Here’s what Judy knew going into her protracted public shaming: the literary establishment hadn’t embraced her. Reporters were downright snide about her popularity, with the Washington Post describing her books in 1981 as “a scatological and soft-porn cinema verité of childhood, of puberty, of growing up.” In the same article, she maintained that these kinds of criticisms didn’t bother her all that much. “What is literature?” Blume asked her interviewer. “I don’t care what they say as long as the kids are reading it, and as long as they’re identifying, or in some way emotionally involved.”

Then, she stopped herself. “Well, I do care,” she admitted. “I care, but that’s not what’s most important… I don’t get as angry about any of it as I used to. I’m ‘mellowing out’ as my kids say.”

She had come to expect certain kinds of dismissive reviews, like the one School Library Journal gave Forever, where it negatively remarked on the novel’s “quality.” In 1980, the Hartford Courant echoed this sentiment in an article about Blume, asserting that she “may never win any prizes for literary quality.”

The Horn Book, a go-to resource for school librarians, had also never been impressed with her writing. But Dick Jackson assured Judy that delighting young readers was far more important than winning over judgmental grown-up gatekeepers. They were in it together, Peter Silsbee recalled. “He really hated stuffy children’s books,” Silsbee said of Jackson. The Horn Book, he continued, “had very high ideals of what children should read. And so he was always sort of thinking, that’s what I don’t want to do. I don’t want to write books for teachers, I don’t want to write them for adults, I want to write them for the audience they’re intended for.”

But Jackson and Blume must have been surprised when the Horn Book came out with a nonfiction collection by the British young adult author David Rees, called The Marble in the Water: Essays on Contemporary Writers of Fiction for Children and Young Adults. Published in January 1980, the book contained an article called “Not Even for a One-Night Stand: Judy Blume.” From the very first paragraph, Rees, who taught English Lit classes at the prestigious boarding school Exeter, sets the tone of his assessment. “Perhaps the best thing to do with Ms. Blume would be to ignore her altogether,” he writes. “She is so amazingly trivial and second-rate in every department—the quality of her English, her ability to portray character, to unfold narrative—but that is impossible; she is ‘controversial’ on both sides of the Atlantic and her work is read and discussed not only by the young but by those adults who have serious concerns about children’s literature.”

What follows is a scathing assessment of Blume’s body of work that arguably crosses the line to mean-spirited. Rees was punching up—Blume was more famous than he was, although he’d won awards in the UK for his novels—but nevertheless, his takedown goes so far as to suggest that the cadence of her prose is equivalent to that of a “shopping list… entirely forgettable, drab, flat.” He calls Are You There God? a “very bad book… a bore and an embarrassment, a complete waste of one’s time.” Fudge, according to Rees, is “wretched… a character the author clearly finds very appealing but who comes over to the reader as extremely tiresome.”

Rees saves his harshest words for Forever, a novel he simultaneously disregards as unintentionally humorous while also getting charged up about its contents. Michael and Katherine’s love story, complete with fumbling sex scenes, is absurd, he says: “The reader’s reaction is laughter—anything from an embarrassed snigger to falling out of a chair with hilarity—when he ought to be moved or excited or enthralled.” Rees goes on to recommend reading the “excruciating” pages “aloud to family or friends so that they can all join in the fun.”

But the book, he explains, isn’t just goofy—it’s offensive to its intended audience. Over and over again Rees makes the point that Blume’s coming-of-age plots are reductive and lacking in perspective and nuance. Blume is “doing the youth a great disservice,” Rees writes, by suggesting that “falling in love is not a matter of complex emotions… but that it is simply a question of should one go on the pill or not, swapping partners quite heartlessly, and whether one is doing it right in bed.” He goes on: “To serve them up the kind of stuff of which Forever consists is to underestimate totally their ability to think and to feel, not only about themselves but about the whole complexity of living that goes on around them.”

Blume’s oeuvre, he concludes—in language so decisive and spicy that it would likely go viral in today’s literary landscape—is nothing short of an insult to the craft. “Judy Blume’s novels are the ultimate in the read-it-and-throw-it-away kind of book,” he announces halfway through the article. “In other words, they are not only short-changing the young; they are short-changing literature.” Damn, David!

Reading the Rees essay now, a note of sexism stands out among the piece’s more aggressive flavors. He takes issue with Blume’s preferred topics, which also happen to be things that pertain to young girls. “What sort of picture would a being from another planet form of teenage and pre-teenage America were he to read ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret’ and ‘Forever’?” Rees asks. “He would imagine that youth was obsessed with bras, period pains, deodorants, orgasms, and family planning; that life was a great race to see who was first to get laid or to use a Tampax; that childhood and adolescence were unpleasant obstacles on the road to adulthood.” Rees sounds a bit like the alien being himself here, as if he’s never in his life interacted meaningfully with a female middle schooler.

But according to Roger Sutton, former editor in chief of the Horn Book (though not at the time Marble in the Water came out), Rees was simply representing the publication’s point of view on most commercial children’s fiction at the time. “In children’s books, since they became a thing at the beginning of the twentieth century as a separate market of book publishing, there’s always been this battle between what kids want to read and what an adult thinks is good,” Sutton explained. “Always. And David Rees was expressing what at the time was a real Horn Book point of view, which is [that] high literary quality trumps everything. That’s what matters.”

Blume, he went on, is “not literary,” thanks to a mixture of her preferred subject matter, the simplicity of her prose, her use of casual dialogue, and her avoidance of highly textured descriptions. (“I absolutely can’t write descriptive prose,” Blume acknowledged to Samantha Bee in 2015. “I can do characters and relationships and dialogue, but don’t make me describe anything.”) There was a sense in the late 1970s that when it came to books, giving children what they wanted to read was akin to feeding them soda and french fries—empty calories, lacking in real nutrients. But what if kids gravitated toward Blume’s books because they contained unexpectedly nourishing ingredients that couldn’t be found elsewhere?

“Dick, he once said to me, ‘We’re writing sugar-coated bitter pills,’ ” Silsbee remembered. “Judy’s books—I don’t think of them as bitter, but I think of them as sometimes teaching hard lessons that nobody will talk to you about, like [about] God.” The sweetness, the girlishness—Blume’s novels aren’t worthwhile in spite of these attributes, but there’s no doubt that these attributes tended to distract from their worth.

Then the bans started, first with a trickle.

In the mid to late 1970s, the public conflict about children’s books started to shift from what kids should be reading to what they should be allowed to read at all. There’s a difference. The first is a debate about the benefits (if any) of spending time with certain novels, while the latter concerns access.

In 1976 in Levittown, Long Island, the conflict came to a head when the school board voted to remove eleven books—including Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the anonymous drug diary Go Ask Alice, The Fixer by Bernard Malamud, Black Boy by Richard Wright, and The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers, a collection edited by Langston Hughes—from the school district’s library shelves. At the time, five high school students pushed back and ultimately brought the board to court with the help of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union). The case was headed up by a then-seventeen-year-old high school senior named Steven Pico, who argued that the decision to remove the books violated young readers’ First Amendment rights.

The publicly elected school board in the all-white district of Island Trees had determined that the offending titles were “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy,” according to a press release quoted in the New York Times. But Pico, as the president of the student council, disagreed. He felt that the challenges were targeted, unjustly pointed toward minority voices. “Two of the authors banned in Island Trees were among the most important Jewish-American writers, Bernard Malamud and Kurt Vonnegut,” he said over email. “Half of the books banned in Island Trees were written by and about Black writers, among them two who were Black and gay: James Baldwin and Langston Hughes.”

As Pico told CNN in 2022, the board was acting unilaterally, without wider community input. Right before the controversial books were unshelved from all four high school libraries in the district, Pico said that board members had traveled upstate to attend a conference hosted by the conservative group Parents of New York United. The list of “objectionable” titles came directly from there. “They [the members] did not read the books in their entirety,” Pico explained. “They used a handful of excerpts, a handful of words, a handful of vulgarities to make these books look bad.”

Pico, who was lead plaintiff, was deeply invested in the case, but aside from his four co-plaintiffs, his peers weren’t nearly as moved by the issue. The vast majority of his classmates were more concerned about getting into college than they were in taking up the anti-censorship mantle. Even his own family “had a lot of doubts,” he told CNN. “They were not particularly supportive of the lawsuit because they thought it was perceived as troublemaking and that I might not get into college.”

But Pico felt like the suit was a calling. He did, in fact, get accepted to Haverford College. And over the next few years, he appeared on Phil Donahue’s show and spoke on panels with Vonnegut and Alice Childress, whose 1973 novel A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, about a thirteen-year-old getting hooked on heroin, was also being challenged. Initially, a federal district court ruled in favor of the board’s prerogative to remove books on moral or political grounds. Then, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed that decision. The issue went all the way up to the Supreme Court in the early 1980s, with Pico shoring up continued legal support from the New York chapter of the ACLU. In June 1982, the Supreme Court ruled for Pico, with the 5-4 majority arguing that elected school boards do not have the authority to remove books from circulation simply because they dislike them.

After that, Long Island officials bickered about how exactly to reinstate the titles; board members tried out a system where the books in question were returned to the libraries but stamped with red ink that said “Parental notification required.” The New York attorney general disagreed with that practice, too, stating that it violated protections around the confidentiality of library records. In the meantime, Pico graduated and took a job in New York with the National Coalition Against Censorship, which was founded in 1974.

Ultimately, in January 1983, the school board relented and voted to return the books to shelves without restrictions. But they weren’t happy about it. “Until the day I die, I refuse to budge on my position,” board member Christina Fasulo told the New York Times, representing the minority opinion in the proceedings. “Since when is it demeaning to take filth off library shelves?”

The Island Trees school board didn’t go after Judy Blume’s books, but around the same time, in Loveland, Colorado, her novels caught the attention of another group of motivated conservative parents. In the fall of 1980, Karen Fleshman was a sixth grader at Mary Blair Elementary School when she heard the news that her favorite author had sparked concern among community members and was at risk of being purged from the school library.

Fleshman, then an eleven-year-old “voracious reader” with glasses, braces, and a short feathered blond haircut, was furious at the thought that kids like her were going to be denied the chance to read her best-loved Blume books, including Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself. She came home one day and vented about it to her father, Roger. “He was a real nonconformist and he was someone who believed in standing up for yourself,” said Fleshman, who was fifty-three and living in San Francisco at the time we spoke. “So when I told him all of this, he was like, ‘Why don’t you do something about it?’ ”

Fleshman took his advice, explaining that Blume’s novels were so important to her because they “really gave me a sense of community, gave me a sense of identity and permission to just be who I am.” She felt out of place in homogeneous Loveland, which had a history as a Sundown town, meaning it used discriminatory practices to maintain an all-white population. “By the time I’m growing up, it’s a big hotbed of the John Birch Society. And like literally, everyone is blond and blue-eyed and everyone goes to Church on Sunday… [and is] super into football. It’s that kind of place.”

What it wasn’t was the kind of place that supported kids reading stories about puberty and masturbation. And so Fleshman went to the children themselves, asking them to sign a petition to present at an upcoming board of education meeting. Unlike Pico’s classmates, Fleshman’s peers eagerly rallied around her cause. “I’m talking to everyone,” Fleshman remembered. “I’m talking to the first graders.” Ultimately, she collected signatures from ninety-three students and one adult.

Then came the meeting of the local board of ed, where Fleshman pleaded her case. To her shock, the board voted unanimously to keep Blume’s books in the elementary school library, persuaded by Fleshman’s advocacy and some additional pressure from the local independent bookstore, The Open Book. After Fleshman’s campaign was successful, the store’s owners wrote letters to the governor of Colorado and to Judy Blume herself, telling them what Karen had done. Fleshman received a letter of appreciation from the governor and—far more memorably—a thank-you note and a signed copy of Sally J. Freedman from Judy Blume. On the inside cover, Blume wrote: “For Karen, a brave young woman and a real friend.”

“Oh my God, I just couldn’t believe it,” Fleshman said about seeing the inscription. All these years later, she’s an anti-racist activist who has a background working with immigrants and preparing young men and women of color for corporate careers. She said her work in social justice all started in October 1980, when the board of ed sided with her. “This was my formative activist experience,” she said. If it hadn’t worked out, she confessed, it would have been “crushing.” But instead, the experience was positive, with her being celebrated and featured in the local newspaper. As Fleshman put it, “It really gave me confidence the rest of my life.”

Chapter Nineteen Allies

“Democracy is exhausting.”

Pico and Fleshman were successful, but the storm was still coming. By the spring of 1980, book challenges were prevalent enough that another popular children’s book author, Betty Miles, used them as a starting point for a young adult novel. In Maudie and Me and the Dirty Book, eleven-year-old Kate Harris finds herself at the center of a town-wide controversy when she signs up for a new program to read aloud to the students in a first-grade classroom. After meeting one of the boys and hearing him rave about his new pet puppy, Kate carefully chooses a picture book that she hopes will appeal to her pint-sized listeners.

The Birthday Dog—a story that Miles invented—is about a little boy named Benjamin who wants a puppy for his birthday. The neighbor’s dog Blackie is pregnant. Just when Blackie is about to give birth, the neighbor calls over Benjamin and his father to watch. Benjamin gets to pick out a puppy from her litter and names it Happy, for making his birthday wish come true.

The kids love the book, just as Kate anticipated. They’re particularly excited by the page, and the picture, where Blackie starts popping out her pups. “Just then, Blackie gave a little moan, and her stomach began to ripple,” Kate reads to her rapt audience. “A small, wet shape began to come out of Blackie… She pushed hard again, until all of it was out.”

After the story is finished, the kids are bursting with questions. “How did the puppy get in there… inside his mommy,” one child asks Kate, who nervously eyes the teacher to see how she should answer. When the teacher gives her an encouraging nod, she carefully begins to explain things. “Before the puppy begins, the father dog and the mother dog mate,” Kate says. “And this little tiny thing called a sperm goes into the mother—”

“Into her vagina!” another child shouts, before the kids erupt with chatter about their body parts.

At the end of their allotted time together, Kate leaves the classroom feeling sheepish but proud of how she handled herself. The teacher, Mrs. Dwyer, reassures her. “Kids this age can be embarrassingly frank! But I don’t want them to think there’s anything wrong with their natural curiosity.”

Kate continues on with her week, unaware that she’s just set off a firestorm. The following Monday, she’s called into the principal’s office to discuss the incident. Her principal tells her that the elementary school received a number of calls from concerned parents, saying that they were unhappy with the topic of dogs mating being brought up with their children. A community-wide standoff ensues. Parents flock to the local library, trying to take out The Birthday Dog. Kate learns that one mother confronted the librarian, telling her that “it was a crime to spend public funds on smut like that!”

Kate finds it funny, at first. After all, the title in question is just a picture book about a little boy who wants a new pet. But the angry faction won’t back down. They write letters to the editor of the local newspaper, slamming a world where “innocent sixth-grade children [are] being required to describe reproduction.” They camp out in front of the grocery store and urge townspeople to join their new coalition, called Parents United for Decency. “You’ve probably heard,” the ringleader tells Kate’s mother, unaware of her connection to the incident, “that only last week the little first-grade children at Concord School were subjected to a book that displayed a birth scene in explicit detail.”

Maudie, who is Kate’s friend and co-volunteer in the first-grade classroom, convinces Kate to stand up for herself at an upcoming school board meeting. “I’m Kate Harris,” she announces in front of the board and a packed audience. “I’m the one who read that book to the kids at Concord. I’m not ashamed of it,” she goes on. “I think everyone in this room should read the whole thing before they criticize it… it’s not dirty… It’s educational!”

Kate’s speech sways the tide of the meeting. The board votes unanimously to allow the reading project to continue, and the Parents United for Decency group eventually dissolves. “Democracy is exhausting,” Kate determines after she gets home from the meeting. Still, it’s well worth it, the novel implies.

Maudie and Me and the Dirty Book isn’t the subtlest story, but it speaks directly to young readers about an issue that was becoming more and more prevalent in the early 1980s. In publishing it, Miles was fighting back.

Betty Miles—who also had a hit book about friendship and divorce called The Trouble with Thirteen—and Blume had a good pal in common: the novelist Norma Klein. “Norma Klein was my first writer friend,” Blume told Terry Gross in an interview on Fresh Air in 2023. “And the two of us were banned together. Always. Norma and Judy, Norma and Judy.” Early after the inception of Banned Books Week by the American Library Association in 1982, their headshots both appeared on a poster with black lines covering their mouths. The other silenced authors? Maya Angelou, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and William Shakespeare, among other greats.

Klein was a New York native who grew up in Manhattan and never learned to drive. Her parents had been communist activists when they were younger and her father worked as a Freudian psychoanalyst. When Judy lived across the bridge in New Jersey, she and Norma would meet for long lunches. After Judy moved out west to New Mexico, they maintained their relationship via long, intimate letters.

A reserved brunette, Klein got her start publishing short stories in the 1960s, before she penned two successful books for children: Mom, the Wolf Man and Me, a YA novel, and Girls Can Be Anything, a picture book for younger readers. Wolf Man, which came out in 1972, is about Brett Levin, an adolescent girl growing up with an artistic single mother, who takes Brett to protests and lectures her about feminism. In an amusing role reversal, Brett wishes her mom was more conventional and sets her up on dates, hoping she’ll settle down and get married.

Girls Can Be Anything has a more obvious agenda. In the 1973 book, two children named Marina and Adam bicker about the roles they get to inhabit in their games of pretend. Adam bosses Marina around, telling her that because he’s a boy and she’s a girl, he gets to be the doctor while she has to be the nurse. He’s the pilot, she’s the stewardess, according to Adam. He’s the president and she’s first lady.

In between their playdates, Marina tells her parents about Adam’s demands and they assure her that he’s wrong. “Well, that’s just plain silly!” her father says when Marina shares that Adam told her women can’t be doctors. “Why, your Aunt Rosa is a doctor. You know that.” Bolstered by her family, Marina bravely stands up to Adam. “Adam, you know, you can be a pilot or a doctor… I’m going to be the first woman President!”

Adam is skeptical. “It seems like according to you girls can be anything they want,” he says.

“Well, that’s just the way it is now,” Marina answers before they work it out, each giving their presidential talks and celebrating with a dinner of potato chips, lollipops, and marshmallows.

Klein, who died in 1989 at the age of fifty, dedicated the book to her daughter. “To Jenny,” it reads, “who, when she grows up, would like to be a painter, join the circus, and work at Baskin-Robbins, making ice cream cones.”

Jenny is Jennifer Fleissner—not an acrobat or an ice cream vendor but today a gender studies professor at Indiana University Bloomington. Fleissner said that like Judy, her mother didn’t set out to be shocking with anything she wrote. “She was a very strong feminist,” said Fleissner, who is the older of Klein’s two daughters. “I think she would have said that the primary thing she was interested in writing about was writing honestly about sexuality and trying to do so in a way that was not shaming.”