God to Margaret: Always with wings!

In updated editions of Judy Blume's classic, Margaret's famous pink belt is replaced with self-adhesive pads. But something has been lost.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Menstruation, Books, Adolescence, Books Features, Rebecca Traister

March 2, 2006 | 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.)

Blume discussed the changes candidly in a terrific interview in the Boston Phoenix in 1998, saying, "Some people get really upset about this, but it has nothing to do with the story ... No one uses belts anymore. Half the mothers haven't used them. [Contemporary readers] have to go to their grandmothers." She also told the Phoenix, "I'd been thinking about it for a long time ... Some people said, 'Oh no, it's a classic. You can't mess around with a classic.' And I said, 'Look, we're not messing around with the character... We're just messing around with the equipment."

And while the changes were also mentioned, in passing, in a 2004 New York Times story about Blume's National Book Foundation medal for distinguished contribution to American letters, few people seem to have gotten their panties in a twist -- so to speak -- about it until now. A few weeks ago, blogger Book of the Day reread "Are You There God?" as an adult and proclaimed it sophisticated and multilayered, and mentioned the updated equipment, calling it "a change that makes sense." But Blume's editorial change came as news to many, and word began to spread like Web wildfire. Apparently, a generation of bloggers -- who undoubtedly gorged themselves on Fudge and Sheila and Tony and Deenie and Margaret as kids -- considered the change a big deal.

And I'm with them. It's a very big deal.

My gut reaction, like Book of the Day's, was to cheer a little, remembering the perplexity I felt when reading about the belt. By the time I was dealing with this stuff, the mid-'80s, it was all Always with wings, all the time, at least until we could make the transition (as soon as humanly possible, please, God) to tampons. Tampons were -- and are -- acknowledged in "Are You There God?" only once: when Margaret's mean girlfriend Nancy asks the feminine product representative who's come to show the sixth-grade girls a filmstrip about "menstroo-ation," "What about Tampax?" "We don't advise internal protection until you are considerably older," is the prim reply. I think it took most of my friends about two periods' worth of walking around with pads in their underwear to decide they were "considerably older." But regardless -- Margaret's practice sessions, the distinction between the cool "Teenage Softies" brand of pad and her mother's "Private Lady" stuff, the process of picking out the separately packaged belt in the drugstore -- these details just didn't resonate specifically with me.

And that was only 15 years after publication! Who could have predicted that the book would wind up in its umpteenth printing, redecorated with modern-looking girls photographed in Baby-sitter's Club-style poses on the cover? When I went to find a new edition with the changes in place, I discovered a whole shelf's worth of almost every one of the Blume books I remembered, while a quick look for some of my other old favorites -- Lois Lowry, Zilpha Keatley Snyder and even Madeleine L'Engle -- turned up a much thinner spread of options. Who could have known for sure that 36 years after its publication (Margaret would turn 48 this month, if anyone's counting) and after having been banned from countless school libraries, "Are You There God" would still be in print, leaving all its first-time readers to wonder anew at the mysterious contraptions from which they are now separated by at least two generations.

Next page: Why it was good to know about the belt, even if it's obsolete