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
“One thing I’m sure of is I don’t want to spend my life cleaning some house like Ma.”
Judy’s illnesses didn’t start with her marriage. She had always been a delicate kid. In seventh grade, she had a massive outbreak of eczema, worsened by an allergy to the ointment a doctor prescribed to soothe it. “This ‘flare-up,’ as the doctors called it, caused a disfiguring rash that covered my whole body,” Blume wrote in Letters to Judy. “My face swelled and my eyes shut… I felt very sorry for myself.”
She got sick with mono her first semester in college and had to come home from Boston University to recuperate in New Jersey. She spent a month weak and glassy-eyed in bed, staring at the walls, and by the time she felt better, she was so embarrassed that she decided to transfer to NYU. “I never want to see Boston again,” she informed Rudolph and Essie. She needed a fresh start, somewhere she wouldn’t be the sickly girl who vanished after orientation.
Her body had been uncooperative throughout much of her teens and twenties. Although there hadn’t been long-lasting repercussions of her various ailments, she could easily imagine what that might feel like for a junior high student.
Deenie is the story of a thirteen-year-old aspiring model who gets diagnosed with scoliosis and has to wear a bulky back brace. But scratch the surface and you’ll see that Blume’s 1973 novel is also a story about mothers and daughters.
Ellie Newman’s journey is about slow but steady self-actualization. Thelma Fenner’s story is a cautionary tale. In movement terms, Thelma, Deenie’s mom, is melting in the crucible of the feminine mystique, but she doesn’t know it. She’s bored, unfulfilled, childlike. And all it takes is one family crisis, centered on the battleground of her adolescent daughter Deenie’s changing body, to blow the lid off and expose her.
The book opens with tension between Thelma and Deenie. The pair, who live in Elizabeth, New Jersey, with Deenie’s father, Frank, and older sister, Helen, are headed into Manhattan to see a modeling agent. Deenie is beautiful, and Thelma wants her to capitalize on it. “The thing that really scares me is I’m not sure I want to be a model,” Deenie admits to the reader, while curled up on a bus on the New Jersey Turnpike. She’d rather join the school cheerleading squad than get a job, even a potentially glamorous one that will help her “make a lot of money and maybe get discovered for the movies, too,” according to her mother.
Yet Deenie is painfully aware of her role in the family. “Deenie’s the beauty, Helen’s the brain,” Thelma tells anyone who’s willing to listen, including their bus driver. By categorizing her daughters this way, Thelma invests in them differently. With Helen, she’s rigorous about her homework, making sure nothing distracts her from her academic promise. Meanwhile, Deenie’s grades are tossed off as irrelevant. “Nobody expects much from my schoolwork so I get by with hardly ever cracking a book as long as I don’t bring home any D’s or F’s,” Deenie says.
Instead, Thelma rides Deenie about more superficial things. Deenie, for instance, is not allowed to wear sneakers, because “they make your feet spread so your regular shoes don’t fit anymore.” Deenie’s also aware that her eating habits are policed in a way that her sister’s are not. “She’s really fussy about what I eat,” she says of Thelma. “She leaves Helen alone but watches me like a hawk. She thinks if she’s in charge of my diet I’ll never get pimples or oily hair. I hope she’s right.”
At the start of the book, Deenie is well aware of the discrepancies between how she and her sister are treated, but it’s clear she doesn’t quite know what to do about it. She isn’t sure if she wants to be a model—but like any self-conscious adolescent girl with a middle school crush and an overbearing mom, she doesn’t want acne and greasy hair, either. Her looks, she tells us before her highly anticipated cheerleading tryout, don’t occupy her thoughts all that often, although she’s conscious of being pretty and the advantages that come with it. “Most times I don’t even think about the way I look but on special occasions, like today, being good-looking really comes in handy,” she says.
Yet the audition doesn’t go the way Deenie had hoped. She doesn’t make the squad, and the next day, her gym teacher asks her to swing by so she can take a closer look at Deenie’s posture. Soon, she’s off to see a specialist about her uneven hips and rounded shoulders. The would-be model gets diagnosed with idiopathic scoliosis, a condition that arises most often in pre-teen girls, where their spines start to grow in a curved shape. The doctor says she’ll need to have an operation or get fitted for a cumbersome back brace. With that, Deenie leaves the fold of her mother’s expectations and enters the world of disability.
Blume has said that she got the idea for Deenie after a real-life encounter in 1970. One night, she met a woman at a party whose fourteen-year-old daughter was recently diagnosed with scoliosis, and she had to wear a back brace to correct it. “This woman was falling apart,” Blume says in Presenting Judy Blume. Judy then met the daughter and was impressed by her poise and resilience, casting a completely different light than her stressed-out mom. “She was very open about her problem and shared some of her feelings and experiences with me,” Blume later wrote about her.
She researched scoliosis and visited a hospital where she observed kids getting fitted for their Milwaukee braces: the restrictive, full-torso support garment that Deenie has to wear. Judy recalled her struggle with eczema and decided to write that into her new book, too. She created a character named Barbara Curtis, the new girl in Deenie’s class who becomes a mirror for Deenie’s eventual self-acceptance. Barbara, like the real-life Judy, has a rash all over her body, which at first Deenie finds “disgusting.” Secretly, Deenie nicknames her the Creeping Crud, and prays she won’t get partnered with her in gym class.
But after Deenie starts wearing the brace to school, she looks at Barbara Curtis differently. Barbara is kind to her during her awkward adjustment period with the medical device, helping Deenie tie her shoes when she can’t figure out how to bend down and reach them. “I felt like the world’s biggest jerk,” Deenie admits to the reader at that moment. Later, she introduces Barbara to her friends. “She’s a nice kid,” Deenie says. “I think I must have been really weird to not like her just because of her creeping crud.”
For Deenie, opening her mind to the experiences of disabled people within her community allows her to make peace with her new reality, which is that she’ll have to wear the Milwaukee brace for four long years. No matter how she tries to camouflage it, the device—which she needs to keep on almost twenty-four hours a day in order to reroute the growth of her spine—pokes up past the base of her neck and shows through her clothes. Her appearance, which has defined her at home for much of her life, is being compromised. But Deenie is surprisingly spunky. After years of avoiding eye contact with “Old Lady Murray,” the hunchbacked woman who sells magazines on the street corner, Deenie tries talking to her. Old Lady Murray isn’t terribly interested in conversation and it doesn’t go well. But Deenie is facing up to the fact that she and the “crazy” town peddler now have something in common: kyphosis, or a rounded upper back.
Deenie’s diagnosis also encourages her to reconsider Gena Courtney, a neighbor and schoolmate who was hit by a delivery truck when she was in first grade. The accident cost Gena her eyesight in one eye and she has to wear braces on both legs. Early in the novel, Deenie admits that she’s never known how to treat Gena since then. “I always feel funny when I pass her house—like I should stop and say hello—but then I think I better not, because I wouldn’t know how to act or anything,” she says. By the end of book, Deenie sees her through fresh eyes, too. “I wonder if she thinks of herself as a handicapped person or just a regular girl, like me,” Deenie thinks.
After getting used to her back brace, Deenie’s ability to still see herself as a regular girl has to do with her baseline temperament—her admirable pluck—and the kindness of her friends at school, who, after getting their questions out of the way, treat her exactly the same. Even Buddy Brader, the boy she’s been flirting with, is still interested in Deenie. Just before their second kiss, at a party in her friend’s basement, Buddy asks if she can remove the brace. Deenie, despite having packed a change of clothes for just that reason, holds her ground in the moment. “I have to wear it all the time,” she tells him.
“Oh well,” Buddy says, all but unaffected.
These flashes of acceptance buoy Deenie, who begins to trust that scoliosis won’t ruin her life. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Thelma.
Thelma is devastated by Deenie’s diagnosis. If part of a parent’s job is modeling strength for one’s children, she fails at this almost immediately. To be fair, neither Deenie’s mother nor her father reacts well to the news that she has scoliosis that requires aggressive intervention. “You’re not telling us Deenie’s going to be deformed, are you?” Frank asks the doctor who identifies Deenie’s condition. Meanwhile, Thelma panics. “Ma started whispering, ‘Oh my God,’ over and over again,” Deenie says.
