Joan Jacobs Brumberg Knihy

An acclaimed classic from the award-winning author of The Body Project presents a history of women's food-refusal dating back as far as the sixteenth century, providing compassion to victims and their families.Here is a tableau of female medieval martyrs who used starvation to demonstrate religious devotion, "wonders of science" whose families capitalized on their ability to survive on flower petals and air, silent screen stars whose strict "slimming" regimens inspired a generation. Here, too, is a fascinating look at how the cultural ramifications of the Industrial Revolution produced a disorder that continues to render privileged young women helpless. Incisive, compassionate, illuminating, Fasting Girls offers real understanding to victims and their families, clinicians, and all women who are interested in the origins and future of this complex, modern and characteristically female disease.

Girls today are in crisis -- and this book shows why. Drawing on a vast array of lively historical sources, unpublished diaries by adolescent girls, and photographs that conjure up memories of the past, "The Body Project" chronicles how growing up in a female body has changed over the past century and why that experience is more difficult today than ever before. Girls' bodies have certainly changed -- they mature much earlier -- but at the same time traditional social supports for girls' growth and development have collapsed. The media and popular culture exploit girls' normal sensitivity to their changing bodies, and many girls grow up believing that 'good looks' -- rather than 'good works' -- represent the highest form of female perfection. With an eye for the humor in as well as the pain of female adolescence, Joan Jacobs Brumberg shows how American girls came to define themselves increasingly through their appearance, so that today the body has become their primary project.