Margaret Approaches Menopause

In my pre-law-professor life I often worked odd jobs to make extra money. For a while I was part of a team that traveled to a series of churches and community centers to interview people about health and beauty aids on behalf of the large corporation that manufactured and marketed them. I did consumer research on the way people reacted to toothbrushes, deodorant, mouthwashes, lipstick, pain relievers, and for one ponderously long interval of time, sanitary napkins. My job was to talk women into wearing a particular brand of sanitary napkin, and then agree to return the following day to answer an invasive series of questions about how wearing it made them feel, and yes, it was just as squicky as it sounds, but the women did get paid for their trouble. At first we offered twenty dollars, but got few takers. Even when the “honorarium” got boosted to $50, many women were squeamish about the idea, and it took a great deal of persuasion to get them to agree to participate, and I had a quota to meet, so I’ll always love the women who, after the honorarium was mentioned, said things like: “For fifty dollars I’ll wear it stuck to my head for you! Even if it has wings!”

So it was with some amusement that I read this article by Rebecca Traister at Salon.com, in which she observed:

If you’re an American woman between the ages of 20 and 40, the following passage will likely be familiar to you:

“I locked the bathroom door and attached a Teenage Softie to the little hooks on my pink belt. Then I got dressed and looked at myself in the mirror. Would anyone know my secret? Would it show? Would Moose, for instance, know if I went back outside to talk to him? Would my father know it right away when he came home for dinner? I had to call Nancy and Gretchen and Janie right away. Poor Janie! She’d be the last of the PTS’s to get it. And I’d been so sure it would be me! How about that! Now I am growing for sure. Now I am almost a woman!

“Are you still there God? It’s me, Margaret. I know you’re there God. I know you wouldn’t have missed this for anything! Thank you God. Thanks an awful lot…”

Those final two paragraphs of “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” Judy Blume’s paean to pubescent faith, sweaty-palmed sexuality, and menarche in the Jersey suburbs of the late 1960s, are the climactic answer to Margaret Simon’s prayers that she will get her period. (An obsession she shares with her girlfriends, the Pre-Teen Sensations.)

But if you have a daughter who has a new edition of the book, this is how the same passage will begin:

“I locked the bathroom door and peeled the paper off the bottom of the pad. I pressed the sticky strip against my underpants. Then I got dressed and looked at myself in the mirror…”

Yes, it’s true: Margaret’s pink sanitary belt is history. In the late 1990s, Blume updated the portions of her book that describe 11-going-on-12-year-old Margaret’s purchase of (and practice with) a box of the kind of absorbent pads that used to be held in place by a belt worn under the clothes.

In fact, the era of the belt ended just a few years after the 1970 publication of “Are You There God?” leaving most of the book’s readers pretty mystified about what the hell all that hooking and unhooking was all about. By the early ’80s, the pre-tampon period years were all about pads that stuck right into your underwear, no belts required. (Thanks, God.)

Traister laments the change, arguing in favor of “the power of a story to chronicle an experience unavailable to many readers” and writing: “…while it may seem minor — so very minor, such a few small sentences in a 150-page book that’s just as much about God and making your boobs grow as it is about periods — I’m actually glad for the sense it gave me that as recently as five years before I was born, girls had very different hassles during puberty. I’m glad I know a bit about what they were. I’m glad that other young women know about some of the technology they can be grateful for (wings!) even if they, like me and many others, don’t share Margaret’s undiluted enthusiasm for the onset of monthly bleeding.”

At Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte concurs in a post entited “Not the belt, dear lord.” Me, I’m kind of agnostic about all this. Traister mildly peeved me off by situating the book’s relevance to American women “between the ages of 20 and 40.” I am 42 and was only seven years old when the book was first published in 1970. I was around nine when I read it for the first time, and had the humiliating experience of having my fourth grade teacher confiscate it from me as age inappropriate contraband. It was after reading “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” that I learned why some of the slightly older girls wore long rows of safety pins on their clothing. There was a short interval between belts and the deployment of napkins with adhesive strips in which sanitary pads came packaged with two safety pins, so that you could securely pin them to your underwear, and thereby forgo the belt. Wearing rows of pins on your jeans was a way of signaling to the teen and pre-teen cognoscenti that you had your period. By the time my day came, adhesive pads were in wide use, and there was no way I was going to walk around with an adhesive strip fastened to my clothing, so I had to affirmatively inform my friends about my puberty-reaching news, which seemed decidedly less cool than the safety pin rows. Oh well.

Below is what one edition of what the tome looks like. Using Google’s image search function I found several different versions, but am pretty sure the copy I read had a purple cover and a blond Margaret, who would be 48 years old now.

–Ann Bartow