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Anorexia nervosa may affect as many as five to ten percent of adolescent girls in the United States, and on some college campuses, the estimate is as high as twenty percent. Despite its recent "popularity", however, the disease remains puzzling in its causes and stubbornly resistant to a cure. For, as Fasting Girls demonstrates, anorexia nervosa existed long before our current preoccupation with lean bodies.

This landmark, award-winning work offers a solution to the mystery of anorexia nervosa, exploring its historical roots from the fasting saints of the Middle Ages and the curious "fasting girls" of the Victorian era to the weight-obsessed celebrities of our own time. By linking broad cultural forces to individual biomedical and psychological factors, Fasting Girls shows how a society that believes a woman "can never be too rich or too thin" actually recruits certain adolescents to anorexia -- those who regard a thin body as a state of perfection. Combined with other social stresses, such an attitude puts an increasing number of contemporary young women at risk.

Highly readable and authoritative, Fasting Girls takes the reader i

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Library Journal Review

Historian Brumberg (Cornell) has produced an excellent study of anorexia nervosa from a Medieval form of sacred possession, to a Victorian curiosity, to a modern condition that experts cannot establish as a disease, neurosis, or socially induced condition. Using historical, medical, literary, and popular sources, Brumberg examines the role of healing professionals in defining the condition; the bourgeois values which demanded that upwardly mobile women appear unfit for productive and reproductive work; and the struggle for moral authority over 19th-century fasting girls that evolved between men of science and religion. Superbly written, meticulously researched, thoughtfully illustrated, and highly recommended for most libraries. Beverly Miller, Boise State Univ. Lib., Id. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

Drawing from varied, rich primary and secondary material in medicine, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and contemporary fiction, Brumberg shows the role that social transformation and concomitant cultural expectations play in the manifestation of illness. Anorexia nervosa, an often deadly and always devastating affliction, still confounds contemporary doctors as, Brumberg demonstrates, it did a century ago. Frighteningly specific to middle-class young women in Western developed nations, this eating disorder divides those trying to treat sufferers into schools advocating biological, psychological, and cultural etiological factors. Brumberg does much to illuminate the disease's genesis by studying fasting girls over the span of the centuries. A historical perspective allows her to distinguish between forms of starvation motivated by ascetic, pietistic considerations--anorexia mirabilis--and the current disorder, a product of a secular consumer culture, which did not appear until the second half of the 19th century. Brumberg shows powerfully and unequivocally that without discounting biological and psychological predispositions, anorexia nervosa is an artifact of the culture of industrial consumer societies and the particular nemesis of modern bourgeois families, especially their daughters. No longer a manifestation of cultural fascination with spiritualism, noneating since the late 19th century has become a symbolic language of desperation, a mode of coping with rapid social change and uncertainty. Peppered with engaging and relevant case histories, this book is delightfully readable. Mandatory for high school and college students. -J. P. Brickman, United States Merchant Marine Academy

Booklist Review

We often think of anorexia as a complaint of the twentieth century. Actually, the disease was identified in the 1870s in England and the United States. In looking at the historical origins of this eating disorder, Brumberg does not deny its biological aspects. But she maintains that throughout history social and cultural characteristics have contributed to its prevalence. While adeptly portraying the social pressures experienced by young Victorian girls, Brumberg maintains that similar pressures are still experienced by contemporary adolescents. (Victorian ``fasting girls'' could rebel against the constraints of a middle-class upbringing by refusing to eat, while modern-day teens may find in anorexia a way to cope with an increasingly complex world.) An interesting perspective on a disease of much popular focus. Notes; to be indexed. JKL. 616.85'2 Anorexia nervosa-History / Anorexia nervosa-Social aspects / Adolescent girls-Diseases-History / Anorexia nervosa-History-Socioeconomic factors [OCLC] 87-25092

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Professor of human development at Cornell University, Joan Jacobs Brumberg has devoted much of her energy to studying the social experiences of 13-21 year old girls in the United States over the past 100 years. Her numerous papers and books deal with a wide range of cultural issues: the changing social and cultural experience of menarche and menstruation; the changing nature of educational and work opportunities; parenting; popular culture and leisure; and diseases of girls. In 1988, she published Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease. In 1997, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls was published.

Brumberg holds a B.A. in history from the University of Rochester (1965) and a Ph.D. in American social and cultural history from the University of Virginia (1978).

(Bowker Author Biography)