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173 Can William Have a Doll Now? The Legacy of Free to Be in Parenting Advice Books Karin A. Martin Growing up in a working-class town in Massachusetts in the 1970s, I didn’t know that a feminist movement was afoot across the country. And despite the fact that my mother was part of the same generation as many second-wave feminists, I don’t think she knew about it, either . When I ask her now if she saw a movie or heard a song from the 1970s, she often replies, “I was too busy raising you kids; I missed a whole decade of politics and culture.” Fortunately, though, she didn’t miss Free to Be . . . You and Me. A fan of That Girl, she bought my brother and me the record album after hearing Marlo Thomas interviewed in the media. Between the ages of seven and ten, I spent countless hours on the living room floor listening to the record. I knew every song by heart and fought with my brother over which songs to play first and most. I memorized every word of Carol Channing’s quick-rhyming “Housework,” a feat that so impressed my parents that I was asked to recite it when visiting cousins and grandparents. Suffice it to say, Free to Be was an integral part of my childhood and my first introduction to feminism. As a teenager I stumbled across and became enthralled with Gloria Steinem’s Outrageous Acts and Other Everyday Rebellions, and then, as a college student in the mid-1980s, I quickly became a fully committed feminist. Years later, on the eve of the new millennium, my partner and I had a son, and I began to look for tools for feminist parenting. In an era when Nickelodeon was considering separate television channels for boys and girls and toy stores were (and today remain) color-coded for gender, I began to wonder whatever happened to gender-neutral child rearing. What happened to the ethos that produced Free to Be? Unlike my mother, who had relied religiously on Dr. Spock, when I became a mother, I was inundated with parenting advice and was part of a generation of middle-class mothers who relied more than ever on experts’ advice for rearing children.1 As I read the advice books sug- 174 Karin A. Martin gested to me by family and friends, I found them to be infused with traditional notions of gender for families, mothers, and children, and they were particularly unhelpful with respect to gender-neutral child rearing. Any discussion of how to raise a feminist boy (or girl) was nearly invisible in my little pile of books. So even though I had years of feminist theory in my back pocket, I had little in the way of everyday tools or strategies for parenting. I decided I was going to have to make it up as I went along, so I returned to the only tool I knew, Free to Be . . . You and Me. I bought the CD of Free to Be for my son, but I had just as much fun listening to it twenty-five years later as I did as a child. However, I was now also in awe at the radicalness of it. In the context of the new millennium and post-second-wave feminism, it remained visionary and unique. There was nothing in contemporary kids’ culture that even came close to delivering the messages (and with such fun and wit) that boys could play with dolls, or that girls might not want to marry (“Atalanta,” my son’s favorite at age four), or that everyone should share the housework. In fact, I felt that most of kids’ culture was delivering the opposite messages: Girls were princesses; boys were fighters, warriors, superheroes. Girls dreamed of princes and getting married and played with toy vacuums while boys—well, were fighters, warriors , superheroes. This stark contrast between the content of Free to Be and the content of the contemporary kids’ culture in which my son was already immersed led me back to the advice books. Why hadn’t I seen much advocacy for gender-neutral parenting there? Sociologists have long recognized that advice books can provide a window into how social issues are culturally understood, so I began to consider what these advisers had to say about gender-neutral child rearing.2 Had feminist ideas become part and parcel of what doctors and psychologists advocated? Were these ideas...

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