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

Free to Be . . . a Child

66 Free to Be . . . a Child Gloria Steinem My first glimmer of understanding that a magical classic had been born came on a sunny day in Minneapolis. I was speaking in a downtown park as part of a brown-bag lunchtime lecture series. Most people were from nearby offices, but some women came from home with young children. Since I had a copy of Free to Be . . . You and Me with me—it had been published about six months earlier—I decided to give the rows of upturned young faces a treat by reading a story or two. After a few paragraphs, I looked up and saw children mouthing the words along with me. I read a poem—and the same thing happened. They already knew it by heart. No one can tell children what to remember. It must be what they love. They might well grow up to repeat these stories and poems to their own children. After all, I remember fairy tales my older sister told me before I could read. I still know the A. A. Milne poems that I first learned to read for myself and to love. But unlike fairy tales, Free to Be stories didn’t tell children to be Goldilocks or a prince, Sleeping Beauty or a knight, an object or a subject . On the contrary, they helped little boys to learn that crying “gets the sad out of you” and little girls to rebel against “Ladies First” and the learned helplessness of dresses with buttons in the back. Most of all, Free to Be supported a sense of fairness, something that seems to be born into children. Think about it: Why else do little girls and boys around the world say out of nowhere, “It’s not fair!” and “You are not the boss of me!” In my own childhood, I loved even a hint of fairness. For instance, I read the Nancy Drew series about a girl detective. From Hillary Clinton to Supreme Court justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, women confess to loving this female heroine. I also read about the Hardy Boys who solved mysteries together. Both series were created by the same book packager, a man who seemed convinced that a successful female was a loner while successful males were a team—yet Free to Be . . . a Child 67 the same child was definitely not supposed to read both. Perhaps by putting “feminine” and “masculine” together, I was trying for the fairness of being a whole person. Otherwise, I turned to stories about animals, as girls especially do— perhaps because we also feel speechless and out of power—and to Wonder Woman, the only female superhero. She was born on Paradise Island, where Amazons found refuge from Mars, god of war, then left to fight for democracy. Actually, she was invented by a male psychologist to counter the violence and sadism of boys’ comic books during World War II—so sadistic, there had been a congressional hearing about it. So three decades later, when Ms. magazine needed a cover image for its first monthly issue,Wonder Woman seemed the obvious choice. After all, her message of peace and democracy was needed again in the Vietnam era, and like her, we wanted to convert our adversaries, not kill them. Unfortunately, we discovered she had been transformed by the conservative 1950s and never changed back. Not only had she lost all her magical powers—bracelets that repelled bullets, a golden lasso that forced people to tell the truth, even a girl gang—but she looked a lot like a carhop. We put the original Wonder Woman on the cover and reprinted her Golden Age comic strips inside. This plus months of fervent lobbying finally ended in a phone call from a harried executive at D.C. Comics. I remember him saying something like, “Okay,Wonder Woman has all her magical powers back. She also has a black Amazon sister named Nubia. Now will you leave me alone?” Civil rights, feminism, and other social justice movements were at last beginning to sift down into children’s worlds. With Free to Be . . . You and Me, this went wide and deep. For instance: When Rosey Grier, a powerful African American football star, told little boys, “It’s All Right to Cry,” it definitely was. When a young Michael Jackson sang “When We Grow Up,” kids knew they could dream, too. When Marlo Thomas herself became Atalanta, who ran like the wind, made...