As never before, girls are maturing earlier and have become so preoccupied with their bodies that they spend much of their energy managing and maintaining their looks at the expense of their creativity and mental and physical health, says a new book by an award-winning Cornell University historian. The book chronicles how opportunities for self scrutiny have escalated during this century, with mirrors, movies and marketing raising young women's self-consciousness to excruciating levels. Girls who want to be wanted so badly are unable to be critical about their sexual options and can be easily manipulated, coerced, even abused.
Contemporary girls seem to have more autonomy, but their freedom is laced with peril.
Her analysis on the paradigm shift in girls' self perception from the l9th to 20th century, however, is of particular interest to American psychologists. Brumberg points out that girls today are likely to be sexually active before the age at which their great-great grandmothers had even begun to menstruate. Such trends have led to sexual coercion of young girls, the demise of chastity as an ideal, the waning of virginity, the rise of sexually active girls throughout middle America and dwindling parental power. Although girls enjoy a new world of sexual freedom, Brumberg says, it is fraught with hazards since many girls are also victims of a century of change in sexual mores and behaviors. Brumberg's research and writing on adolescent girls has received the support of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation.