This was Blume’s personal philosophy as well. She believed that kids deserved to have pressing and private questions about their bodies, and that they were entitled to the answers. Over the course of her life and career, she has recognized that women’s interior lives and their sexual desires are deeply intertwined. Making that connection, and putting it into her books in the 1970s and 1980s, was radical at the time.

Hell, it’s radical now.

Americans are still debating the value of sex education. Twelve-year-old girls are still getting catcalled on the street, while books that talk frankly about sex are getting dismissed as pornography. Roe v. Wade is no longer the law of the land and powerful men have announced that they’re coming for birth control next. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has greenlit a bill that prevents girls younger than sixth grade from even talking about menstruation in school. Kids in many states are prohibited from learning about the gender spectrum, or LGBTQ+ issues, or anything that falls beyond the traditional boy/girl binary.

This moment in history feels like a tipping point. When Judy Blume started writing in the late 1960s, the culture was at a tipping point, too. The sexual revolution presented an ocean of new ideas, but there were plenty of people trying to hold back the tide. Second Wave feminists—Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett—were fighting to change the world for women. The goal of women’s liberation was to free wives and mothers from cages of domesticity and let them enter modern society.

Blume was a housewife and mother of two in her twenties when she first sat down to write. She wasn’t a women’s rights activist, but she was deeply affected by the ideas coming out of the movement. One of Second Wave feminism’s aims was to demystify the female body once and for all, so that women could be more in control of their reproductive systems, their sexual experiences, and their lives. Tapping away at her IBM Selectric, Judy was absorbing feminist values and translating them, in real time, for her young readers.

This is the genius of Judy Blume. It’s the single most important aspect of her legacy. Her work as a children’s writer did something nobody else could manage: it helped ensure feminism’s longevity. When Friedan published The Feminist Mystique in 1963, she argued that the activists who came before her—the First Wave suffragettes—had admirably won the vote but then hung up their sashes and failed to encode their values into American culture. “The fact is that to women born after 1920, feminism was dead history,” Friedan wrote. Or, as Kate Millett put it in Sexual Politics (1970), “When the ballot was won, the feminist movement collapsed in what can only be described as exhaustion.”

By the war years of the 1930s and 1940s, the country no longer had an active women’s rights movement. The United States in the 1950s saw a return to patriarchal gender roles, leaving the Nineteenth Amendment in place but undoing much of the important social and cultural work of early feminism.

Second Wavers didn’t want this to happen again. Friedan and Millett both agreed: a movement requires a multigenerational buy-in to maintain its momentum. And over in suburban New Jersey, a soft-spoken stay-at-home mom was listening. Writing cutting-edge books for kids, Judy Blume became the Second Wave’s secret weapon.

This book is about how she did it. It takes elements from her life, her work (specifically, the controversial young adult novels she published between 1970 and 1980), and her battle against censorship to reveal how she brought up the next generation of women’s rights activists. Her characters and stories were more than just entertainment. They were a roadmap of open communication, bodily autonomy, and even sexual fulfillment. They taught young readers that we were allowed to expect more from our lives than the women who came before us.

I am following that map from its starting point. Come with me.

Rachelle Bergstein

Brooklyn, NY

October 25, 2023

Chapter One Housewife’s Syndrome

“I went in the closet and I cried.”

Before Judith Sussman had even graduated from college at NYU in 1961, she was married and pregnant. She had met a man—another New Jersey native, six years her senior—who could give her the life she thought she wanted: a suburban success story. When they first started dating, John Blume was a promising law student, preppy, clean-cut, with a round face and wry blue eyes. He had a job waiting for him at his father’s law firm in Newark. Was Judy smitten? It was tough to say. Their backyard wedding, in August of 1959, had a feeling of inevitability.

It was inevitable, she later realized, because she had been programmed to want certain things. Despite the fact that her high school yearbook listed her single most important ambition as “college,” she was acutely aware that her degree in elementary education was actually a backup plan. Her mom, Essie Sussman, would have been mortified if she’d used it. In the shorthand of New Jersey’s Jewish mothers, work was something a woman did when she couldn’t find a husband to take care of her.

And of course Judy could find a husband—she was smart, bubbly, pretty. A good girl, if a bit of a flirt, with slim hips and a glinting, movie-star smile. When she had her first baby, a daughter she named Randy, in her early twenties, she had fulfilled her greater purpose according to contemporary standards. Her son, Lawrence, who they called Larry, followed soon after, in 1963.

By then, the Blumes had moved into a lovely new house in the affluent suburb of Scotch Plains, New Jersey. The four-bedroom home, which sat on nearly an acre of grassy land, had an airy front porch and a two-car garage. It was a twelve-minute drive from her mother. Judy framed her college diploma—already, school was starting to feel so far away—and hung it over the washing machine.

The family was thriving. As John Blume’s wife, Judy frequented the local country club, taking tennis and golf lessons so she could go along with his hobbies, and enjoyed steak dinners at restaurants with crisp white tablecloths. She had to admit, she wanted for nothing. So what was that tug at the pit of her stomach? A hunger, gnawing and painful, like she was empty.

The sexual revolution was well underway, but it hadn’t yet made it to Scotch Plains. The first Playboy magazine, with Marilyn Monroe in a black swimsuit beaming on the cover, had gone to press in 1953. Elvis rocked and rolled his hips on the Ed Sullivan Show just a few years later, in 1956. The birth control pill was approved for contraceptive use in 1960, and the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut protected the rights of married couples to use it. Sex was in the air—or at least on the airwaves. “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones topped the charts. Ponytailed schoolgirls watched the Beatles perform with desire shooting out of their eyes.

But in Scotch Plains, it was as if the 1950s had never ended. Even though it closed out its seven-year TV run in 1963, everyone was still playacting Leave It to Beaver. The men went to work every morning. The wives watched the kids, cooked dinner, and cleaned. If they were lucky enough to have free time, they gossiped and browsed clothing racks. “Those women weren’t even shopping but simply going to stores, for lack of anything better to do,” Blume later said of her fellow New Jersey moms.

Shopping didn’t do it for Judy. It didn’t do it for Betty Friedan either, who lived an hour away in Rockland County, New York. In 1963, mother of three Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, which described housewives’ ennui as “the problem that has no name.” Friedan argued that during World War II, when American women had flooded the workforce while the men went to war, they had been happier. Then, after D-Day, they had been corralled back into their homes. They subsisted on a substanceless media diet that told them they should entertain no ambitions beyond their “feminine” duties: Preparing gourmet meals. Scrubbing the floors until they sparkled. Cultivating their children’s interests. Making it all seem lovely and effortless, so that it appeared, at five o’clock every day, as if they had been gift-wrapped just for their husbands.

Middle-class women were told they were lucky, that they led more pampered lives than any other species in the history of the world. “The American housewife—freed by science and the labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth and the illnesses of her grandmother… was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children and her home. She had found true feminine fulfillment,” Friedan wrote of the cultural messages housewives received.

But then, Friedan asks: Why were so many women secretly dying inside?

They were miserable because they were bored, Friedan argued. More than bored—they were suffocating. And to top it all off, these women felt guilty about being unhappy. They yearned to understand why their comfortable, cosseted lives didn’t nourish them. “I feel as if I don’t exist,” one interview subject confessed to Friedan.

Many suffered from unexplained illnesses. The “housewife’s syndrome” or “housewife’s blight,” Friedan called it, describing a constellation of symptoms that appeared separately or all together: crippling exhaustion, anxiety, restlessness, teariness, lethargy, skin conditions.

Judy had pounding headaches and migraines that sent her to bed in the middle of the day. She had year-round sore throats, rashes, and other allergic reactions for no apparent reason.

“If you want to know about my illnesses, read Wifey,” Blume said in the 1990 book Presenting Judy Blume. “It was another side of my life that I wanted to share.”

In Wifey, Blume’s first novel for adults, published in 1978, she references her weird afflictions in the character of Sandy Pressman: a stifled and sexually frustrated housewife who seeks fulfillment in a series of R-rated, extramarital affairs. Early on in the book, Sandy looks in the mirror to discover a crop of heart-shaped bumps erupting across her face. Despite taking a course of penicillin, she gets sicker. “Ten days later it returned, but much worse. A fever of 105, aches and pains in her joints, a strange rash suddenly covering her body; hivelike on her arms, measlelike on her stomach, blotches on her swollen face. She only wanted to sleep.”

Judy (and Sandy) had the housewife’s blight, all right. And who could blame her? While Gloria Steinem was publishing her explosive 1963 two-part series “A Bunny’s Tale,” about working as a cocktail waitress at the Playboy Club in New York City, Judy was making pot roast. While Friedan was promoting her book and gathering ground for women’s liberation, Judy was tidying up the living room, driving the kids around, folding stack after stack of warm laundry. Randy and Larry grew from babies to toddlers to elementary schoolers, and Judy had more time on her hands—but she didn’t know what to do with it. The truth was, she found tennis and golf boring. She couldn’t stand the country club husbands, and their wives were somehow worse: catty and small-minded.

She needed a project. Something creative to pass the time.

As a girl, Judy had wanted to be a famous actress like Esther Williams or Margaret O’Brien, a child star turned ingénue. Growing up in the diverse city of Elizabeth, New Jersey, Judy—or “Judie” as she spelled it back then—was a cheerful, if somewhat high-strung kid. Her brother, David, who was four years older, made fun of her for being jumpy and liked to toss a sheet over his head like a ghost and sneak up on her. It was easy to get her to scream—she was always anticipating danger.

Her early childhood was defined by World War II. Born Jewish in February 1938, Judy couldn’t remember a time without Hitler. Hitler, shouting sharply in German, was on the radio while the family ate dinner together at the dining room table. Hitler, with his Brylcreemed hair and bristly patch of a mustache, stomped through the newsreels that played when they went to the movies. Judy’s father, a dentist named Rudolph Sussman, volunteered in town as an air-raid warden. Her mother, a housewife named Esther, or “Essie,” knitted khaki sweaters for the boys overseas.

It was a frightening time, but Judy always had a place to stash her anxiety. Her dolls starred in elaborate dramas. She lived in a modest, two-story house on a residential street, and she spent hours bouncing a ball against the brick, making up stories. As she got older she took ballet lessons, acted in plays, sang in the school chorus, and joined the yearbook committee. She was always reading—her first favorite book was Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans, which she took out over and over again from the local library branch. Then she graduated to Nancy Drew and eventually J. D. Salinger.

As an adult, Judy was missing a creative outlet. Washing dishes at night, she hummed along to the radio, thinking she might try her hand at songwriting. Quickly, the notion passed—John Lennon she was not. Then she turned her attention to arts and crafts. She bought yards and yards of colorful felt, fashioning it into splashy pendants to hang on children’s walls. Much to Judy’s delight, her local Bloomingdale’s agreed to stock them and they sold for $9 apiece. She made over $350 (around $3,200 in today’s dollars) before that enterprise got squashed by yet another malady, when her fingers started peeling because she developed an allergy to fabric glue.

Another idea came to her soon after. Reading bedtime stories to her kids, she wondered if she could be a children’s book author and illustrator. She’d play around with words in her head—a little verse here, a mellifluous phrase there—and chuckle, imagining herself as the unlikely Dr. Seuss of suburban New Jersey. Her maiden name had been Sussman, she noted. Seuss, meet Suss. Was it a sign?

Probably not, but Judy started jotting down her ideas anyway. They came alive in colored pencil with simple, homespun drawings. Okay, she conceded, maybe she’d need to work with an artist. But when she wrote, she felt the zap of something familiar from her girlhood: something electric and joyful. A distant, yet sacred, creative force welled up inside her. She wrote one story, called “You Mom, You?” about a mother patiently explaining to her two young kids that she had once been just a silly child herself. The tots—enthralled by their mother’s recollections, told in rhyme—are shocked by her playful history lesson.

Judy was proud of her short manuscripts and bound them with brass fasteners. She started researching where she might submit them: small children’s book publishers and Parents magazine. One afternoon, she checked the mail and discovered a continuing education brochure from her alma mater, NYU. One class, offered on Monday nights, felt like it had been included just for her. It was called Writing for Children and Teenagers.

Judy signed up and started riding the bus from Scotch Plains into the city every week. Even the commute down to the West Village was fulfilling. There was something about taking herself into Manhattan that seemed both delightfully grown-up and reminiscent of her unencumbered college years. Seeing the steel frame of the George Washington Bridge rise up from the road, the silvery skyline shooting out in the distance, it was like she was traveling to another world, one shimmering with artistic potential.

In class, Judy was one of just seven students. The teacher was Lee Wyndham, a published children’s book author, syndicated reviewer, and Russian émigré who wore flamboyant hats with feathers. Wyndham took a traditional view of children’s literature—that all stories should have a good, clear-cut moral with no questions left unanswered in the end—but she also encouraged her pupils to play. Eager to find her own voice, Judy experimented with different perspectives, toggling between first and third person, and an array of narrative forms. She started carrying around a green-gray three-ring binder, which she used to take notes in class and scribble down any new ideas that came to her. On the inside cover Judy wrote down her address, as well as a phrase indicating the item’s growing significance: Reward if found.

Between her lectures on everything from craft to writing strong cover letters to go with manuscript submissions, Wyndham consistently gave Judy warm, positive feedback. She was frank with the aspiring author, telling her that realistic writing, as opposed to fantasy, was her strength. Wyndham likely empathized with Judy; she also didn’t start her professional career until after she had a family. When the class ended, Judy signed up to take it again. She had already started working on a full-length manuscript, about a young white girl whose sense of injustice is inflamed by her community’s racist response to a Black family moving into town.

As Judy wrote, she was also sending out her stories. The first rejection stung. “I went in the closet—I didn’t want the kids to see me,” Blume told CBS Sunday Morning in 2015. “I went in the closet and I cried.” Over time, however, her skin grew thicker. Eventually, by the late 1960s, she’d been rejected by every major publisher, from Harper & Row to Houghton Mifflin to Random House and Pantheon. But she had made progress, too. She sold a short story, called “The Flying Munchgins,” to a children’s magazine, about a little boy named Leonard who discovers a society of mysterious creatures—the Munchgins—living in the dirt. He traps them in a box and shows them off to his older brother and sister who, unimpressed, inform him that they’re nothing special: just plain old ladybugs.

For another story, called “The Ooh Ooh Ahh Ahh Bird,” Judy received $20—and a celebratory red rose from Wyndham.

“She was wonderfully supportive,” Blume said of Wyndham at a 2015 book event hosted by the Arlington Public Library in Virginia. “She was wonderful to me, always,” Blume recalled of her teacher, who died in 1978, even though she admitted Wyndham did not always approve of her tendency to leave the task of untangling moral complexities up to the reader.

Wyndham’s support meant everything to her, especially because she felt she had so few others in her corner when it came to her writing. John wasn’t bothered by her new passion, but he had trouble seeing it as anything more than a hobby. “He thought it was better than shopping,” Blume said. He’d joke to their friends, “All I have to do is buy Judy some paper and pencils and she’s happy!” At one point, John sent a few of her drafts to his friend who had worked in book publishing. That guy was discouraging to the point of rudeness. In so many words: pack it up sweetheart and go back to baking.

Judy didn’t want to bake. She wanted to invent things—to dream. Then one day her dreams took root. In 1969, she received a phone call from an editor at Reilly & Lee, a Chicago-based publisher that had previously rejected her work. They said they wanted to publish her manuscript for The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo, about second-grader Freddy Dissel, an aggrieved middle child who is sick of wearing his older brother Mike’s hand-me-downs and being told to play nicely with his annoying baby sister, Ellen. When Judy hung up, she raced into the basement where Larry was having a playdate and started tossing the children’s Silly Sand—the sloppy 1970s precursor to today’s wet and pliant kinetic sand—into the air in celebration. “Larry’s mother is crazy!” the friend later told her parents, according to a 1981 Scholastic mini-biography called Judy Blume’s Story.

Green Kangaroo, in which Dissel goes from feeling like he will “always be a great big middle nothing” to getting the starring role in the school play (the titular green kangaroo), is not even close to Blume’s best work. But it offers up hints of the humor and empathy that would eventually distinguish her as a writer. Judy was paid $350 (roughly $2,800 today) for the book, and when the mailman—who had grown accustomed to delivering rejections—came by with the check, the pair danced across the lawn together.

The publisher matched Judy with an artist, Lois Axeman, who provided the book’s illustrations, though the pair never actually met. Judy dedicated her debut to John, Randy, and Larry.

When Green Kangaroo was published in the fall of 1969, her local newspaper, the Central New Jersey Courier News, did a small story on Judy. In an article titled “Mom Keeps Busy Writing Books for Little Children”—Keeps busy! Honestly!—the Scotch Plains resident and former Brownie troop leader shared that she was shopping another short manuscript, about a boy who swallows his brother’s pet turtle, and already had a contract to publish another book, which she had completed in her writing class at NYU. The novel, called Iggie’s House, featured a young protagonist named Winnie Barringer, who sought to befriend her new Black neighbors.