Free to Be … You and Me: Revisiting a Feminist Classic

Free to Be … You and Me was a remarkably prescient project for its time, with a profound impact on the history of feminism in the United States. Placing Free to Be in the history of the women’s movement brings children and childhood to the center of an already multifaceted movement and reveals that they were there from its beginning. Free to Be used material developed in Ms. magazine from its first issue and its royalties supported the Ms. Foundation for Women through its early years. Similarly, the Women’s Action Alliance began the Non-Sexist Child Development Project in response to demand for a national feminist agenda that included children and the impact of sexist stereotypes. In the 1970s, chapters of the National Organization for Women led the fight against violent and sexist children’s toys with pickets and protests at toy manufacturers (Rotskoff and Lovett 2012). For feminists focused on childhood, toys could reinforce sexist stereotypes as easily as they could inspire creative potential. In 1974, Letty Pogrebin challenged parents not to buy toys that insulted, offended, or excluded one sex, usually females. In her words, “We’re refusing to buy toys ‘for girls’ that teach hypocrisy, narcissism, and limited aspirations. We’re avoiding toys ‘for boys’ that promote militaristic values and a must-win attitude” (49). Instead, Pogrebin urged parents to apply feminist values when considering toys for their kids. This faith in the power of socialization and the impact of parenting placed children at the center of the women’s movement.

The history and continued relevance of Free to Be inspired historian Lori Rotskoff and me to use its fortieth anniversary as an occasion to revisit the fight against gender stereotypes in our collection When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children’s Classic and the Difference It Made (Rotskoff and Lovett 2012). We wanted to create a history in four voices: the voices of the creators of the original Free to Be book, album, and TV special; the voices of the children of those creators; the voices of contemporary thinkers on gender, feminism, and parenting; and the voices of scholars seeking to place Free to Be in its historical context. We weren’t seeking an oral history or a collected memoir but a form of collective history and commentary written for a contemporary audience still facing stereotypical representations of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and ability.

When we called Free to Be a classic, we were making a claim about its place in history, its legacy, and its life in our contemporary culture. Free to Be remains in print, with a new edition issued in 2010. That it continues to inspire both adults and children does not mean that its interpretation has remained unchanged or unchallenged. Contributors in When We Were Free to Be, like commentators in this journal and elsewhere, have questioned the stories, skits, and songs of Free to Be, pointing out a range of inconsistencies and shortcomings, especially when viewed from a contemporary perspective. For instance, contemporary commentators, such as sociologists Karl Bryant and Karin Martin, are much more open about the implications for male sexuality suggested in the story and song “William’s Doll” than were the creators of Free to Be in 1974 (Bryant 2012; Martin 2005). Bryant recounts being drawn to the gender-nonconforming William as a child but realizing as an adult that William was redeemed only by becoming a father and conforming to a heterosexual and familial ideal that valued masculinity over femininity for boys and men. The framers of Free to Be were not blind to the issue of sexuality. In 1980, Letty Pogrebin, a framer of Free to Be, addressed the “secret fear” that sex roles somehow determined sexuality and she railed against homophobia as a “malevolent enforcer of sex-role behavior” and an “enemy of children” (289). Nevertheless, much more explicit conversations about sexual stereotypes came in the wake of the original Free to Be.

In a similar fashion, the support for a traditional heterosexual ideal of the family that many contemporary readers find in...