Her book is brilliant and ambitious, impossible to distill in just a few sentences. But Millett, like Friedan, believed that the economy benefited from the unpaid labor of wives and mothers. “Women who are employed have two jobs,” she wrote, “since the burden of domestic service and child care is unrelieved either by day care or other social agencies, or by the cooperation of husbands.”

And on August 26, 1970, feminists decided to do something about it. That day, which was the fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage, Betty Friedan led fifty thousand protesters down New York City’s Fifth Avenue for the Women’s Strike for Equality March, sponsored by the National Organization for Women, or NOW, founded in 1966. The action, paired with a countrywide call for wives and mothers to go on “strike” by putting down their brooms and dishrags for the day, was dedicated to three key issues: abortion rights, equal opportunities for women, and free child care. In major cities across the US, activists responded with complementary protests—amassing in Boston and Chicago, infiltrating men-only restaurants and social clubs in the South, demonstrating in Los Angeles, and swarming the capital.

Judy wasn’t protesting—she was busy at home with her children. “I would have been marching if I hadn’t lived in a suburban neighborhood with two kids,” she told Samantha Bee in an interview in 2015. “In my heart, I was out there marching.”

Before, Judy’s political liberalism had been a secret. During the 1960 race between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, she made campaign calls for Republican Nixon (her husband John’s preferred candidate), but then got in the voting booth and mischievously pulled the lever for Jack. But now, the women’s movement was everywhere: in the newspapers, magazines, and on television. Journalists Susan Brownmiller and Susan Kempton debated a smarmy but articulate Hugh Hefner on the Dick Cavett Show. A drawing of Kate Millett’s face—hard-set, intense—stared back from the cover of Time. Housewife-turned-writer Judy was deeply affected by what she saw going on around her. And she found a way to symbolically get in on the action from behind her typewriter, while Randy and Larry played in the next room.

Judy vented her frustrations with being a wife and mother in the early 1970s by putting it all into the mouth of a proxy: Ellie Newman.

In the beginning of It’s Not the End of the World, mother of three Ellie is raging after Bill gets home late from work and then starts complaining that dinner is cold. The fight escalates, and Karen notes that they’ve been arguing a lot recently, including one time the previous week when Ellie baked a cake for the family and ended up smashing it on the floor. She’d frosted it with mocha icing instead of the usual chocolate. When Bill snipped that he hated mocha icing but would scrape it off, Ellie got livid and hurled the whole dessert—plate and all—to the ground.

In the subsequent weeks and months, after Ellie and Bill announce their plans to split, Ellie starts opening up to Karen about why the marriage isn’t working for her. At first, she offers simple reasons: “Daddy and I just don’t enjoy being together,” Ellie tells her impatient daughter. “We don’t love each other anymore.” Soon, however, Ellie shares her intention to go back to school to study English Literature. “I had you when I was just twenty,” she says to her oldest child, Jeff, over a family dinner with the three kids. “I think I might like to get my degree. I never really had a chance to find out what I might be able to do.”

The children—Jeff especially—are annoyed by this development, and even more so when Ellie changes her tune yet again and reveals that she’s taking a part-time job as a receptionist at an insurance company. At that point their aunt Ruth, who is Ellie’s overbearing older sister, questions Ellie’s judgment.

“The children need you at home, Ellie,” Ruth tells her.

“They’re in school all day,” Ellie assures her. “They won’t even know I’m gone.”

Woven throughout the pages is the sense that Ellie is aching for purpose, a vocation to transport her beyond the walls of her home. It’s a quest that Judy—along with the feminists propelling the movement in general—knew particularly well.

Writing cured Judy of the housewife’s blight. The constant buzz of ideas—which she jotted down in notebooks, on file cards, on tissues, and in the margins of old shopping lists—was better than any doctor’s prescription. A deep wound had been treated and cauterized: “It was like the bacteria, the bad bacteria was coming out that was making me sick,” Blume said at an event in 2015. “I never got sick again in the same way, that way. I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning and get going.”

The transformation made her wonder what her life would have been like if she’d figured this all out sooner. Thinking about it, she simultaneously resented and got sad for her mom. Essie never had anything beyond a husband and kids to keep her busy. “My mother had many, many talents and much to offer,” Blume said in Judy Blume’s Story. “Everyone would have been a lot happier, including my father, if she had worked outside the home.”

Suddenly, Judy was questioning everything about their relationship. During adolescence, her childhood visions of becoming “the hero, the cowgirl, the detective” got replaced “with fantasies of growing up and getting married and having babies,” she once said. She ascribed this switch to her mother’s influence. Her whole life had been what Essie wanted for her, and the thought made her hot with anger. If she wasn’t careful, she’d never stop being that anxious and agreeable schoolgirl.

Her mother’s voice was such a part of her that she heard it ringing in her head like a relentlessly catchy jingle. Your kids are what’s important. Be a quiet and docile wife. Had this ever been what she had wanted for herself?

She wasn’t sure. There were other models of womanhood that had appealed to Judy, as far back as she could remember. Her married but childless aunt had been a school principal—a big accomplishment in her day. And then there was her father’s longtime receptionist, Miss Fay. Miss Fay was a spinster who lived with her sister, a widow, and their parents. Not exactly the picture of success in the 1950s, but to Judy she was absolutely magnetic. “She had a Roadster with a rumble seat,” she told Bust. “She smoked and could tell dirty jokes with the guys. She seemed exciting to me,” Blume said, adding that it was Miss Fay who taught her how to use mascara before prom.

Judy was inspired by Miss Fay, enough so that she wrote a similar character into her 2015 novel for adults, In the Unlikely Event, which is set almost entirely in the 1950s. Daisy Dupree is the beautiful, eminently capable secretary to Dr. O, Elizabeth, New Jersey’s most successful and beloved dentist (Judy has said Dr. O was based on her father). She’s single and childless, and over the course of her career with Dr. O, she becomes a vital part of his ecosystem—booking his appointments but also babysitting his kids; cleaning up after him when he smashes a plaster-of-paris figurine in a private fit of rage; mentoring his newer employees; keeping his secrets.

Like Miss Fay, Daisy lives with her widowed sister. She had been married once and for only two weeks when a doctor diagnosed a congenital defect that meant she would never be able to have penetrative sex or bear children. Her husband had their marriage annulled. And Daisy, formidable, found freedom in his abandonment. “After that, she’d reinvented herself,” we’re told in In the Unlikely Event. “She’d learned to throw back a Scotch, to straddle a chair, smoke a pack of Camels a day and laugh at off-color jokes… a woman who made friends with men but who never let it get romantic. She was done with all that, with girlish dreams of houses with picket fences and little children calling her ‘Mommy.’ ”

Near the end of the book, Dr. O picks up his dental practice and moves it across the country to a burgeoning boom town: Las Vegas. Daisy doesn’t just follow him; she heads west first to set up the new office and hire and train the staff. She turns the heartbreak of being untethered into a decades-long adventure. Who wouldn’t admire a person like that?

Second Wave feminists didn’t look down on women who wanted husbands and kids. Betty Friedan herself had three children. No, the heart of the problem sat in women’s isolation and lack of intellectual stimulation, brought on by traditional gender roles. Marriage and parenting, they argued, didn’t necessarily mean that a wife also had to be an indentured servant. A vibrant home life didn’t have to prevent a woman from becoming a vital contributor to her larger world.

Friedan saw this as the missing piece in so many women’s lives. She called it the fourth dimension. In her 1976 book It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement, Friedan wrote that prior to the movement, women had been stuck “in the feminine mystique, which defines woman solely in terms of her three-dimensional sexual relationship to man: wife, mother, homemaker—passively dependent, her own role restricted to timeless, changeless love and service of husband and children.”

The fourth dimension, on the other hand, opened up possibilities beyond those rigid boundaries. It could be entered only by unlocking a sense of purpose, whether through a fulfilling job, volunteer work, or continuing education. Admittedly, Friedan was appealing mostly to white, affluent women when she spoke this way, by making the assumption that outside employment was a choice. “Women who work because of a commitment [to their vocation] are more aware of themselves as individuals, take a greater joy in their own children, and know greater physical well-being than housewife-mothers or mothers ‘forced’ to work. The forced workers often have to quit a ‘job’ to find the fourth dimension,” she writes, acknowledging those who take jobs for entirely financial reasons, but suggesting, perhaps naively, that an alternative path is available in most cases.

Friedan also blames the suburbs for housewives’ malaise—but again, her solution turns up an economic blind spot. She endorses “a new kind of city living with close neighbors to organize cooperative nursery schools and swap babysitting with… maybe that suburban house will turn into a weekend retreat for the whole family instead of that onerous daily commute for the husband and a separate, isolated world for the wife and children.”

As a middle-class mom, these are the issues that Ellie Newman is wrestling with in It’s Not the End of the World. Whether she knows it or not, she wants the keys to the fourth dimension and she’s rifling through her metaphorical purse to find them. Is she going to get her degree? Settle into long-term work? Sell the house and move the family to Florida? Or maybe she’ll rent an apartment in New York City, where she always wanted to live before her responsibilities got in the way. The possibilities are, if not endless, pretty extensive for women like Ellie Newman. At the end of the book, she’s still working out the details, but she knows she’s ready for a change.

And one of those changes is getting away from Aunt Ruth. The novel is as much a coming-of-age for Ellie as it is for Karen. During a climactic fight scene, Bill shouts at her: “You never grew up! You’re still Ruth’s baby!” He’s being cruel, but the book implies that he’s also correct—Ellie hasn’t been trained in making her own decisions. Her character arc is about learning to flex that muscle.

Finding the fourth dimension is the goal for Ellie; divorce is simply the exercise. And for Judy, clearly some of these issues were on her mind as she was writing. “At the time, my own marriage was in trouble, but I wasn’t ready or able to admit it to myself, let alone anyone else,” Blume explains in the afterword to the twenty-first-century edition of It’s Not the End of the World. She hung on to the life she thought she had wanted for as long as she could. When the moment came to dedicate the book, she chose to honor her existing role as a devoted wife and jotted down, For John.

Chapter Seven Money

“It’s scary to think about my mother with no money to feed us or buy our clothes.”

Before Judy had a job, she and the children lived on John’s income. John controlled the family’s finances and doled out cash for her to pay for groceries and other household necessities. This made her, and all the other unemployed housewives out there like her, vulnerable. If a married woman had no money of her own, how could she leave? Or worse—what would she do if her husband left her?

The women’s movement wasn’t just about personal fulfillment. It was about women renegotiating the terms of their very survival.

The realities of divorce woke up a lot of otherwise privileged white women in the late 1960s, said Suzanne Kahn. The divorce rates had gone up for women of color as well, but it was generally white women who were blindsided by the struggle that came next. “The reason that divorce became the politicizing moment for many white women was because they had been so included in the culturally dominant narrative, and also in public policy. Black women were already suffering from many different forms of exclusion, both political, legal and cultural,” Kahn said.

From a political perspective, white women had sauntered through their milestones and, at the same time, divested themselves of power. They had gone to work after college, but then quit their jobs the moment their pregnant bellies started to pop. After that, a wife’s income, health insurance, and retirement benefits flowed through her male partner. As did her purchasing power: If a married woman wanted a credit card, her application needed to be cosigned by her spouse. An unmarried woman was usually compelled to produce some kind of male guarantor, like her father or her brother, if she had any chance of taking out a card in her own name. It wasn’t until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 that lenders legally had to approve female credit card applicants if their finances were viable.

Until then, and for a long while after, a good marriage was sometimes the only thing standing between a woman and the poverty line. When a divorce blew through, it was terrifying. “They were really sort of economically displaced,” Kahn said of these mostly middle-class women after their breakups. Like Judy, they had made all the “right” choices up until that point, and the fear and disappointment of being financially gutted mobilized them. “They start to organize and a lot of them find a home at some of the biggest feminist organizations of the twentieth century, like the National Organization for Women,” Kahn said. “They really start advocating for shifts in the social insurance system that gives them access to all these economic resources they’ve lost.”

The movement welcomed them with open arms. “If there is any one thing that makes a feminist it is to grow up believing somehow that love and marriage will take care of you the rest of your life—and then to wake up at forty or fifty or even at thirty and find out it isn’t so,” Friedan wrote in It Changed My Life. She found that women whose marriages had crumbled needed the teachings of Second Wave feminism to help them make sense of what had happened. “They were suffering not only loneliness and guilt and hostility—the psychological scars of that inequality that had been responsible for destroying so many of the marriages in the first place—but real economic deprivation.”

In other words, women were ending their marriages—only sometimes by choice—and then watching helplessly as their quality of life plummeted. Even more heartbreaking, they couldn’t provide for their kids in the same way the entire family had come to expect. And so the movement was clear: in the future, married women should not leave their jobs. In order to make that feasible, the government had to step up and offer families the kinds of services that would allow mothers to flourish in the workplace. “Women should be educated to do the work society rewards, and should be paid for that work,” Friedan writes. “And since women are the people who do have children, there should be maternity leaves—and paternity leaves—and child-care centers, and full income tax deductions for child care and home maintenance.”

And advocates wanted other things, too. If the structure of the American family required a woman to stay home, acting in a support role to her male, breadwinning partner, then “homemaker” should be considered her job—and thus, she was entitled to benefits. Friedan wanted these wives, after a divorce, to get severance pay, as well as Social Security payments reflecting the time they’d put in. She also thought husbands should be on the hook to cover their ex’s post-split educational needs, to give them a shot in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Finally, Friedan supported the idea of mandatory marriage and divorce insurance, which would guarantee child support and other monthly payments in case a union splintered.

Unlike some more radical feminists—“Until all women are lesbians, there will be no true political revolution!” declared Village Voice writer Jill Johnston in a 1971 debate moderated by Norman Mailer, commemorated in the 1979 documentary Town Bloody Hall—Friedan, a divorcée herself, still believed in the institution of heterosexual marriage. She also bristled at the accusation that feminism was to blame for the cascade of nationwide breakups. To her, the rising divorce rate was a clear-cut reflection of gender inequality, and it would stabilize as soon as the problem of women’s systemic oppression was solved. After that, legal partnerships would look different, and better, for everyone. “Our movement to liberate women and men from these polarized, unequal sex roles might save marriage,” she wrote. “And marriage is probably worth saving. The intimacy, the commitment—the long-term commitment of marriage—is something we still need.”

The feminists hoped that their work would one day make life better for their daughters and granddaughters. They wanted young girls to grow up expecting more than they did from their marriages, and from their lives. And in many ways, Blume’s books chanted from that same pulpit. From the very first line of It’s Not the End of the World, Karen tells us that she hasn’t bought into the fairy tale. “I don’t think I’ll ever get married,” she says. “Why should I? All it does is make you miserable.”

Are we meant to believe her? Maybe. But what’s clear is that she’s rejecting doing things her parents’ way.

Blume understood that divorce introduced kids to serious worries. Throughout the novel, Karen struggles with the idea of her mom and dad dating new people. She’s very anxious about money, even though she knows nothing of the family’s finances. “My mother has no money that I know of,” Karen thinks to herself after a friend suggests that Ellie must have “plenty” of it if she’s getting divorced. “It’s scary to think about my mother with no money to feed us or buy our clothes or anything.” Later on in the book, the kids complain about going to Howard Johnson’s for dinner with Ellie. Amy, the youngest, whines that “Daddy always takes us out for steak.”

“Daddy can afford to,” Ellie tells her—a sharp and surprising reaction that Karen immediately clocks.

As she penned It’s Not the End of the World, Judy was a visitor in the province of divorce, but she hadn’t yet set up residency. Her work was satisfying but also useful—quickly, she was building up her nest egg. The check for “Growing Up and Liking It” was a windfall. When It’s Not the End of the World came out, she already had five books behind her. It’s Not the End of the World wasn’t a smash—the New York Times dismissed it as “self-help reading, a guide for those troubled by divorce, that will have little interest for those that aren’t”—but she had other irons in the fire.

While she was writing her middle grade and young adult novels, Judy was also publishing books for younger children. These cheerful, humorous stories bricked her path to financial freedom. Freckle Juice, about a second grader who wants freckles so badly he falls for another classmate’s gross-out recipe, published in 1971. Her first mega-hit came the following year, in 1972, with Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. Unlike the Newmans, the Hatchers were a delightfully tight-knit family. They could handle anything together, including a full-fledged natural disaster in toddler form: the inimitable, hysterical Fudge.

Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing had started as a short story back in the Lee Wyndham days, about a wild little boy who accidentally swallows his older brother Peter’s pet turtle. Another piece—about a mother who is so worried about her son’s meager appetite that she indulgently lets him eat on the floor, like a dog—was an obvious predecessor, too.

Jackson, who was mostly interested in novels for older readers, turned down the early draft of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. It was a decision he’d eventually come to regret, as he told School Library Journal in 2001. At the time, it was a picture book and he didn’t see its stunning potential (Tales, beloved, eventually yielded three sequels about the Hatcher family and one spin-off, about the inner life of Peter’s neighbor and nemesis, the swaggering Sheila Tubman). Judy’s agent sent it to another editor, named Ann Durell, who worked at the children’s book publisher E. P. Dutton. Durell read it and invited Judy to lunch, suggesting the story might make more sense as a longer novel. Judy got straight to work and Durell made an offer on the revision soon after.

Blume has since revealed that the inspiration for Fudge was her own son, Larry, who occasionally ate on the floor, calling himself Frisky the Cat. He never actually choked down a turtle—that idea came from a newspaper article Judy saw in the late 1960s—but he did suck his fingers like Fudge and left an embarrassingly big mess behind at more than a few restaurants. But if Blume was anything like Ann Hatcher as a mother, she could handle it. Ann is patient to a fault with her youngest son, barely cracking when he’s so rowdy around her husband’s biggest advertising clients that they flee the apartment, taking their account with them. Warren Hatcher, the dad, is a bit of a hothead, but Ann, a stay-at-home mom, remains steady throughout the book, at least up until the denouement when Fudge eats the turtle. “Oh no! My angel! My precious little baby!” she shouts when she realizes what he’s done.

In the next book, Superfudge, Warren takes a leave from his job to write a book, and Ann considers what her life might look like after her kids are grown up. One evening, she tells Peter she’d like to go back to school and get a degree in Art History. The Hatchers have just had a third baby, nicknamed Tootsie, and Peter can’t understand why his mother would even be thinking about another major change.

“Someday she’ll grow up and go to school and I’ll want to have a career,” Ann tells him. Peter is nonplussed.

But by the time Superfudge was published in 1980, Judy’s own life had changed dramatically. Tales was a great success and some of her earlier novels, including Are You There God?, had found a slew of new readers after coming out in paperback. The freedom—financial, creative—emboldened her. In between Tales and Superfudge, Judy Blume became a star.

Chapter Eight Mothers