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"My hopes for the future rest upon the girls."

So wrote the physician Dioclesian Lewis, in 1871, in his book Our Girls, in an effort to redirect girls from "idle pursuits" to something worthy in Victorian America. The book was popular, but few value its ideas today.

One who does is feminist Joan Jacobs Brumberg, and she argues the point convincingly in her recent book The Body Project (Random House, $25), which everybody should read both for the arguments and for the social history.

Advertising screams the values of popular culture today, pushing easy sex, hard bodies and beautiful skin, rather than promoting good works and character, as Brumberg says Victorian mothers did for their daughters. Few girls measure up, making them unhappy and vulnerable to manufacturers and men.

(But how could our retailers make money if were easy to be beautiful and sexy?)

It's astounding to read the role of mirrors, germ theory and tampons in the decline of virginity and the increase of vanity in American culture.

The author proposes again protecting girls and young women from the worst of our culture, and promoting worthwhile goals, as was done a hundred years ago, often by single-sex associations.

Three years ago, when I opened this museum, an unidentified person from Dr. Brumberg's office at Cornell, where she holds a Stephen H. Weiss Professorship, sent me her article "Something Happens to Girls: Menarche and the Emergence of the Modern American Hygienic Imperative" (Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1993, vol. 4, no. 1). The article is an illuminating discussion of the medicalization of menstruation from about 1800 to the present in America. Much of the same story forms part of her argument in this book.

And her argument has helped convince me that this museum, MUM, should have no connection with a medical museum or with a medical institution. Such a connection would just harden the link between sickness and menstruation in the public mind.

I do have a quibble with her tampon discussion in the "The Disappearance of Virginity" chapter. She writes that Dr. Earle Haas invented the commercial tampon. Haas invented the tampon with an applicator. American women could buy Wix tampons in 1934 through the Sears, Roebuck catalog, and probably buy fax tampons, and maybe others, before 1936, when Dr. Haas's invention, Tampax, appeared. Haas did patent his tampon a month before the Wix patent was granted, however, but didn't beat Wix to the marketplace. Neither Wix nor fax had applicators; that was the genius of Tampax.

Read it! You will understand today's world a lot better.

Just an afterthought: What is it about bellybuttons? One pops up on The Body Project cover (above), and a similar view graces the ad for the Canadian TV video Under Wraps. Is it to show kinda where the uterus and ovaries are? Or is this the sexualized advertising Professor Brumberg complains about?

Let's Be Thankful for the Unusual, When the Usual Can be So Awful

OK, you're looking right now at the Web site for a pretty unusual museum - but there are other "different" ones, too, and I have just the thing to tell you something about them!

Santa Monica Press in California has just published a big book, Offbeat Museums, about 50 museums in America, including the famous Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, a medical museum run by the College of Physicians in that city (by the way, compare this museum's nickname MUM with Mütter, which in German means "mothers"); the eerie Museum of Jurassic Technology; and the National Museum of Dentistry. But the reader can also feast on the International Banana Club and Museum, Mister Ed's Elephant Museum, The Museum of Death, and the Madison Museum of Bathroom Tissue.

And, of course, this museum, MUM. The six pages of this entry look great (I do graphics for a living), as do the rest of the entries, with plenty of pictures and wry commentary (menstruation brings that out in people). I recommend it! This is the third popular book that has discussed MUM.

Buy it from the publisher, Santa Monica Press, in Santa Monica, California, at 1-800-784-9553, for $17.95, plus $3 shipping. Or write Santa Monica Press, P.O. Box 1076, Dept. 4646, Santa Monica, CA 90406, USA. Tell 'em your MUM sent you!


Remember to See the Feminine Hygiene Comedy Group in New York Every Thursday!

Get all the facts and/or call the Fried Eggs Hotline at 212-475-1284*1 for more information about the all-feminine crew!


NEXT EARLIER NEWS |news | first page | contact the museum | art of menstruation | artists (non-menstrual) | belts | bidets | Bly, Nellie | MUM board | books (and reviews) | cats | company booklets directory | costumes | cups | cup usage | dispensers | douches, pain, sprays | essay directory | extraction | famous people | FAQ | humor | huts | links | media | miscellaneous | museum future | Norwegian menstruation exhibit | odor | pad directory | patent medicine | poetry directory | products, current | religion | menstrual products safety | science | shame | sponges | synchrony | tampon directory | early tampons | teen ads directory | tour (video) | underpants directory | videos, films directory | washable pads | LIST OF ALL TOPICS

© 1998 Harry Finley. It is illegal to reproduce or distribute any of the work on this Web site in any manner or medium without written permission of the author. Please report suspected violations to hfinley@mum.org