But did she believe it was the right decision? All she had wanted was to write honest books for kids and there she was, dropped into the deep end of the culture wars. She went on: “I’ve never forgiven myself for caving in to editorial pressure based on fear, for playing into the hands of the censors.”
Chapter Twenty-One Morals
“They call her a Pied Piper leading kids down the wrong path.”
Jackson was right that the censors had it out for Judy. They were mobbish and rough, demonstratively flashing their pitchforks. Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum circulated a pamphlet called “How to Rid Your Schools and Libraries of Judy Blume Books.”
Another Texas-based conservative group, called the Pro-Family Forum, created a flyer with the frightening title “X-Rated Children’s Books,” about mature themes—sex, drugs, and divorce—snaking their way into fiction for young adults. The handout mentions The Outsiders and V.C. Andrews’s haunting 1979 novel Flowers in the Attic, but it really goes in on Blume, denouncing Forever for the explicit scenes between Michael and “Kathy” (a repeated mistake that suggests whoever drafted the primer didn’t actually spend a lot of quality time with Blume’s characters).
“X-Rated Children’s Books” walks readers through the process of challenging these books, with the intention of getting them removed from public libraries as well as privately owned bookstores. It encourages concerned citizens to investigate their local libraries and shopping malls, and bring any inappropriate titles to the attention of public school teachers and principals, whose salaries rely on tax dollars, as the leaflet points out. It also suggests that aspiring book vigilantes buy copies of the flyer, at a price of three for a dollar, and distribute them within their communities. Other mounting threats, according to the Pro-Family Forum, include the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons and the creep of Atheism.
The moral center dropping out of everyday life was an important idea among book banners. In February 1980, a complaint from an upset parent prompted an elementary school library in Montgomery County, Maryland, to remove Blubber, Blume’s 1974 YA novel about fifth-grade bullying, from the shelves.
Blubber is narrated by Jill Brenner, an average student who is suddenly swept up in some nasty social dynamics after her classmate Linda Fischer gives an oral report on whales. Linda is nervous and chubby, and when she mentions that the giant sea creatures are encased in a thick layer of fat called, yes, blubber, the popular girls in class seize on it.
“Blubber is a good name for her,” Wendy, the queen bee, writes in a note to Jill.
Wendy, her sidekick Caroline, and Jill start relentlessly taunting Linda. “School isn’t as boring as it used to be,” Jill says after the entire class catches on to the game, egged on by a list that Wendy circulates titled “How to have fun with Blubber.” Suggestions include pushing her, tripping her, and telling her she stinks. The kids make Linda say “I am Blubber, the smelly whale of class 206” before she can eat lunch, drink from the water fountain, or use the bathroom. Jill has moments of ambivalence about what’s happening, but there’s no denying she’s on board. For Halloween, she ditches her witch costume of three years running to dress up as a flenser: someone who strips blubber from whale carcasses. She’s proud of the cruel inside joke and annoyed when she doesn’t win the school’s costume contest.
Jill eventually gets her comeuppance, not from an authority figure—the fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Minish, has been checked out for months—but from Wendy herself. The class submits Linda to a mock trial after she’s accused of tattling on Jill for pulling a Halloween prank on a grumpy neighbor. Jill isn’t sure Linda’s actually guilty, but she’s enthusiastic until Wendy, who has appointed herself the judge, refuses to assign Linda a lawyer. Jill stands up for her: “If we’re going to do this we’re going to do it right, otherwise it’s not a real trial,” she says. An argument ensues and Wendy turns on her. The next day at school, everything is worse. Linda has teamed up with Wendy, and Jill—freshly dubbed B.B. for Baby Brenner—is the new classroom pariah.
Wendy never faces any consequences. Still, Judy was surprised when she heard that Blubber, of all her books, was ruffling feathers. Unlike many of her other novels, Blubber makes zero references to sexuality.
The whole thing started in Maryland with a mom named Bonnie Fogel, who called up her daughter’s public school after her seven-year-old, named Sarah, checked Blubber out of the library.
As Fogel told the Washington Post, she was half listening as the second grader read aloud from the book at the dinner table, until one line stopped her in her tracks.
“That teacher is such a bitch,” Sarah said.
Instantly, Fogel asked to see the book and was “shocked” when she spied the offensive word spelled out on the page. B-I-T-C-H. In a book for children?! She flipped ahead and wasn’t reassured. Blubber was brutal. “What’s really shocking is that there is no moral tone to the book,” she told the Post. “There’s no adult or another child at the end who says, ‘This is wrong. This cruelty to others shouldn’t be.’ ”
Fogel spoke to the school superintendent, who decided to pull Blubber, along with two other books he’d received negative feedback about, including It’s Not What You’d Expect by Norma Klein. (Klein’s novel tells the story of fourteen-year-old twins who, while struggling to make sense of their parents’ divorce, find out that their older brother has gotten his girlfriend pregnant and wants her to get an abortion.) A spokesman for the superintendent told the Post that he’d decided these stories were better suited to high schoolers. Meanwhile, although Montgomery County’s schools were reconsidering Blubber, the local public library had just ordered 110 copies.
“It’s not a great piece of literature,” librarian Ann Friedman said at the time, echoing long-standing criticisms of Blume’s work. “But I feel we have an obligation to be responsive to what kids are reading… I have great faith that kids will figure out what’s the right thing to do without having a moral lesson spelled out.”
Fogel vehemently disagreed. “I think adults have an obligation to steer young children away from cruelty,” she said. “Not introduce them to more.”
Asked to comment on the controversy, Blume stood up for her novel. “The fact that it is not resolved is the most important part of the book,” she said. “Blubber is a tough book, but I think kids are awfully rough on each other. I’d rather get it out there in the open than pretend it isn’t there.”
In light of the situation in Montgomery County, other Maryland schools were also reassessing the book’s suitability for young readers. But given the novel’s intended audience, the Post chose to give Sarah—the only young reader whose voice appears in the article—the final word on the matter.
And Sarah loved it. “Blubber, she told her mother, is ‘the best book I ever read.’ ”
Hardly anything exemplifies the high-speed shift in the public’s understanding of Judy Blume like two profiles in the Christian Science Monitor, published less than two years apart. The first, headlined “Writing for Kids Without Kidding Around,” came out in May 1979 and described a pleasant visit with Blume at her new home in Santa Fe, where she had just moved from Los Alamos with Tom Kitchens, Randy, and Larry, who were seventeen and fifteen at the time. Beyond Blume’s own mention in passing of the “sensational” responses to her novels, the tone of the story is warm and admiring.
“Blume’s books are sympathetic stories of ordinary children, suffering from a bossy sibling, confusing sexuality, or a disintegrating family,” the reporter wrote. “Blume brings humor, affection and order to the often bewildering complexities of being a child today.”
The second article, however, reads like it was published on a different planet. “Judy Blume: Children’s Author in a Grown-Up Controversy” came out in the Christian Science Monitor in December 1981, almost a year after Reagan’s inauguration. Gone were the coolheaded and complimentary hat tips to Blume’s writing. Instead, the focus had shifted to her critics. “A growing number of iconoclasts are out to take the bloom off the Blume books,” reporter Gay Andrews Dillin wrote. “They call her a Pied Piper leading kids down the wrong path. They don’t like her tune and charge that she plays to the prurient interests of her adolescent audience.”
Once again, Blume forcefully defended her work. She offered what would become her go-to line on censorship: parents have a right to control what their own children read but cannot unilaterally make those decisions for other families. She blamed the swell of outcries against her books on the Moral Majority. However, Cal Thomas—an evangelical Christian and then the vice president of communication for Jerry Falwell’s organization—deflected responsibility. “They’re trying to use us to sell more of their books,” he told the Christian Science Monitor dismissively. “It’s the old ‘Banned in Boston’ scam. Too often the Moral Majority is used generically to mean any group that is right-wing or conservative.”
That might very well have been true, but further down the page, Thomas made his stance on Blume’s novels abundantly clear. He said it was “intellectually indefensible” to insist that kids were already talking about sex, so it couldn’t hurt for them to read about it, too. “It’s the writers and advertisers who are the ones putting it before us every day,” he said.
Thomas ran with this line of thought a few years later, when he published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Daily News called “In Kids’ Books, Guess What ‘Honest’ Means.” The headline makes it sound like he’s describing an entire genre, but his opening lines reveal the narrowness of his target. “Judy Blume writes what she calls ‘honest’ books for children,” Thomas began. “Others call them just short of kiddie porn.”
He continued by bringing up a recent case in Peoria, Illinois, where Blume’s books had been removed from elementary school shelves. “Critics label as ‘lunatic’ the Peoria decision to remove the Blume books from the school libraries,” Thomas wrote derisively. But to him, it was equally crazy to suggest that the books should be freely available to kids just because they reflected a new “reality.” “Why is it that chastity until marriage and caring enough for another person not to engage in premarital sex are not considered reality?”
Thomas contended, as many other religious and right-leaning people have over the years, that children don’t always know what’s good for them. He said that adults had a responsibility to provide moral guidance and that Blume—twice divorced herself, as he pointed out—wasn’t the right person to do it.
He concluded by comparing her books to the crunchy, salty, sticky-sweet snacks kids would gobble down if their parents weren’t around to stop them. “Arguing that Blume is just giving kids what they want is no argument at all,” he wrote. “Many schools have banned junk food vending machines as unhealthy to children’s bodies.” Thomas wanted kids ingesting the literary equivalent of broccoli. “In public schools, kids will learn far more from studying the classics than from the mental junk food dished out by Judy Blume.”
Thomas’s argument that parents and role models should act as correctives in an out-of-control culture extended well beyond the realm of children’s fiction. In 1981—the same year that Charles and Diana got hitched in London and MTV premiered with an infectious oh ah oh in “Video Killed the Radio Star”—sex education was under attack as well. There was a widespread political agenda to reroute the way kids were being taught to think about their bodies, steered by people who believed America, thanks to the civil rights and women’s movements, had taken an abrupt wrong turn in the 1960s. Too many adults, they thought, had been corrupted by their appetites, with activists and atheists spoon-feeding them crap. But kids—kids were still movable. The Right wanted to get back in the driver’s seat, escorting boys and girls toward traditional, Christianity-approved pairings: monogamous, heterosexual, breadwinner/homemaker relationships.
In 1981, the Reagan administration quietly pushed through the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA), which provided federal funding to programs that promoted abstinence-only sex ed. It was the first bill of its kind and was passed as part of the new president’s Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981, aimed at making good on Reagan’s campaign promise to cut down on government spending. AFLA’s purported goal was to solve the fiscal crisis of teen pregnancy by teaching high schoolers that the only safe sex before marriage was no sex at all. This, supporters argued, would scale back on government handouts, because teen moms were almost always on the take.
Really? Here’s how that logic went. Young women who gave birth out of wedlock grew up to be “welfare queens”—a racially coded epithet for mothers who had more and more children in order to live off the taxpayers by vampirically extending their benefits.
While family life classes had always been designed to underscore the primacy of heterosexual marriage, the abstinence-only model went a step further by stressing that state-sanctioned male-female unions were the only appropriate context for sexual activity. This is just another angle on the pro-censorship argument, really; the thinking goes that if you can’t read or learn about it, it doesn’t exist. Once again, teens were being told that until they grew up and made it to the altar, they’d simply have to control themselves. Masturbation, contraception, and homosexual experimentation were not presented as ways to explore safer sex. The religious undertones in this approach were unmistakable. AFLA denied funds to programs that offered abortions or abortion counseling, according to Jeffrey Moran, the author of Teaching Sex. “Congress soon passed the so-called squeal rule,” he wrote, “which required federally funded family planning clinics to inform parents if their teenage children were seeking contraception or an abortion.”
The controlling Republican Party was prepared to punish teens for getting pregnant by condemning them to poverty. Conservatives were trying to legislate girls like Katherine Danziger—bright, feminist, sexually empowered from a relatively young age—out of existence. If Judy Blume was the Pied Piper, as the Christian Science Monitor wrote, then the Reagan administration and its champions were trying to barricade the gates to Hamelin. But they didn’t account for the fact that making a big show of locking her out only amplified her music.
Chapter Twenty-Two Notoriety
“Isolated and alone”
In 1984, Judy appeared on an episode of CNN’s Crossfire, then a two-year-old entertainment news show hosted by Tom Braden, a former CIA operative and liberal journalist, and Pat Buchanan, a former advisor to the Nixon White House and leading voice in conservative Christian politics. As the guest, Blume was seated between them, the set sparse with three stately leather armchairs against a black backdrop. She was dressed stylishly in a green sweater, khaki skirt, and tan knee-high boots, a patterned green and purple scarf looped around her neck. Her curly hair was cut into a flattering long shag. She smiled nervously at the camera as an announcer introduced her as “award-winning writer of children’s books Judy Blume.”
Buchanan, his hair slicked into a camera-ready comb-over, glanced at her warmly. “Ms. Blume looks like a very nice lady,” he began, “and what I wanted to ask you, I looked through three of your books, what is this preoccupation with sex in books for ten-year-old children?”
