“It’s really scary being a librarian right now.”
There’s still work to do. The Equal Rights Amendment—which, along with Roe v. Wade, was supposed to be the crowning achievement of Second Wave feminism—still hasn’t passed. It went through Congress and the Senate, but then died at the state level in 1979 thanks to a swell of conservative activism led by Phyllis Schlafly. As any parent of an elementary school–aged child can attest, the breadwinner/homemaker model of marriage is still “super baked in” to our legal and school systems, Suzanne Kahn said, which means that, arguably, traditional gender roles are, too. Regardless of any political lip service, universal child care still sounds like a progressive pipe dream. The tide of right-wing support that got Reagan elected is once again overtaking local and state governments.
While book challenges certainly slowed down by the end of the 1980s, they continued through the 1990s, and in some extreme cases ruined peoples’ careers in the process. That’s what happened when Wisconsin guidance counselor Michael Dishnow took on his school principal, who wanted to ban Forever in the early nineties. As Dishnow tells it, the principal at Rib Lake High School, where he worked, saw a girl reading Forever in the hallway and snatched it out of her hand. “Of course, [he] opened it initially to the perfect page with the sexual intercourse, and confiscated the book,” Dishnow remembered.
Dishnow was married to the school librarian at the time, who had described Judy Blume to him as “the best of the best.” Dishnow, a mustached former Marine and a onetime school principal himself, thought it “just wasn’t right” that the principal “didn’t go through any process” when he decided to take the student’s book away from her and subsequently ban it from the school library. They argued over it, and Dishnow recalled that “at one point I made a statement to the effect, I used a curse word, I said something about the ‘damn principal’ and this ‘damn school’ or whatever.” (The judge’s ruling on the case quoted him as having referred to the “God damned administration” at a faculty meeting.)
The well-liked guidance counselor said he was a rare liberal in a conservative town, where the school’s less-is-more approach to sex ed struck him as naive, given “the realities I knew having been in the Marine Corps overseas, various places, especially when it came to sexual issues.” Dishnow wrote a column in the local newspaper, Medford’s Star News, where he mused about things that came across his desk as a guidance counselor—mostly uncontroversial topics, like college applications and job hunts. But after the principal “unilaterally” banned Forever, he used his “Counselor’s Corner” platform to sound off on the situation.
Dishnow said that was probably the last straw. “They fired me… for being insubordinate,” he alleged. He’d had a successful twenty-five-year career working as a school administrator in Alaska before moving to Wisconsin, and felt the blow to his reputation was unjustified. He sued the Rib Lake school district, arguing that he had been let go in retaliation for exercising his First Amendment rights. “I was a gadfly, no doubt about it,” Dishnow said, “[but] they’re not going to take my rights away from me, so I fought it.”
The case went on for three long years, during which Dishnow looked for another position but claims he was kneecapped by the very public details of his dismissal, and the fact that he couldn’t get a letter of recommendation from his former employer. A jury agreed, awarding him $400,000 in damages (that number was reduced to approximately $180,000 in subsequent appeals, according to Dishnow). Dishnow eventually took the one and only employment offer he received, in another small town in Wisconsin, where he still resides, at a significantly lower salary from the already modest one he was making at Rib Lake. “But I wasn’t in it for the money to begin with,” Dishnow said. “Nobody else would touch me at that point. It was a long time ago but it was a pretty trying experience.”
He is still in contact with some former colleagues at Rib Lake High School and they told him that to this day, Forever remains on a restricted shelf in the library. Dishnow’s campaign seems to have done nothing to change the principal’s mind about the book, but he did get one high-profile shoutout for his efforts. In Places I Never Meant to Be, Blume mentions Dishnow among a number of examples of people who stood up to book bans and experienced dire personal and professional consequences. “Guidance counselor Mike Dishnow was fired for writing critically of the board of education’s decision to ban my book Forever,” she notes. “Ultimately, he won a court settlement, but by then his life had been turned upside down.”
For a while, it looked like the culture wars over children’s books had been diffused. Two blockbuster series took over bookstores in the mid-1980s: The Baby-sitters Club and Sweet Valley High. Ann M. Martin, who created the Connecticut band of business-minded babysitters, had them talk about serious issues—diabetes, divorce and remarriage, cultural differences, death—but left the puberty stuff to Blume. Sweet Valley High, about a pair of pretty blond twins, was straight fluff. Fleissner said her mother hated those books, which crowded out complex novels like hers: “From my mom’s point of view and the other seventies-era writers, it was such a step backwards, to this much more 1950s sanitized version of like, ‘Oh, who’s dating who?’ Little high school dramas.”
Parents and politicians argued over Satanism, rap lyrics, Beavis and Butt-Head, and whether or not it was cool that Britney Spears dressed like a sexy schoolgirl. But now, book challenges are back—and they’re more cutthroat than ever.
In April 2023, Blume told the BBC that the current movement to ban books is “so much worse than it was in the ’80s,” because instead of being stoked by grassroots movements, it’s driven by the politicians themselves. She cited her adopted home state of Florida as a place where “bad politicians who [are] drunk with power, who want to get out there” are using extreme talking points and legislation to do so. “It is so frightening,” Blume told British journalist Laura Kuenssberg. “I think the only answer is for us to speak out and really keep speaking out, or we’re going to lose our way.”
Arlene LaVerde, who has spent three decades working for the New York City Department of Education, said that Blume’s novels aren’t challenged nearly as often now, in part because they aren’t as ubiquitous as they were in the 1980s, and also because the bull’s-eye of conservative grievance has moved. Now the young adult books that are most often under attack are ones with LGBTQ+ themes. Of the top thirteen most banned books in 2022 according to the American Library Association’s list, seven contain LGBTQ+ subjects and/or characters, including Gender Queer, All Boys Aren’t Blue, the award-winning graphic novel Flamer by Mike Curato, and transgender writer Juno Dawson’s This Book Is Gay.
LaVerde said that thanks to the brouhaha over Critical Race Theory, books that speak openly about race—even straightforward history books—are under fire, too. “Critical Race Theory is not taught in K–12 education,” insisted LaVerde. “But it’s a term that people grab on to and use because they feel like it’s indoctrination. Indoctrinating what? Indoctrinating that in the United States, more than half of the country had slaves? And that it was legal?” She went on: “It’s a shameful part of our history, yeah. But it’s a part of our history and we should learn about it.”
In New York City, a book would never get removed from a school library if just one parent or educator complained about it, LaVerde explained. A complaint initiates a formal process, wherein the first step is requesting that the challenger read the book from cover to cover (many parents who balk at certain titles do so because “they looked over a kid’s shoulder and, excuse my language, they saw the word ‘fuck.’ Or they saw the word ‘sex,’ ” she said). If they’re still unhappy after that, they can fill out a challenge form, which then prompts the school to put together a committee of readers, consisting of a school administrator, a representative from the DOE’s library system, and the librarian. If it’s a high school, some students will be invited to sit on the committee as well. The group then meets to discuss the book, its merits, and whether it actually belongs in the building. If the committee votes in favor of retaining the title, it cannot be challenged for another two years.
With such a robust system in place, few books end up getting removed—but librarians still absorb strong feelings from parents when they disagree with the reading material that’s been selected for their children. At the time we spoke, Lauren Harrison had worked as an elementary school librarian at a public school in the West Village for seven years. She said she stocked her shelves with the popular titles of the moment—all the Dog Man books, The Baby-sitters Club updated graphic novels—as well as inclusive picture books for early readers, like My Own Way: Celebrating Gender Freedom for Kids; Our Skin: A First Conversation About Race; and Antiracist Baby. Given the demographics of the families who attend her school, Harrison said she was surprised when she received feedback from a mom that her book selections were “too gay.” She recalled getting an angry email after reading the picture book Our Subway Baby—based on author Peter Mercurio’s real-life experience of finding an abandoned baby on the New York City subway and ultimately adopting him with his husband—aloud to the students. Harrison dismissed the email as “ridiculous,” with her principal’s blessing. “I loved that book, the kids loved it, they fought over who got to borrow it,” she said. “It’s offensive to me that that book’s offensive to you.”
Harrison’s mother, Carol Waxman, is also a librarian and has worked in the Connecticut public library system for almost forty years. She had a harrowing experience after she helped plan West Hartford’s first drag queen story time in the summer of 2022.
Waxman was enthusiastic about hosting the event as part of a larger local Pride celebration, especially given the town’s “very active Pride community.” But as soon as the story time was scheduled, the blowback started. “Well, it ended up being so controversial and difficult. Letters, phone calls, people came in to see me, furious,” Waxman remembered. She was shaken up by it, “because some of the letters to me were threatening. ‘This is on you, your career is at stake, you’re gonna throw everything away because of this,’ ” people were telling her. The town’s mayor and manager also received rage-filled correspondences, all from older citizens who stressed that they’d never, ever let their grandchildren attend an event hosted by drag queens. Reluctantly, officials made the decision to move the reading outside, in light of the threats of violence and vandalism against the library. And when it became clear that the event might need a rain plan, a nearby Barnes & Noble stepped up and offered to absorb it. “I went over to see it and it was packed,” Waxman said.
She noted—as Blume has, too—that this moment’s increased appetite for censorship isn’t coming exclusively from the Right. Blume experienced this firsthand in April 2023 after expressing solidarity with J.K. Rowling, who has borne the brunt of major social media pile-ons due to her outspoken anti-trans views. Public response was so negative that Judy issued an aggrieved statement on X (then Twitter) clarifying that “I wholly support the trans community. My point, which was taken out of context, is that I can empathize with a writer—or person—who has been harassed online.”
Then there were the sanitized versions of Roald Dahl’s books that struck up a frenzy in the winter of 2023. That February, UK conservative broadsheet the Telegraph reported that “Augustus Gloop is no longer fat, Mrs. Twit is no longer fearfully ugly, and the Oompa Loompas have gone gender-neutral in new editions of Roald Dahl’s beloved stories.” Dahl’s publisher, with the blessing of the Dahl estate, had scrubbed potentially offensive descriptions and passages from his famous books, presumably to appease today’s more sensitive readers, with Gloop going from “enormously fat” to just “enormous,” and the Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach becoming Cloud-People, for instance. But the response was mixed at best; PEN America criticized the move, and oft-censored author Salman Rushdie tweeted that Puffin Books and Dahl’s descendants “should be ashamed.” Puffin later announced that it would continue to publish “classic” versions of Dahl’s novels, giving contemporary readers a choice between the two.
Waxman said that she keeps her collection up to date, which at times means retiring titles that no longer fit in with cultural norms. She said any children’s books that depict guns—which used to be unremarkable—are now “taboo, completely taboo” in the age of mass shootings. Same goes for illustrations that show adults smoking cigarettes. Waxman also mentioned Lois Lenski, an author and illustrator who published award-winning children’s books in the 1930s and 1940s. Waxman would “never” recommend them for young readers today, she said, because of their outmoded depictions of gender roles within families. “The mother is always home, never works, always wearing a dress, always home cleaning the house,” Waxman said. “I’m very aware of those books now, not that anybody is going to tell me to ban them, but they’re just not in good taste.” (People have compared this process, called “weeding” in the library biz, to banning books but it’s a false equivalency. Weeding is about unshelving titles that have been rendered irrelevant by the culture. Banning is about cutting off access to books that are contributing to current cultural conversations in the hopes that these conversations will stop.)
“It’s really scary being a librarian right now,” LaVerde confessed, given high levels of polarization and the aggression with which citizens express and defend their personal views. “It’s really scary being an educator,” she went on, “which is weird, because it’s something I would never in my entire career of thirty-plus years think I would say.” LaVerde conceded that “honestly, in New York, we’re luckier. But I think about my colleagues in Florida, in Texas, who are being threatened, not only to lose their certification, their license, their pensions, their careers, but they’re being threatened with bodily harm.” Politics, religion, and the concurrent racial justice and transgender rights movements have all crashed together in a shockingly painful collision over… books, of all things. But LaVerde thinks stories for kids are so contentious not only because they tend our children’s nascent moral fibers but also because they uproot our deepest fears as parents—that in being exposed to increasingly mature topics, our kids will become independent and leave us to lead their own lives.
“Parents don’t want to admit that their children are growing up,” she said. “It hurts.”
Nevertheless, she’s strongly opposed to book bans and believes that reading about our differences—whether they’re cultural, racial, or involving sexual orientation—actually builds empathy by reminding us that we all share the same human experiences. “Your struggles are a little bit different [than a character’s] but you know what? The kid in rural Mississippi is fighting with his mom to go to a sleepover, and me in New York City, I’m fighting with my mom, she’s not letting me go to a sleepover, either,” LaVerde said, channeling a young reader’s point of view.
School librarian Julia Loving said that she makes a priority of reminding her students that access to a wide range of books is a privilege, even in the age of social media, where kids often tell her that reading takes too long and is “boring.”
Loving recently responded to this sentiment by sharing her own history with them—about her parents, who migrated to New York City from the Jim Crow South because they wanted their children to have better opportunities than they had. About her great-great-grandparents, who Loving found out could read and write when she dug into her genealogical roots. That surprised her. She told her upper schoolers that literacy was rare among Black people in Virginia in the late nineteenth century. She asked the students if they had any idea why that might be.
“They said, ‘Well, they couldn’t read or write because maybe many of them had been enslaved, right? Because that was something that was illegal to do, educate enslaved people,’ ” Loving recalled someone saying. “And so I asked them, ‘Out of all things in the world, why would someone want another human being not to know how to actually read and write?’ And one of the kids said, ‘Well, you keep them from power, you strip them of their power.’ ”
Knowledge is power, reading is power, and for the first time since the 1980s, today’s kids are caught up in a multidirectional adult power-play over the kinds of books they should be allowed to slip into their backpacks and quietly enjoy in their bedrooms. Loving said her personal share made a visible impact. “I always say, the reason [to have] inclusivity and diversity in our collections, and definitely having our kids have access to books, is because of the power that can be gained from them,” Loving explained. “They can take you places that you’ve never been, can teach you how to do this or that… in those scenarios, why would you not want to read? Because you have to realize that there’s something to this reading thing.”