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

On Square Dancing and Title IX

191 On Square Dancing and Title IX Miriam Peskowitz Square Dancing It’s 1972. While Marlo Thomas and her artsy friends were in New York City recording Free to Be . . . You and Me, I was eight years old and stuck in the gender culture of second grade at the Lee Avenue Elementary School on nearby Long Island. Our town was only forty minutes away by car (without traffic), but it seemed worlds away. Memory No. 1 is a conversation I had with my friend, Anthony, in which I am relieved to learn that boys are the ones who are supposed to ask girls out on dates. Anthony tells me this bit of information, having learned it at confraternity class, where the Catholic kids at my school went on Wednesday afternoons while the rest of us enjoyed a blissful extra hour of free play. The truth is, he could have learned it anywhere; it’s not like it was a secret. He tells me this, I think, because the looming school square dance was making him very nervous. He was shy, as I was. I was relieved to take in what Anthony told me, because I couldn’t imagine summoning the courage it would take if I had to ask someone out on a date, even though at age eight, dates seemed very far away. Memory No. 2: our family’s square-dancing story. That same year, Title IX, formally known as Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, was enacted by Congress, and over the next few years, it was implemented in public schools nationwide. The new law said that no one in the United States would be excluded from participation in any education program or any activity that received federal funds, nor would they be denied the benefits of such programs, nor be subject to discrimination within them. The legal language wasn’t specifically about sports, but it came to be interpreted that way, especially because girls had long been excluded from and discriminated against in school sports programs. Because public schools received taxpayer money, Title IX required them to figure out how to provide equal sports opportunities for boys and girls. It’s a long process, one we’re very much still in the process 192 Miriam Peskowitz of working out, campus by campus. Forty years later, the vast majority of schools are still out of compliance with Title IX. But that’s another story. Let’s get back to the early 1970s, when Free to Be was released, and the principal and assistant principal at my elementary school had to meet with the phys ed teachers and come up with a Title IX plan. My school was hardly a hotbed of radical feminism. It was decided that instead of offering girls an actual, fair chance to play baseball or soccer, the phys ed program would comply with the new law by offering square dancing to both girls and boys. That’s right. Square dancing. I thought it was horrid and stupid and a terrible idea. That’s because we were told that the square dance would begin with the boys walking over to the girls’ side of the gym to choose their partners. I’m pretty sure that the congressional minds and feminist lobbyists behind Title IX did not have this scenario in mind when they drafted their legislation. In any case, the principal and the phys ed teachers thought it was a fine idea, and no one in my parochial town protested the situation. The schools in our neighborhood offered up religious prayers each day after having us salute the American flag and say the Pledge of Allegiance, which also didn’t follow federal law.This was not the kind of place from which a feminist or liberal legal defense fund was going to emerge. “What new form of gender torture is this?,” I must have wondered as the square-dance music filled the gym. I was the daughter of a feminist mom, and I was shy, too. Couldn’t they just give us some bats and balls and send us out to the fields to play? Were boys clamoring that they’d been excluded from square dancing for centuries and needed legal resolve? I think not. Luck was with me, though. Anthony and I arranged ahead of time that we would be partners for as long as the square-dance torture went on. We were both relieved. I didn’t tell my mom. She...