The questions and discussion topics that follow are intended to enhance your reading and discussion of Joan Jacobs Brumberg's The Body Project. We hope they will give you a number of interesting angles from which to approach Brumberg's provocative historical analysis of the experience of growing up in a female body during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in America.

The Body Project will interest a wide variety of readers. Mothers and daughters of all ages will find it fascinating. Mothers and fathers of adolescent girls can use it to begin a dialogue with their daughters about sensitive issues, including puberty, menstruation, sexuality and sexual ethics, body image, eating disorders, and self-confidence. Groups of women who are the same age can discuss adolescent experiences common to their age group and relate those experiences to their own later lives. Pediatricians, sex and health educators, school psychologists, social workers, and teachers will find it valuable in their work. For adolescent girls it provides a new perspective on an intensely private and personal experience.