Fasting Girls

Author: Joan Jacobs Brumberg
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375724486
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 395

Book Description
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 self-denial: 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.

Fasting Girls

Author: Joan Jacobs Brumberg
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
ISBN: 9780375724534
Category : Anorexia nervosa
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Book Description
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 into the private world of sufferers in the past, and also shows today's health professionals and parents why America's young women are so vulnerable to anorexia, and what treatments have proven effective in combating this frequently misunderstood, often deadly, disorder.

The Welsh Fasting Girl

Author: Varley O'Connor
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
ISBN: 194265863X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Book Description
Praise for the Previous Novels of Varley O’Connor “Thoroughly researched and lively.” —Vogue “Elegantly wrought, hardheaded, and tenderhearted.” —Michael Chabon “Honesty and compassion inform every page, and there are passages so musical and full of grace they read like hymns. Reading groups should rejoice.” —Sigrid Nunez “[O’Connor] captures the dangerous intersection between private life and the forces of history . . . and gives the reader that rare pleasure of inhabiting another family life that feels at once entirely familiar and new.” —Susan Richards Shreve Twelve-year-old Sarah Jacob was the most famous of the Victorian fasting girls, who claimed to miraculously survive without food, serving as flashpoints between struggling religious, scientific, and political factions. In this novel based on Sarah’s life and premature death from what may be the first documented case of anorexia, an American journalist, recovering from her husband’s death in the Civil War, leaves her home and children behind to travel to Wales, where she investigates Sarah’s bizarre case by becoming the young girl’s friend and confidante. Unable to prevent the girl’s tragic decline while doctors, nurses, and a local priest keep watch, she documents the curious family dynamic, the trial that convicted Sarah’s parents, and an era’s hysterical need to both believe and destroy Sarah’s seemingly miraculous power. Intense, dark, and utterly compelling, The Welsh Fasting Girl delves into the complexities of a true story to understand how a culture’s anxieties led to the murder of a child. Varley O’Connor is the author of five novels, including The Welsh Fasting Girl, The Master’s Muse, and The Cure. She lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

Fasting Girls

Author: William Alexander Hammond
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Anorexia in children
Languages : en
Pages : 92

Book Description

From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls

Author: Walter Vandereycken
Publisher: Athlone Press
ISBN: 9780485241006
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Down the centuries self-starvation has taken many morbid guises. This story culminates in the 19th century labelling of anorexia nervosa, a condition which has since attracted a host of theories and explanations in the course of which a medical curiosity has been transformed into a modern disease.

The Body Project

Author: Joan Jacobs Brumberg
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307755746
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335

Book Description
The award-winning author of Fasting Girls explores what teenage girls have lost in this new world of freedom and consumerism—a world in which the body is their primary project. "Fascinating ... riveting ... Women and girls should read this fine book together." —The New York Times Book Review A hundred years ago, women were lacing themselves into corsets and teaching their daughters to do the same. The ideal of the day, however, was inner beauty: a focus on good deeds and a pure heart. Today American women have more social choices and personal freedom than ever before. But fifty-three percent of our girls are dissatisfied with their bodies by the age of thirteen, and many begin a pattern of weight obsession and dieting as early as eight or nine. Why? In The Body Project, historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg answers this question, drawing on diary excerpts and media images from 1830 to the present. Tracing girls' attitudes toward topics ranging from breast size and menstruation to hair, clothing, and cosmetics, she exposes the shift from the Victorian concern with character to our modern focus on outward appearance—in particular, the desire to be model-thin and sexy. Compassionate, insightful, and gracefully written, The Body Project explores the gains and losses adolescent girls have inherited since they shed the corset and the ideal of virginity for a new world of sexual freedom and consumerism—a world in which the body is their primary project.

Fasting Girls

Author: Joan Jacobs Brumberg
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Book Description
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 into the private world of sufferers in the past, and also shows today's health professionals and parents why America's young women are so vulnerable to anorexia, and what treatments have proven effective in combating this frequently misunderstood, often deadly, disorder.

Starving Girl

Author: Laura Lofgreen
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781539335955
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
Lofgreen, an overweight 43 year-old mother of six children was overwhelmed and living in a state of procrastination until one day she reached bottom. She decided to change her life and stepped into the world of hunger. Why would she put herself in such a position? Her Christian faith encouraged fasting, an observance she'd ignored for twenty years. Could there be more to this timeless religious practice than she realized? Determined, she struggled, resented, fought and eventually rejoiced in the lessons she learned from daily 16-hour intermittent fasts. She constantly asked God questions: Why was obesity wide-spread? Why did some have so much while others starved? Why was body size related to self-worth? Why had she turned to food after being sexually abused? While combating hunger, she learned how the difficult decisions in her life shaped her greatest potential and that big dreams are only possible if she lived in the present. She experienced improved relationships with her family, tremendous clarity of mind and weight loss. In essence, the dreams she'd long buried became reality.

The Wonder

Author: Emma Donoghue
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316393886
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
Now a Netflix film starring Florence Pugh: In this “old-school page turner” (Stephen King, New York Times Book Review) by the bestselling author of Room, an English nurse is brought to a small Irish village to observe what appears to be a miracle—a girl said to have survived without food for months—and soon finds herself fighting to save the child's life. Tourists flock to the cabin of eleven-year-old Anna O'Donnell, who believes herself to be living off manna from heaven, and a journalist is sent to cover the sensation. Lib Wright, a veteran of Florence Nightingale's Crimean campaign, is hired to keep watch over the girl. Written with all the propulsive tension that made Room a huge bestseller, The Wonder works beautifully on many levels -- a tale of two strangers who transform each other's lives, a powerful psychological thriller, and a story of love pitted against evil. Acclaim for The Wonder: "Deliciously gothic.... Dark and vivid, with complicated characters, this is a novel that lodges itself deep" (USA Today, 3/4 stars) "Heartbreaking and transcendent"(New York Times) "A fable as lean and discomfiting as Anna's dwindling body.... Donoghue keeps us riveted" (Chicago Tribune) "Donoghue poses powerful questions about faith and belief" (Newsday)

Holy Feast and Holy Fast

Author: Caroline Walker Bynum
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520908783
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

Book Description
In the period between 1200 and 1500 in western Europe, a number of religious women gained widespread veneration and even canonization as saints for their extraordinary devotion to the Christian eucharist, supernatural multiplications of food and drink, and miracles of bodily manipulation, including stigmata and inedia (living without eating). The occurrence of such phenomena sheds much light on the nature of medieval society and medieval religion. It also forms a chapter in the history of women. Previous scholars have occasionally noted the various phenomena in isolation from each other and have sometimes applied modern medical or psychological theories to them. Using materials based on saints' lives and the religious and mystical writings of medieval women and men, Caroline Walker Bynum uncovers the pattern lying behind these aspects of women's religiosity and behind the fascination men and women felt for such miracles and devotional practices. She argues that food lies at the heart of much of women's piety. Women renounced ordinary food through fasting in order to prepare for receiving extraordinary food in the eucharist. They also offered themselves as food in miracles of feeding and bodily manipulation. Providing both functionalist and phenomenological explanations, Bynum explores the ways in which food practices enabled women to exert control within the family and to define their religious vocations. She also describes what women meant by seeing their own bodies and God's body as food and what men meant when they too associated women with food and flesh. The author's interpretation of women's piety offers a new view of the nature of medieval asceticism and, drawing upon both anthropology and feminist theory, she illuminates the distinctive features of women's use of symbols. Rejecting presentist interpretations of women as exploited or masochistic, she shows the power and creativity of women's writing and women's lives.