She’s also taken it upon herself to get her parents back together—and to stop Bill from going to Reno, where, due to New Jersey’s strict divorce laws, he plans to live for six weeks to officially dissolve the marriage. When her painstakingly designed Viking diorama fails to successfully reunite them, Karen finally gives in to a full-blown tantrum. “I stamped on it with both feet until there was nothing left but a broken shoebox and a lot of blue sparkle all over my rug,” she says.
For Judy, fine-tuning Karen’s emotional range proved to be one of the trickiest parts of the editorial process. The eleven-year-old needed to be honest enough that young readers could see themselves in her, but not so bitter that she was off-putting. Early drafts of It’s Not the End of the World show Blume striving to find that balance—with Dick Jackson’s input, of course. Many of his notes had to do with making sure Karen had enough depth that she didn’t come off as a whiner.
He wanted, for instance, to build in plenty of positive relationships on the page so that her rage toward her parents didn’t seem like her default. Sure enough, in the published book, Karen has a supportive friendship with her lifelong neighbor Debbie Bartell and is intrigued when a new girl comes into her life—a wry, New York Times–obsessed child of divorce named Val, who shocks Karen by shaving her legs in front of her. Karen also looks up to her paternal grandfather, who she calls Garfa. Garfa lives in Las Vegas, and when he visits New Jersey in the wake of the separation, the pair conspire to stop the divorce in its tracks. She writes him private letters to update him on her progress, although her tone becomes increasingly resigned. “I have discovered something important about my mother and father,” she says. “When they are apart they’re not so bad, but together they are impossible!”
Judy also played around with the scope of the book, originally planning to track the Newmans through Bill’s dating life and quick remarriage. Up through the third—and close to final—draft, he walked down the aisle with a woman named Sandy, who had a young daughter, Beth. Karen wasn’t a fan of either of them. And eventually, Jackson suggested that Bill’s second marriage plot was contributing to the problem of Karen’s likability. Was it appealing, he wondered, to watch her begrudgingly accept her new stepfamily and continue to resent her father?
Judy agreed and lopped off the entire sequence. The finished novel ends with Karen making peace with the circumstances of the divorce and having a B+ day.
Blume worked to soften Karen’s hard edges throughout the revisions but not at the expense of the character’s righteous, and rightful, indignation. Karen is angry. At moments, she’s mean and sarcastic. She doesn’t bottle up her feelings like a nice girl. After she first finds out about the breakup, she gives Debbie a hard time just because she can. “I was making Debbie feel bad and I was glad,” she says. “Sometimes I am a mean and rotten person.” Later, in a fight with her mother, Karen takes a cutting snipe at her: “All you care about is yourself! You never think about me!”
Kids are allowed to blow off steam in Judy Blume’s books, even if the fallout is ugly. And so Karen yells. Margaret taunts. Tony Miglione resents his parents and spies on his next-door neighbor while she changes. And it’s not just the children in Blume’s stories who act out—the moms and dads have their moments of gross humanity, too.
Chapter Six The Fourth Dimension
“In my heart, I was out there marching.”
Feminism seeped into the pages of Judy’s new novel. In 1971, when she was writing It’s Not the End of the World, the colossal momentum of the Second Wave was already reaching its peak. The year before, a college professor in her mid-thirties named Kate Millett had published her galvanizing treatise Sexual Politics, which argued that the modern world was organized around “a theory of patriarchy,” where “sex is a status category with political implications” and women were a subjugated class, like Black people in America or Jews in Nazi Germany.
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.
