Louise Fitzhugh’s The Long Secret

Too Long a Secret

Harriet the Spy’s sharp observations, tomato sandwiches, and composition notebooks have delighted several generations of girls. The youngest may know the 1964 novel mainly from the 1996 film or the animated Apple TV series, but few know Louise Fitzhugh’s sequel, The Long Secret, which I’m going to praise as a marvel, if not a masterpiece. I’ve searched for it electronically in the libraries of several of New York’s best girls’ schools, and not found it. But every girl should read it—and any boy interested in the lives of girls.

Alas, when it was published in 1965, The Long Secret went unrecognized as the gem it is. An unsigned Kirkus reviewer dismissed the novel as “not as good, or perhaps cohesive, a story as the first one,” and Harriet as “that spankingly (spankably?) fresh heroine,” adding, “some thought she wasn't very "nice,” and some even thought her "sick." A girl with strong opinions who preferred wearing jeans, a girl who said she’d be “damned” if she went to dancing school, she was “sick”—or at least setting “a bad example” said many parents, teachers and librarians. She wasn’t what the age considered “feminine” and adults—but not children—felt frightened.

In November, 1965, the feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun declared The Long Secret “not as good as Harriet the Spy because second books never are,” an unprovable generalization to which I find many exceptions—books at least as good as, if not better, than the originals: Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife, Suzanne Collins’ Catching Fire, Rick Riordan’s The Sea of Monsters—and how could I be forgetting the Harry Potters? Each better than the preceding one, though I admit to a favorite, namely The Goblet of Fire, fourth in the series of seven.  As a child, I guzzled the Oz books, all fourteen by L. Frank Baum (Tik Tok of Oz was one I liked even more than the original).

Professor Heilbrun praises The Long Secret for being “like its predecessor . . . capable of surprising even an adult reader.” But curiously, this eminent feminist congratulates Fitzhugh for knowing “that girls of 12 aren’t exactly women, but have most of the symptoms of womanhood, including that galloping irrationality which so markedly characterizes the sex.”

Is this a joke? Surely not an objection to Fitzhugh’s portrayals of Janie, the aspiring scientist, Harriet, the aspiring writer, Beth Ellen, the aspiring artist? In any case, Heilbrun cites no examples.

None of these girls demonstrates anything I’d call “galloping irrationality.” Carolyn Heilbrun was the first woman to achieve tenure in the Columbia University English department and to hold an endowed chair; she was the author of fourteen academic studies of women as well as the Kate Fansler detective series about a literature professor who solves mysteries. I find the dismissal of Harriet, Janie and Beth Ellen by Columbia University’s most prominent feminist strange.

A more ambitious book than Harriet the Spy, The Long Secret explores, subtly but dynamically, ideas about women that were just beginning to be accepted. It is the first book to include an open discussion about menstruation at a time when it wasn’t unusual for girls to wonder, the first time they saw blood in their underpants, whether they had cancer. Or to think of menstruation as a ticket to marriage and family.  “Molly Grows Up,” a 1953 introduction to menstruation, begins and ends with thirteen-year-old Molly talking about—and looking at—wedding dresses.  The Disney “Story of Menstruation” was still standard fare; you can watch it here. Wikipedia’s spoiler alert: “as Disney historian Jim Korkis has suggested, menstruation is characterized  as "a hygienic crisis rather than a maturational event".^[8] The menstrual flow was depicted as snow white instead of blood red.”^[6]

The Long Secret disrupts these notions of a girl’s fate: Harriet, Beth Ellen and Janie are interested in what’s happening with their lives and their bodies; they remain primarily concerned with their ambitions, though they are far from ignoring romance. Beth Ellen has a crush on a piano player and Harriet is interested in knowing what makes a person fall in love. Louise Fitzhugh was writing at a time when the culture beckoned for direct exploration of girls’ emotions. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique appeared in 1963, and the Boston Women’s Health Collective, which first produced Our Bodies, Our Selves in 1968, had spent years investigating how women felt about sexual health and contraception, sexual orientation, abortion, pregnancy, childbirth, domestic violence and menopause.

In The Long Secret, Beth Ellen, Harriet’s shy classmate who lives with her grandmother, finds blood on her sheets and hides in the summerhouse, crying.

            “I’m menstruating,” she tells Harriet, who asks how come Beth Ellen is doing that and she isn’t. The question many a girl asks—and we have a partial answer: Harriet is a few months younger.

The plot thickens when Janie comes to visit, and says she, too, has her period. Beth Ellen asks whether those “little rocks” come down and “make you bleed and hurt you.”

“Wow!” says Harriet. “Rocks!” If they think she’s gonna do that, she comments, they’re crazy. Janie takes in Beth Ellen’s terrified look and banishes the rocks story, noting the “very Victorian” quality of Beth Ellen’s grandmother’s generation. With panache, Janie explains the functions of the uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, and menstrual cycle. She begins with the basics: do Beth Ellen and Harriet know that a pregnant woman has a baby in her uterus? Yes, they do, they say impatiently.

“Well, what do you think it lives on while it’s growing?” asks Janie. Harriet and Beth Ellen, having never considered the question, stare back wordlessly.

“The lining, dopes!” says Janie.

I learned more from Janie than I did from my querulous sixth-grade science teacher, who sweated and huffed and clearly didn’t enjoy the topic.

Here is a generation of girls talking among themselves, making their own discoveries, uninfluenced by social media. For that reason alone, girls should read the book today.

Born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, Fitzhugh, a lesbian, knew the costs of being an outsider.

She experienced and supported the expanding civil rights movement, feeling horrified by the obvious racism of her classmates. The Washington Post’s Carlos Lozada, reviewing Leslie Brody’s 2020 biography of Louise Fitzhugh, Sometimes You Have to Lie, remarks, “the young Fitzhugh wanted nothing more than to break free of family and privilege and the Jim Crow South.” Although neither Fitzhugh nor her editors nor her publisher could risk identifying her as anything other than “not married” (even in her New York Times 1974 obituary!) she at least had a community of friends who accepted her. She had the comfort—with events like the 1969 Stonewall riots and the publication of Jill Johnston’s 1973 Lesbian Nation—of knowing she might not always have to hide her sexual identity.

Reviewers failed to recognize Fitzhugh’s treatment of the civil rights movement in The Long Secret. Harriet, Beth Ellen, Janie, and their Southern friend, Jessie-Mae, pay a visit to “the preacher,” described as an old black man who, as it develops, has lost his congregation.  He is helping Jessie-Mae, who is very religious, with bible studies. “I was a bad preacher,” he declares, against Jessie-Mae’s protests, because “a good preacher should be able to help.” To her horror, he adds, “Religion is a tool, Jessie, just like a tractor or a shovel or a pitchfork. It is a tool to get through life with. And if it works, it’s a good tool. And if it don’t work, it is a bad tool. Now, for my people there it don’t work.” These remarks push Jessie-Mae almost to despair. He remonstrates, reminding her that she’s from his part of the country, that she knows what the life of a sharecropper is like. Harriet interrupts, frantically asking what it’s like and he laughs, saying, “I’ll put it to you this way, little curious Yankee. Just about the only way they can get through this world is to think there’s another one coming.”

Remember, this conversation is taking place in the context of major events in the civil rights movement. In June, 1963, Governor George Wallace stood in a doorway at the University of Alabama, blocking the entry of black students trying to register, until President Kennedy sent in the National Guard. In August of the same year, 250,000 people took part in the March on Washington and listened to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. And in July, 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. In August of the following year, he signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Anne Moody’s autobiography, detailing her life as a sharecropper’s daughter and her involvement in the civil rights movement, appeared in 1968. The preacher’s words to Harriet, Beth Ellen, Janie and Jessie-Mae, could not be more prescient.

Fitzhugh is attempting to enlarge the limited views of Harriet, Beth Ellen and Janie, who until this point in their lives have had little exposure to poverty. Harriet knows her friend Sport has less money, that Sport keeps and deposits his father’s checks, since if he doesn’t, “we don’t eat,” Sport says. But she’s never seen or imagined anything like the racialized poverty of the deep South, or had the slightest notion of the Great Migration.

Not that they have no troubles. Beth Ellen’s gorgeous jet set mother breezes in with her latest husband, micro-manages her clothing, hairstyle, even her name, which the mother considers “tacky.” Finally Beth Ellen, known as “mouse” for her shy ways, boldly asks her mother what profession she should be. For the mother, the question is even tackier—she wants to take Beth Ellen away and cure her of such bourgeois notions as career with finishing schools and trips to Elizabeth Arden. Which Beth Ellen violently protests. We have the satisfaction of seeing her grandmother, who has always preached the importance of being “a lady,” say you shouldn’t be a lady if it means losing your whole self. She’s delighted by Beth Ellen’s answer to the question of whether she’d like to go with her mother: “I wouldn’t go to the corner with Zeeny!” says Beth Ellen.

On several occasions, Harriet’s mom steps in to rescue Beth Ellen from her inattentive mother and stepfather, Harriet witnessing a verbal jousting match (“Of course, I was much younger,” Harriet’s mom says to Beth Ellen’s mom) that she understands not at all. But we’re confident Harriet will get it in a few years. Janie, meanwhile, also suffers from a mother who takes no interest in her thoughts of ambitions. But in these books all three girls triumph over those who would limit them; they remain strong characters who can cope—and who appear to be well on their way to lives satisfying their talents. This is indeed a feminist book about social justice. In the end, we see Beth Ellen and Harriet relaxing with popcorn in front of a movie, their immediate problems resolved.