Empowerment or Equality?: Legacies of Free to Be … You and Me

Since Free to Be … You and Me marked its fortieth anniversary in 2012, I’ve spoken about this groundbreaking children’s album, book, and television special to audiences across the country. Along with historian Laura Lovett, I coedited a collection titled When We Were Free to Be, which documents the production of the Free to Be project by Marlo Thomas and her creative team during the 1970s. Our volume also explores the reception of Free to Be among critics, parents, and children and offers personal reflections and social critiques by journalists, scholars, and artists today.

From the moment the vinyl LPs first hit the record store shelves, Free to Be became a cultural phenomenon. For the first generation of Free to Be kids, this musical mélange of songs and stories still stirs up a heady mix of emotions, memories, and even tears. Revisiting Free to Be prompts adults to time travel back to their elementary school days to reclaim those bygone moments when the future beckoned with a boundless sense of open possibility.

Free to Be influenced listeners’ values, politics, and even core identities in two fundamental ways. First, it provided an affirming narrative to boys who did not conform to dominant, heteronormative standards of masculinity. As Marlo Thomas recounts, over the decades, countless gay men have told her that “William’s Doll” and “It’s All Right to Cry” provided “the first inklings” that “they were going to be okay” (Thomas 2012, 13). Many straight fathers, too, recall finding in these lyrics reassuring license to grow into nurturing parents. Although Free to Be’s creators still assumed the existence of only two genders linked to biological sex, families of LGBT youth often praise the album as a pioneering manual of social acceptance.

Second, Free to Be schooled young children in a particular set of liberal feminist ideals. With some important exceptions (discussed below), Free to Be’s feminist politics are strongly individualistic: it asserts that children should pursue their interests and talents regardless of stereotypes, and it invites them to embrace their uniqueness (and thus to accept differences among other people, too.) The story “Atalanta” teaches girls to relish independence, adventure, curiosity, and competition rather than value marriage as life’s crowning achievement. And as expressed in the song “Parents Are People,” Free to Be affirms the importance of paid work and parental roles for both mothers and fathers within heteronormative, nuclear family life.

Indeed, we might regard Free to Be as the original primer of what is now sometimes called “empowerment feminism”: a “be it all–have it all” ethos that tells girls and women that they can succeed in all realms of life by aiming high, working hard, staying confident, and—dare I say it—“leaning in.” Countless women have testified to Free to Be’s emboldening influence on their identities as equal-opportunity feminists; fittingly, Marlo Thomas’s own niece, Dionne Gordon Kirschner, offers a representative account of this experience. Raised during the 1970s by a capable single mother—and also benefiting from supportive ties with Marlo’s extended family—Dionne sees little distinction between the independent women who raised her and the Free to Be philosophy that suffused her childhood:

My aunt has always been “Free to Be” in my eyes. I grew up feeling that I wanted to attack life in the same way. I knew that whatever dreams I had would be my own and not a product of what others wanted for me. … Along with my mom and my aunt as role models, Free to Be empowered me in its one of a kind, progressive, and skillful storytelling. As a young person, it left me feeling energized, transformed, and capable of taking on anything that might come my way.

(Kirschner 2012, 22)

Reading these words, it’s hard not to feel impressed that a children’s album could leave such an inspiring imprint. I myself was a Free to Be kid in suburban St. Louis during this time; I, too, belted out these melodies, scarcely realizing, until many years later, how profoundly they would...