No children’s book had ever gone here before.
“You were never allowed to talk about [menstruation],” said Arlene LaVerde of the way things were during her childhood. LaVerde was born in 1967 and served as president of the New York Library Association from November 2023 to November 2024. “Now… the way we’re able to talk about menstruation and periods, without fear—it starts with Judy Blume and what she started with that one book.” LaVerde went on: “We wouldn’t be where we are without her.”
In Judy’s day, girls ended up learning about Aunt Flo not from their parents, but from the people who wanted to sell them menstrual products. The overlap between physical maturity and consumerism—shopping for pads, picking out a brand—was as true for Margaret as it was for girls in the real world, writes Joan Jacobs Brumberg in her book The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. With adults being ashamed to discuss periods with their daughters, it left a gap in the chain of communication that industry stepped in to fill. The first disposable sanitary napkins were manufactured by the medical and personal care corporation Kimberly-Clark, and sold under the name Kotex, which appeared on shelves in the early 1920s, after the company developed synthetic surgical cotton for use during World War I.
Quickly, according to Brumberg, Kotex became a status symbol among young, middle-class women, who could afford the monthly investment in a store-bought product that was immediately marketed as an upgrade in personal hygiene. Meanwhile, poorer girls, and particularly the daughters of immigrants, were stuck with the functional—but high-maintenance—washable cloth-rag pads used by their mothers and grandmothers. “Well into the 1930s and 1940s, there were some American girls who had to make do with homemade protection,” Brumberg writes. But they weren’t happy about it. “Daughters of immigrants understood, before their grandmothers and mothers did, that there was an American way to menstruate, and that it required participation in the larger consumer society.”
By the time Judy Blume was writing about Margaret, that initiation often began in school, especially in more liberal enclaves like northern New Jersey. In 1946, Kotex and the Walt Disney company collaborated on an animated ten-minute film called The Story of Menstruation, an educational short that would eventually be viewed by approximately 100 million American girls. In it, a smoky-voiced actress with a fancy transatlantic accent walks viewers through the science of early puberty, starting with the pituitary gland. The cartoon, done in elegant, muted colors, is filled with wide-eyed girls who mostly resemble the title character in the studio’s 1950 full-length take on the Cinderella tale.
The narrator—who pronounces the word “maturing” as ma-TOOR-ring—uses correct scientific terms, such as “uterus” and “ovaries,” to explain the monthly cycle. In a sequence that describes the process that leads to menstrual shedding, a simulation of a woman’s reproductive system appears on-screen, portrayed in bloodless shades of ivory, with an egg touring through a fallopian tube like a tiny pinball. “If the egg is impregnated, which happens when a woman is going to have a child, the egg will stay within the uterus,” the voiceover actress recites in the film’s only subtle nod to how babies are actually conceived. “Then the thickened lining will provide nourishment for the budding human being through the early days of its development. However, most eggs pass through the fallopian tubes without being fertilized.”
The Story of Menstruation goes on to provide tips to girls for getting through their periods, including tracking them on a calendar, getting exercise, and eating right. At times, the tone borders on condescending: “Some girls have a little less pep, a feeling of pressure on the lower body, perhaps an occasional twinge or a touch of nerves.” (“An occasional twinge”? Okay, try telling that to someone with mind-numbing cramps.) “But don’t let it get you down. After all, no matter how you feel, you have to live with people. You have to live with yourself, too.” As the film assures its young female audience, it’s all part of growing up to be a healthy adult, within “nature’s eternal plan for passing on the gift of life.”
The film also mentions an accompanying pamphlet called “Very Personally Yours,” which Disney and Kotex had produced as well to reiterate the cartoon’s messages. In Are You There God?, Blume pokes fun at the kind of stuffy, in-school presentations that would have a junior high schooler like Margaret walking home at the end of the day with an illustrated period fact sheet tucked in her bookbag. One Friday afternoon, the sixth-grade girls gather in the auditorium to watch What Every Girl Should Know, which is being chaperoned by a representative from the fictional Private Lady company. “The narrator of the film pronounced it menstroo-ation,” Margaret says. “The film told us about the ovaries and explained why girls menstroo-ate. But it didn’t really tell us how it feels, except to say that it’s not painful… it just said how wonderful nature was and how we would soon become women and all that.”
Margaret is doubly unimpressed when she’s handed a pamphlet after the movie, also called “What Every Girl Should Know.” “It was like one big commercial. I made a mental note never to buy Private Lady things when and if I needed them,” she says.
That irreverence and inborn skepticism are part of what make Margaret so relatable to young readers. It’s also part of what makes her so needling to the kinds of parents who don’t want their children exposed to sex ed. The problem is, sex is a part of human life and people figure out ways to learn about it, Zimmerman said. “Everyone gets sex ed, all seven billion people… They just get it from different places, and most of them don’t get it from state-sponsored schools. They get it from Judy Blume novels. Or recently from porn on the Internet. Porn is sex ed. I think most of it is bad sex ed, but it’s absolutely sex ed.”
After publishing Are You There God?, Judy was officially in the sex ed business. Ironically, one of her next paying gigs was penning the very kind of period pamphlet that she sends up in her novel.
“Growing Up and Liking It” was commissioned by the Personal Products Company, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson based in Milltown, New Jersey. The booklet, published in 1970, was ten pages long and featured cheerful feminine doodles of flowers with smiley faces. In a series of short letters between pre-teens Patty, Donna, and Ginny, the girls discuss their changing bodies and menstruation. Patty is the knowledgeable one—she has an older sister and an open-book mother. Even though she hasn’t gotten her period yet, she has already studied up on the subject. Ginny is preparing herself, too. She bought a “Starter Kit” from the Personal Products Company, which real kids could order for the price of $2.50.
At her request, Judy’s name didn’t appear anywhere on the pamphlet. She was well paid for her work, earning $5,000 for the chatty booklet (just over $38,000 in today’s dollars), exactly the same amount that Bradbury spent on the ad that reeled her in. She was on her way toward financial freedom—no small task for a writer, or a woman for that matter, in the early 1970s.
Chapter Five Bad Kids
“Sometimes I am a mean and rotten person.”
Blume frequently uses the word “honest” to describe her work: an admirable word and—perhaps shrewdly—an uncontroversial one. But it sells her writing short.
Pioneer children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom, who published Louise Fitzhugh, E. B. White, Maurice Sendak, and other notables, has a famous quote that comes in handy here. Nordstrom described her mission as shepherding “good books for bad children,” as opposed to all the “bad books for good children” she felt were crowding the shelves already. Nordstrom’s quip makes a terrific soundbite, despite the fact that most early-childhood experts will tell you there are no truly bad children. But are there lots of kids who behave badly? Absolutely.
With Are You There God? and even more so in her next few books, Blume leaned into all the ways generally good kids could still be messy. Even contemplative Margaret has her moments of brattiness, like when she piles on the middle school outcast Laura Danker. Unlike the other girls in their class, Laura already has a curvy body, which leads to rumors that she uses it to entice boys. “I heard all about you and Moose Freed… about how you and Moose and Evan go behind the A&P,” Margaret whispers to Laura when they get into a power struggle over a school project. “I don’t know why you do it,” she continues when Laura challenges her. “But I know why they do it… they do it so they can feel you or something and you let them!”
The exchange pushes Laura to tears, and Margaret regrets it immediately. But she never suffers any consequences—nor does she get a chance to make it up to Laura. She simply has to live with the shame of her own behavior. (On the other hand, the Are You There God? movie shows Margaret making up with Laura in the end and ditching Nancy—a false note in an otherwise faithful adaptation.)
Judy gave her characters the emotional legroom she felt she was denied when she was growing up. The older she got, the more she learned to hide her feelings. “My brother was so rebellious that my role in the family was to make everybody happy,” Judy told Bust magazine in 1997. Photos of young Judy show her smiling so tightly you can feel the tension in her jaw. In the winter of 1951, when she was in eighth grade, three separate planes went down in Elizabeth on their way to and from Newark Airport. The crashes were a crisis for her hometown, and many people were killed. It must have been terribly frightening for everyone. Still, Judy tried to be the happiest.
“My mother used to say, ‘We never have to punish Judy… if you look at her wrong, she cries,’ ” Blume wrote in Letters to Judy. “Well, yes… but I wish I had been able to risk showing my anger now and then. I wish I had felt secure enough to know that once I had gotten it all out I would still be loved.”
For her next book with Jackson, Judy created a character who holds in his feelings, too. Then Again, Maybe I Won’t kept her firmly in the puberty zone. Like Margaret, Tony Miglione is weathering a big move alongside a flurry of physical and emotional changes. At the age of twelve, he’s all set to start junior high in Jersey City when his father, Vic, a talented yet humble electrician, invents a new kind of electrical cartridge and lands a lucrative manufacturing contract with a heavy-hitting corporation in Queens. The job comes with plenty of money, which spells considerable economic mobility for Tony’s multigenerational Italian American household. The family picks up and moves to a white house in Rosemont, Long Island, with a manicured lawn and a stately circular driveway.
Tony knows he’s supposed to be excited about this impressive home, with its roomy closets and multiple bathrooms, and the fact that his parents can suddenly afford to hire household help, which means his aging grandmother doesn’t have to cook anymore. But Tony is skeptical. Grandma seems depressed without anything to do, and his wealthy neighbor and schoolmate Joel is somehow more of a thug—shoplifting and making prank phone calls—than his far less privileged friends back in Jersey City. Tony is disappointed in his parents for throwing around their new money. They keep telling him he should be grateful to be on the receiving end of opportunities and material goods that his two older brothers didn’t get, one of whom died young in Vietnam. “I wanted to say let me alone and stop trying to shove everything that Ralph and Vinnie didn’t have down my throat!” Tony admits. “But I couldn’t say that because that would have hurt their feelings and they weren’t trying to be mean. But sometimes they’re so full of bull it makes me sick.”
This is not the way kids talk in Beverly Cleary’s books. As if the move isn’t stressful enough, Tony is also on the brink of a full-blown sexual awakening. Joel’s older sister, Lisa, is sixteen and “the best looking girl I’ve seen in person anywhere,” according to a lovestruck Tony. He’s mesmerized—and a little bit ashamed—when he realizes he can see into her room at night from his window. He makes a habit of watching her undress. He knows it’s wrong, but he does it anyway.
Recently, Tony has learned about wet dreams in gym class and he wonders if he’ll ever have one. He’s terrified he’ll get an erection in school. “When I read Joel’s paperbacks, I can feel myself get hard,” Tony says, referring to the stash of adult books Joel keeps around, diligently cataloging the dirtiest passages. “But other times when I’m not thinking about anything it goes up too. I don’t know what to do about that.”
Judy worked hard to capture Tony’s voice, prompting some rigorous tête-à-têtes with Jackson. In early drafts, Jackson found the storytelling less intimate than he’d come to expect from Blume. He felt she needed to convey Tony’s feelings about the move to Long Island with more emotion, more care. Would Judy consider giving Tony a sentimental object that his mother, while packing up the house, wanted to leave behind in Jersey City? A week later, Judy came back with a scene where Tony asks to hold on to the junior high school pennant that hung over his bed.
“You’ll get a new one… from Rosemont Junior High,” says his mother, who is quick to toss out the remnants of her former life, in which she buried the older son who had originally owned the pennant.
“I want this one anyway,” Tony replies. “It used to be… I almost said ‘Vinnie’s,’ but I caught myself in time.”
Jackson was pleased with the changes, and ultimately loved the manuscript. Judy dedicated the finished book to him: For Dick.
Unlike with Are You There God?, reviewers treated Tony’s preoccupation with his changing body as utterly unremarkable. “Tony takes to carrying his raincoat everywhere, to use as a screen in case he has an erection in public—an event that does finally occur at the blackboard in math class, when a book provides the necessary cover,” Kirkus said on October 18, 1971, calling scenes like this one “refreshingly light.” A young male narrator, it seemed, could get away with referencing the physical trials of puberty in a book for children in a way a female character couldn’t without raising questions.
Meanwhile, Judy was already getting involved with yet another novel for readers aged eight to twelve, called It’s Not the End of the World. The conflicts were very different from those experienced by Tony Miglione but a similar, aching strain played throughout the pages—that of feeling like a stranger in your own home.
It’s Not the End of the World is a book about divorce, told through a child’s eyes. Like Henry James’s classic novel for adults What Maisie Knew, published seventy-five years before in 1897, Blume’s story lets readers watch a marriage fall apart by way of the observations and experiences of a sensitive daughter. Unlike in What Maisie Knew, the parents in Blume’s tale are loving and almost entirely well-intentioned. But for sixth-grader Karen, their breakup still feels crushing—almost catastrophic. Eventually, she comes to accept that her mom and dad won’t be getting back together, but not before she digs out the personalized cocktail napkins from their wedding, buys them an awkwardly timed anniversary card, and convinces herself that a handmade diorama about the Vikings is the perfect magical item that will help rekindle their love for each other.
Judy got the idea to write the novel after a wave of divorces hit her neighborhood, rattling her elementary school–aged children. In Scotch Plains and around the entire country, the seemingly solid suburban dream—erected by American culture in the boon years after World War II—started to splinter. The baby boom was over and another trend tiptoed across the country’s green grassy lawns and began to chew away at the house frames: breakups. Between 1967 and 1979, the divorce rate doubled, affecting families of all racial and socioeconomic backgrounds.
“There are a number of different factors that go into really rapidly rising divorce rates in the sixties and seventies,” said Suzanne Kahn, author of Divorce, American Style: Fighting for Women’s Economic Citizenship in the Neoliberal Era. These included “everything from changing economic conditions, the feminist movement, more possibilities for women outside of the home… [and] rapidly changing divorce laws in the late sixties and early seventies that just make it easier to get divorced,” Kahn said.
The divorce boom would soon yield some terrific art: An Unmarried Woman. Kramer vs. Kramer. Nora Ephron’s Heartburn. But when It’s Not the End of the World was published in April 1972, divorce wasn’t the fertile creative ground that it is today, and especially not in books for children. Judy, then in her thirties, wrote the novel because she recognized that families were changing and kids were feeling unmoored. To learn more about how divorce affected children, she “did considerable reading and six months of crying,” she told an interviewer.
Maybe she felt so emotional because she’d started to wonder if her own clan was headed in that same direction.
“I tried to reassure [Randy and Larry] but I really wasn’t sure myself,” she explained in Letters to Judy. “I wrote It’s Not the End of the World at that time to try to answer some of my children’s questions about divorce, to let other kids know they were not alone and, perhaps, because I was not happy in my own marriage.”
When we meet the Newmans at the start of the novel, the New Jersey–based family of five’s dinner time has devolved into chaos after Bill, the father, comes home late from work. Karen—a middle child sandwiched between fourteen-year-old Jeff and six-year-old Amy—watches as her parents get angrier and angrier with each other, until her mother, Ellie, tosses a sponge across the room. Karen guesses her dad will sleep on the couch that night, as he’s been doing frequently. Still, she’s blindsided when Ellie gathers up the children to tell them that she and Bill are separating. “I felt tears come to my eyes,” Karen says, after her mom drops the news. “I told myself, ‘don’t start crying now Karen, you jerk.’ ”
But later, when she’s alone, she gets emotional. “I would rather have them fight than be divorced. I’m scared… I’m so scared. I wish somebody would talk to me and tell me it’s going to be all right. I miss Daddy already. I hate them both! I wish I was dead.”
Over the course of the next few months, the Newmans struggle to adapt as Bill moves out and gets his own apartment and Ellie reconsiders her place in the world. Through it all, Karen tries to stay “dependable” even though she’s swollen with anger. “Sometimes I feel sorry for my mother and other times I hate her,” she writes in her daybook, where she assigns every day a letter grade. It’s been a long time since she’s had an A.
