuation with blue jeans, meant more cultural attention to thighs and buttocks and of course what do i find in diaries, but talk about thunder thighs. uh today at the end of the twentieth century, i think it would be fair to say that adolescent girls pay close attention, to both the upper body, and the lower body this is the_ these are the new shoulders, um, it's on the poster i think for this series, and um there's also a_ quite a bit of attention uh as in this slide to a carefully groomed, bikini line area. contemporary young women are also piercing, not just their faces but also their breasts and genitals. what the Victorians called, private parts. i think that the historical message is really quite clear. virtually every body part is now part of the body project, and the entire body has become, a message board. now i want to show you at this point, some contrasts i'm not gonna say very much until the last few of them that i think need a little bit of explanation, uh but these_ this has uh primarily to do with body language, from the demure, and decorous, to aggressive, and clearly imitating males those were sixteen-year-olds in both cases, to girls posing, and playing to the camera, in the eighteen nineties with makeup, in New York City, that's unusual, to find a picture like that, and then today. body language, again, um sisters and chums, uh lots of of shots like this from the nineteenth century, uh the evocation of a homosocial world, much as Carol Smith Rosenberg described it it's still lingering, into the twentieth century. uh today lots of s- shots like that but they have a different kind of of uh nuance because of language also of course there are many more interracial, photographs. our relationship to the outdoors has certainly changed these are the Cornell women uh, on the shores of Cayuga Lake um, outdoors, uh getting their exercise i guess <SS LAUGH> but they're, they're in corsets and they have gloves uh and this interestingly enough is the same spot, in the nineteen forties, uh where you know the reference is obviously from the movies, of the forties and the the the bathing beauties and the Busby Berkeley, images. two African American sisters, uh in North Carolina, uh really Victorian uh beauties i think, and uh two, African American sisters one of whom is my colleague at Cornell, from Duke, uh not very long ago, two Japanese American women very demure, in a schoolyard in San Francisco in the forties, and this student who is one of my favorite students insisted, that i show this in my slide show to show you, a fast track, Pacific Rim woman <SS LAUGH> on_ who's rollerblading, okay? athletics have obviously changed they're a very important, piece, of the new body project, um, uh the routinized gymnastics, of th- nineteen ten, quite different from the brutal rugby scrimmage where you just can't be ladylike, you know if you play rugby. um dating, i include this really, f- for the_ it's dear to my heart i guess. uh it's not me <SS LAUGH> but um, i i think a lot of young, um younger people today don't realize that double dating, was pushed on a lot of us in my generation people in their fifties and their forties, because they_ it was thought to be safe. um, and this is a prom from a Catholic school in Minneapolis, um, the assumption was you know if there was a couple in the back seat and a couple in the front seat, nothing bad was really going to happen. um, this is dating today. you know, and all that it implies. yearbook pictures. now this is a friend of mine from Ithaca, whose name she will not allow me to announce in Ithaca <SS LAUGH> (xx) so i won't do it in Ann Arbor either, uh these_ i'm gonna show you two two pictures that are forty years apart, first of an African American woman and then of a Caucasian woman. the point is to look at the difference in these uh yearbook shots. uh this is from the uh early sixties, and, everybody in the class wore the same, thing in other words the same sweater, and pearls, and the emphasis was on, the face, and personality, and this is her, niece last year, in Brooklyn, a much more seductive picture would you agree, showing a bit more flesh, than in the nineteen fifties i- i- the picture itself has a different, intention, and look at these. this is Traverse City Michigan, alright? <SS LAUGH> uh in the nineteen sixties another friend of mine who shall remain nameless, um, and these little, these these shirts some of you may remember we often wore those with round pins that were called, [SS: circle pins ] circle pins they were, an emblem of virginity, um, <SS LAUGH> and, but again you know the emphasis is on, that bright smile and on the uniformity, of everybody in the class, and this is her niece, last year, at a high school, in Connecticut, a full body shot, and of course the the the um, reference here is to, modeling, uh and uh not every girl can do that. um, the next slide i show you simply to make a point about advertising, and the changes that are affecting our girls today. this is from the early twentieth century and it's a a you know it's a very familiar a a formulaic story. the young woman on top, uses the product and gets the man you've seen this, hundreds of times, but, what's interesting is she is not unhappy at the top before she uses the product. <SS LAUGH> she's she's not_ she's really, you know seems to be a relatively, uh uh healthy woman. take a look at this one... <TECHNICAL DIFFICULTY S1> oh no... what happened...? hello? can we go back to the Dep slide...? i'm trying to go backwards. <P :05> okay <P :05> well i'm sorry. there's a slide that has dropped. what it is is an ad for Dep styling product, and it it_ the text reads something like, if you hate your thighs because they're too jiggly too cottage cheesy, large curve you feel like the before in a before and after shot uh it's too hereditary blah blah blah blah blah, if you hate yourself it basically says, but at least you can use, Dep and your hair will look good. <SS LAUGH> and it it's it's an ad that really plays on female self-hate, okay? um, i chose this simply to make a point, about, the earlier eroticization of girls bodies this is a fifteen-year-old, in the eighteen nineties, this is a fifteen-year-old today from the (Delia) catalogue, uh not much different than, uh Victoria's Secrets and some of you should know that one of our most popular American family department stores, Penney's has been selling, bras with underwire, for girls eight and nine, for uplift. <WHISTLE SU-F> [SU-F: what? ] <SS LAUGH> okay. <SLIDE COMES UP> ah, there it is. <SS LAUGH> there it is. <SS LAUGH> [SU-F: oh my god ] can you read it? <P :06> okay, can you turn the lights on? <P :04> okay just a few words uh, five minutes here in in summary i- if_ probably a little less. uh, anyone who's lived or worked with adolescent girls understands the pressures that contemporary, young women feel with respect to their bodies and sexuality, and thoughtful people will, i hope, be intrigued by my larger historical argument, namely that the body is always an important index of social change, and that adolescent girls more than any other group, have absorbed the social changes in the twentieth century. from a historical perspective adolescent girls are a greater strategic difficulty than ever before because
{END OF TRANSCRIPT}

