THE BODY PROJECT: An Intimate History of American Girls.<i> By Joan Jacobs Brumberg</i> .<i> Random House: 268 pp., $25</i>

Five years ago, Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan published “Meeting at the Crossroads,” a luminously empathetic study of adolescents at an all-girls private school in Cleveland. The book was profoundly disturbing not because it focused on such well-known “pathologies” as eating disorders or early pregnancies but, rather, because it examined what Gilligan and coauthor Lyn Mikel Brown saw as a widespread process of psychic suicide among ordinary teenage girls--because it viewed female adolescence as the graveyard of the authentic self rather than as the birthplace of adulthood. Two years later, a Nebraska psychologist named Mary Pipher wrote “Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls.” Pipher’s book clearly, and cleverly, zeroed in on a by-now obviously widespread anxiety about adolescent development; as of this writing, “Ophelia” has spent well over two years on the New York Times’ national bestseller list.

The latest entry in the girls-in-crisis genre--and one openly indebted to both Gilligan and Pipher--is Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s “The Body Project.” Unlike her predecessors, Brumberg is a historian (she has taught at Cornell for almost 20 years), and she tackles the current problems of teenage girls through an examination of the development of now-ordinary but once-astonishing products such as bras, tampons, makeup and pimple creams, and of the transformations in attitudes toward female beauty and sexuality that accompanied these inventions. (Surprisingly, though, she largely neglects the history of contraceptives, which have surely changed girls’ lives in the last 50 years more than any other “intimate” product.) Why, Brumberg wonders, have adolescent girls become obsessed with achieving perfect skin, perfect hair, perfect bodies at precisely the moment when they have more professional options, more social choices, more freedom than ever before? Why have they replaced restrictive corsets and sexual codes with equally restrictive regimens of obsessive dieting and exercise? What, Brumberg asks, is “the historical process by which women exchanged external controls of the body for internal controls . . . “?

These are fascinating questions, and although Brumberg’s answers are ultimately unsatisfactory, the queries themselves take the reader a long way. As long as Brumberg sticks to her history of the ways in which girls’ bodies--and the things they put in and on them--have been transformed, “The Body Project” is lucid, highly informative, and entertaining.

If you think, for instance, that a girl’s body is simply a manifestation of nature, not culture, Brumberg will set you straight. She notes that as a result of several factors including better nutrition and a decrease in infectious diseases, the average age of menarche (a girl’s first period) is now just over 12, whereas in the early 19th century it was 15 or 16. But these days, of course, marriage and motherhood are now often postponed until the 20s, 30s or even 40s, thus creating a decades-long gap between menstruation and childbirth that was virtually unheard of a century ago. In addition, the average age of intercourse has dropped to just under 16, so that a contemporary American girl, Brumberg writes, “is likely to be sexually active before the age at which her great-great-grandmother had even begun to menstruate.”

Brumberg discusses the “ovarian determinism” that dominated the 19th century, when “regular” periods were fetishized and yet early menstruation was feared as a manifestation of lust and was associated with nonwhites and the lower classes. Similarly, skin blemishes were linked, in the bourgeois imagination, with immigrants, poverty, workers, dirt, sexual desire and masturbation, and Brumberg charts how, in the late 19th century, everything from the new accessibility of mirrors to the discovery of germs led to the rise of the lucrative skin-care industry. (It should be noted that Brumberg, by her own admission, largely confines herself to studying middle- and upper-middle-class girls; then again, it might well be argued--although Brumberg doesn’t--that adolescence is itself a creation of the modern middle class.)

But Brumberg strays into odd territory when she attempts to understand the social meaning of the many changes that she charts. Her analysis rests on several dubious generalizations. She states that, in the 19th century (which she loosely refers to as the Victorian era), “character [for young women] was considered more important than beauty”; that the Victorians did not, in any case, primarily associate beauty with actual physical attributes, but rather with moral and spiritual qualities; that only in our own century did beauty become a matter “more external than internal”; that it is “modern femininity” that has required women to “display” themselves as “a decorative object”; and that modern American girls differ from their predecessors in that their “power” is tied to looks “rather than to character or achievement.”

It is undoubtedly true that the rise of mass media--photographs, advertising, movies, magazines, television--radically changed the ways in which we create, perceive and manipulate beauty, as the 20th century diaries Brumberg cites so aptly show. But she offers no parallel, direct, contemporaneous evidence to support her sweeping statements about the Victorians’ supposed indifference to appearance. Certainly many readers of 19th century literature, or viewers of its art, would be perplexed by Brumberg’s claims. Jane Austen--perhaps the 19th century’s most astute observer of the moral economy of mating and marriage (though she died before Victoria’s ascension)--would, I believe, be amused, if not stunned, by Brumberg’s perspective. Austen habitually introduced her female characters by supplying two pieces of information--their degree of beauty and the size of their inheritance--not because she was “superficial” but precisely because she knew these were the salient facts that would determine a girl’s entire life. (As Emma Woodhouse, who was herself quite enamored of female beauty, rather tartly noted, she awaited the day when men would “fall in love with well-informed minds instead of handsome faces.”) The 20th century has been the incubator of many truly new inventions, but Brumberg never comes close to proving that the obsession with female beauty is one of them.

Brumberg’s analysis of 19th century sexual mores is also skewed. Although she is a self-described liberal and feminist, she clearly yearns for the Victorians’ “protective umbrella,” which kept girlhood “wholesome and chaste” and made girls feel “special, valued and safe.” This was, no doubt, true for certain girls in certain families at certain times. But inexorably tied to that umbrella was the stringently enforced cult of virginity; as Brumberg herself later admits, a Victorian girl’s “hymen was in effect ‘jointly owned’ by her family and her bridegroom” and treated “as if it were a piece of valuable commercial or agricultural property.” There is a fine line--actually, often no line at all--between protection and control, and the balance between feeling sheltered and feeling suffocated is one that Brumberg does not explore with any nuance. In addition, she ignores--although 19th century novelists certainly didn’t--the sharpness with which the umbrella snapped shut the very moment a “good” girl transgressed accepted sexual boundaries. One false move could lead to social ostracism, family disinheritance, spinsterhood, penury, prostitution. Brumberg is beguiled by the nurturing aspects of Victorian culture but ignores its capacity for cruelty.

A romanticization of the 19th century is almost always accompanied by a strong dislike of the 20th, and so it is with “The Body Project,” in which Brumberg rails repeatedly against “consumer culture.” This somewhat nebulous term is never defined, but it seems to be a euphemism for advanced capitalism, the system that dare not speak its name. (Sometimes Brumberg’s anti-consumerism takes inadvertently comic forms, as in her many cranky critiques of the tampon industry.) Brumberg characterizes consumer culture as “sexually brutal and commercially rapacious,” a system of “unrelenting objectification where women’s bodies are used to sell everything.” But wait: Isn’t this system, which so mercilessly targets 14-year-old girls in America as consumers, the very same one that so mercilessly pays 14-year-old girls in Haiti and Vietnam pennies an hour to stitch sneakers and bras and blue jeans? Why the surprise, the shock? What Brumberg seems to want is a market economy that will be nice enough to cordon off children and adolescents from its incessant commodification; that will recognize us all as precious beings with souls instead of as units of consumption; that will abstain from using sexuality for the crass purpose of actually selling things. (Oh, and as long as you’re out, honey, could you pick up a vial of fairy dust?)

Brumberg veers farthest off-track--in her understanding both of modern life and of adolescence--when she discusses the private-public dichotomy. For Brumberg, the private sphere (read: the family) represents the good: warmth, intimacy, honesty, stability. Naturally, the public sphere (which seems to include pretty much everything else, especially pop culture and teen peer groups) is therefore evil: harsh, uncaring, inauthentic, unruly. In Brumberg’s view, contemporary consumer culture has dangerously eroded the “important distinction” between the two, resulting in sexual exhibitionism, sexual exploitation and adolescents who “are likely to become confused about the nature of intimacy.”

But the whole trend of modern life, which has been two centuries in the making, is precisely to play with this distinction, to sweep us out of the private domain of the home into the public one of offices and factories, city streets and movie theaters, supermarkets and department stores, nursery schools and universities. As the social historian Marshall Berman has written, Baudelaire understood this when he celebrated the life and the lovers on Paris’ grand new boulevards. Bruce Springsteen understood it, too, when he celebrated the freedom and romance of being “Out in the Street”:

When I’m out in the street

I walk the way I wanna walk

When I’m out in the street

I talk the way I wanna talk. . . .

When I’m out in the street, girl

Well, I never feel alone

When I’m out in the street, girl

In the crowd I feel at home. . . .

Baby, out in the street I just feel all right

Meet me out in the street, little girl, tonight. . . .

And adolescents, also, understand this, perhaps better than anyone. For adolescence is just the time when the private-public dichotomy is turned on its head; when the home so often becomes a place of falseness and furtiveness, and the outside world--the basketball court, the mall, the park, the parking lot, the rock concert--is where one feels most alive, most real, most oneself. Brumberg wants to return adolescence--an increasingly postmodern experience--to a premodern world that no longer exists.

Brumberg ends her book with a call for the creation of a less brutal, more girl-positive culture. In particular, she cites the plight of poor, often black, single teenage mothers who, she so rightly notes, “are a telling indication of how we have failed as a society to protect the most vulnerable segment of our population.” She concludes with a plea for the taking of “collective responsibility” for all adolescent girls, “not just our own middle-class daughters.”

This is a lovely sentiment--but again, its isolation from current political realities is startling. Brumberg never mentions, much less confronts, the fact that, far from moving toward forms of collective responsibility, our society seems ferociously intent on privatizing everything from schools to garbage collection to prisons. Even more astonishing is her refusal, in this context, to mention the welfare-ending bill that President Clinton signed last year, a bill that negates the very idea of a shared responsibility for teenage mothers and that, as Barbara Ehrenreich recently wrote in Harper’s magazine, “smashed that central moral bond, which linked the destitute to the rest of us, into thousands of fragments.”

Divorced from any larger reality, Brumberg’s call for a new social contract reads less like the stirring vision of a utopian optimist than like the somewhat wistful musings of an almost willful naif. It’s hard to see how such obliviousness could be of help, now or in the future, to America’s adolescent girls.