The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us

by Rachelle Bergstein

Twelve-year-old girls are still getting catcalled on the street, while books that talk frankly about sex are getting dismissed as pornography.

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.

Even in the anything-goes Big Apple, she saw that teenage girls were being taught about sex—“ ‘Say No,’ put a brake on his sexuality, don’t encourage”—in a way that stopped them from developing a healthy sense of agency and entitlement in their inevitable sexual encounters.

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.

“Women have long been barred from access to knowledge and information on sexuality, including reproduction, and have been excluded even from viewing or creating representations of their own bodies.” Women were barred from access to knowledge. Think about that. Katz did; she saw book challenges as just another way for the Right to control female bodies and minds.