When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children’s Classic and the Difference It Made

Beyond the Fun and Song

62 Beyond the Fun and Song Francine Klagsbrun Click! It was the sound of our generation. Women had suddenly discovered themselves and the restrictions with which they had lived all their lives without recognizing them. “Why can’t you get the children’s stuff put away?,” a husband barks at his wife. Click! “You have two hands,” she replies, startled at her words yet pleased to have said them. A woman writer is invited to have lunch in her company’s executive dining room. Her husband rocks with laughter. “Ho ho, my little wife in an executive dining room,” he says. Click! Jane O’Reilly introduced the clicks in her article, “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth,” which appeared in the preview issue of Ms. magazine in 1972. After that, click! became women’s shorthand for eyes opening and minds awakening as we reassessed the putdowns (“You think like a man”), diminutives (the “little woman”), and demands (“Honey, what’s for dinner?”) women and men had simply accepted as the natural order of the universe. Coming one after another and more rapidly with time, the clicks turned into a drumbeat of change that revolutionized society. For most of us, that change related to our own lives and to the intensity with which we reexamined them.We assumed—if we thought about it at all—that once we made things right, they would be right for our children and grandchildren thereafter.We were, after all, repairing wrongs, revamping the social order, and reconstructing history. Then came Free to Be . . . You and Me, and with it a different kind of click. Suddenly, with music and humor, joy and fun, kids took center stage. And suddenly we realized that that’s exactly where they needed to be if we were truly to undo the old tired ways of seeing.The women’s movement had begun with our experiences as adults, and we would continue to fight inequality and injustices toward women. But by concentrating on kids now, we could shift the focus away, at least for a while, from the angers and hurts of the past onto our hopes and expectations for the future. Beyond the Fun and Song 63 My daughter was three years old when I came to Free to Be as its editor, helping Marlo Thomas and the book’s creative team pull the project together. It was the second publishing assignment I undertook for Ms. The first called for editing an anthology of articles that had appeared in the earliest issues of the magazine. We named that book, published in 1973, The First Ms. Reader in optimistic anticipation that there would be others. (They never materialized.) About the same time, I began to immerse myself in the budding Jewish feminist movement , which would eventually lead me to deep involvement in the struggle to have women ordained as rabbis in the Conservative movement , the middle ground between Reform Judaism on the left and Orthodox Judaism on the right. It seemed the perfect moment to be the mother of a daughter.Through her, I could look ahead to sweeping changes in the secular and religious worlds I inhabited. She was too young at the time to understand all the concepts in Free to Be. Much later, I would watch her and her friends perform skits from the book in Hebrew at her Jewish summer camp. And much, much later I would hear her children, my grandchildren, sing its songs at the top of their lungs as my husband and I drove with them to family vacations. But when I began working on the book, she was still too young to appreciate its reach. Nevertheless, I read her the stories and poems our editorial group commissioned, showed her the pictures art director Sam Antupit laid out, and sang the lyrics that graced the record and the printed volume. As I worked on the project and brought home the delicacies of my labor, I became increasingly aware of the profound meaning behind the lighthearted tales and catchy music that entertained my little daughter. It was as though the serious and provocative essays I had gathered for The First Ms. Reader had danced off the pages of that book, rearranged themselves in color and song, and come back to teach children painlessly the achingly difficult lessons many of their mothers had struggled to learn. This children’s book, I decided, was downright subversive, in the best sense of the word. It subverted outdated conventions...