Judy Blume is more famous than she’s ever been since she started writing books for children in the late 1960s. She’s a star who has exploded into a supernova, with multiple film and television projects (A documentary! A movie version of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret! A Peacock series based on her 1998 novel Summer Sisters!). “The Judy Blume Renaissance is upon us,” the New York Times declared in March 2023. “We Need Judy Blume Now More Than Ever,” an April 2023 headline from the A.V. Club reads.
The latter referred to the post-Trump political climate, which has proven particularly favorable for book banners. To parental rights activists, a book like Gender Queer, a graphic novel by Maia Kobabe about adolescent gender dysmorphia, is “grooming,” making it the most-banned title of 2022, according to the American Library Association. All Boys Aren’t Blue, about author George M. Johnson’s experience growing up Black and queer in Plainfield, New Jersey, is “indoctrination” and was banned eighty-six times, per the same list. Republican-led state legislators in Florida, Texas, and Iowa are feverishly removing books from school library shelves, leaving them half-empty. Not since the Reagan years have the attacks on books been so organized, and so vicious.
We need Judy Blume now because she understands this moment better than anyone. She is rightly being recognized for all the brave choices she’s made in her long and celebrated career, from talking about periods in Are You There, God?, to having Deenie touch her “special place” in Deenie, to showing an eighteen-year-old losing her virginity—without suffering any hideous consequences—in Forever. Tackling these controversial subjects earned her a dubious honor: she was the country’s most-banned author in the 1980s, back when the Moral Majority was leading the charge against books the way the national right-wing group Moms for Liberty is driving efforts to remove books from school libraries today.
Blume is the grande dame of so-called dirty books. Her work, her voice, her face are all a comfort to the people who grew up with her, who watched her persevere against her attackers and go on to sell an astonishing ninety million copies of her novels to people around the world. Generations of readers are still rooting for her. Today, in her mid-eighties, she has graciously accepted her laurels and strolled into her role as a living legend.
I wanted to write this book to figure out why Judy Blume is still so beloved, when many of her contemporary young adult novelists, like Betty Miles and Norma Klein, have receded into history. I wanted to investigate why just the mention of Blume’s name is enough to break the ice with a stranger and get a serious, otherwise put-together adult woman giggling. Try it: say the name “Judy Blume” to the nearest Gen X or millennial book lover and see what happens. Is it a smile? A fast flush of joy? I’ve seen this look so many times since I started researching Blume’s life and work. A glimmer that floats across the eyes, almost like the person across from me is recalling a former flame.
What’s the secret ingredient that makes Judy Blume’s work so potent? The thing at the heart of her writing that makes it so sticky? Her name continues to show up in contemporary pop culture, in movies like Easy A (2010), Ted (2012), and Deadpool (2016). In interviews, Blume is consistent when she says that she wasn’t sitting down at her typewriter trying to be a firebrand; she just wanted to tell honest stories. But in doing so, she created a cohesive, culture-altering vision of modern childhood. In writing about kids from the inside out, she hit on crucial universalities that transcended race, class, and even sexual orientation. Young readers saw themselves in Judy Blume’s novels and felt she gave them permission to be truthful, too. More than truthful—to be complicated. In Blume’s world, children are expansive enough to question their relationships with God one night and then bicker over trivialities with their best friends on the bus the next morning. Middle school crushes are valid, and important! Nice girls are allowed to challenge their parents. They’re even allowed to criticize them.
This might not sound like a big deal now, but it was huge when Blume started writing in the late 1960s. Back then, children’s literature clung to the wisdom that mother and father knew best. One of the reasons I loved Just as Long as We’re Together so very much was that it validated my feelings. My parents divorced when I was five. Their split and subsequent remarriages had freaked me out and made me angry, but I held it all in. Unlike me, Stephanie expressed her displeasure with her mom and dad in all kinds of subtle and explicit ways. She was fundamentally a good kid—a doting older sister, a dedicated student—but she also wasn’t afraid to tell her parents exactly how upset she was about their breakup. I couldn’t imagine anything more delicious, or more deviant.
Judy Blume is special because she made young readers like me feel seen. That helps explain the nostalgia for her and her work, especially at a moment when the world—with a global pandemic, the existential threat of climate change, mounting combat overseas, and culture wars at home—feels so frightening. Blume’s universe, filled with bicycles, bras, and boy books, is much simpler.
Certainly, that’s part of the reason for the Blume-aissance. But it’s not the whole story.
The answer, I’ve come to believe, is sex. Sex is the lifeblood that flows through her pages. Not selling sex for titillation’s sake, the way her critics claimed, but sex as a fundamental part of being human. From Margaret Simon’s obsession with getting her period to Deenie Fenner’s curiosity about masturbation, the children in Blume’s stories all embrace puberty with open arms and take the ride into adulthood without shame. No matter how much they struggle, her adolescent characters are fundamentally empowered. Across Blume’s books, kids approach sex as a crucial part of growing up, a key element in their cultural and biological destinies.
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.”
