When Will the Children Be Free?: Looking Back on Free to Be … You and Me

Movements of wildly different political aspirations have long understood that if you want to change the world, you start with the children. In Free to Be … You and Me, second wave feminists embraced this idea, creating children’s songs and stories that are fun, pointed, and enduring. Its creators often claim that at the time, there were no feminist children’s stories. Marlo Thomas visits the children’s section of the bookstore to find that “not only had nothing changed” since she was a child, “but in some cases things had gotten worse” (Thomas 2012, 14). Then, Gloria Steinem introduces Thomas to Letty Cottin Pogrebin, editor of Ms. magazine’s “Stories for Free Children,” who tells her she has “trouble finding even one book a month” that meets her “nonsexist, nonracist, and multicultural” criteria, and may have to “buy original stories written just for Ms.” (Pogrebin 2012, 42). Realizing that she will also need to create feminist stories, Thomas enlists an all-star cast, including Pogrebin; producer Carole Hart; writer-composers Stephen Lawrence, Carol Hall, Sheldon Harnick, Shel Silverstein, and Mary Rodgers; performers Alan Alda, Harry Belafonte, Mel Brooks, Carol Channing, Shirley Jones, Diana Ross, Tom Smothers; and many more. The result is the record album Free to Be … You and Me (Thomas and Friends 1972), followed two years later by a book and prime-time TV special.

It’s true that there were distressingly few feminist children’s stories in 1972, but some of Free to Be’s predecessors deserve mention. Anticipating Free to Be’s “Atalanta,” Jay Williams created feminist fairy tales in the 1960s. In his The Practical Princess (1969), Princess Bedelia defeats a dragon and rescues the prince; in his Philbert the Fearful (1966), a knight succeeds by thinking instead of fighting. A precursor to Free to Be’s “Parents Are People,” Eve Merriam’s Mommies at Work (1961) shows mommies doing “all kinds of work” including rancher, dancer, writer, doctor, air traffic controller, architect (“bridge-building mommies with blueprints and T squares”), scientist (“atom-splitting mommies”), and factory worker (“assembly-line mommies building cars”). Part spoof of Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight’s Eloise (1955/1983), and part manifesto for liberated childhood, Sandra Scoppettone and Louise Fitzhugh’s Suzuki Beane concludes with beatnik Suzuki declaring, “Children Are People,” after which she and her “square” classmate Henry Martin set off to find a place where children can be themselves. As she tells her parents, “i have to go where i can be me” (1961, 87). A decade before the New Seekers sang the opening track on Free to Be, Suzuki was already dreaming of a land “where the children are free.”

While Free to Be wasn’t the first to give voice to that dream, it—more than any other single work—helped establish feminist stories for children as commercially viable. As Leslie Paris notes, “The Free to Be enterprise was one of the most financially and culturally successful feminist projects of the 1970s. Nominated for a Grammy the year it was released, the album sold a very respectable 150,000 copies by March 1974.” The book landed on the New York Times best-seller list and won an American Library Association Award. The TV special “drew a large audience (a 18.6 rating/27 share) and won both an Emmy award for children’s prime-time entertainment and a Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting” (2011, 520). Indeed, though the Ms. Foundation was expected to underwrite Free to Be, Free to Be actually ended up underwriting the Ms. Foundation (526).

Beyond bringing antisexist literature into American homes and classrooms, Free to Be helped bring second wave feminism into mainstream American culture. However, like all great progressive cultural works, it did not have as profound an impact as its creators and fans hoped it would. Throughout the “Creating a World for Free Children” section of Lori Rotskoff and Laura L. Lovett’s fascinating When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children’s Classic and the Difference It Made, contributors convey the sense...