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

Epilogue

256 Epilogue Laura L. Lovett As much as historians love to tell stories of beginnings, one of the most important things about Free to Be . . . You and Me is that it has continued.The contributors to this book have described why they created Free to Be, how Free to Be influenced their lives, and how changing times have altered what we discover in those songs, stories, skits, and poems from the early 1970s. For some, the continued attraction of Free to Be may signal that the work of the women’s movement remains unfinished; the pervasiveness of princess culture today makes the messages of Free to Be not only relevant but urgently needed. For others, the messages of acceptance and equity in Free to Be reflect a narrow focus on gender roles that has been reinterpreted by subsequent activists to keep up with new issues that complicate the old stories about “the pinks and the blues.” Of course, there is room for both points of view; broadening the call for acceptance does not push aside gender but instead reveals how complexly gender is interwoven into our lives. The creators of Free to Be understood this complexity, and they continued their efforts after 1974 when the television special premiered. Just as they had worked to overturn gender stereotypes that did not reflect reality during the early 1970s, later in the decade and into the 1980s, Marlo Thomas, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and some new collaborators , including Christopher Cerf, turned to stereotypes about the family that disparaged every nontraditional family as a “broken family” and stigmatized children whose families did not fit the traditional ideal. Free to Be . . . a Family debuted as a record and a book in 1987, followed by an ABC television special that aired in 1988.1 Free to Be . . . a Family was developed during a time when the American family was used as a vehicle to debate social change. The American family has a history of being held up as a nostalgic icon that makes social reforms and new governmental policies seem less radical . So it is not surprising that in the 1970s, a particular ideal of the family was used as part of a backlash against the civil rights movement , the women’s movement, and the antiwar movement. For in- Epilogue 257 stance, in 1977, James Dobson founded Focus on the Family to defend and promote the biblical institution of the family through a short radio program that aired primarily on Christian broadcast stations. Dobson and many others of that era believed that the family was in crisis because they held onto a patriarchal ideal of the family based on a male breadwinner and a dependent wife.2 Even though this ideal had been enshrined by the media throughout the 1950s and 1960s, this “Ozzie and Harriet” form of the family was in fact very short-lived and even at its peak only represented around 60 percent of American families.3 It certainly did not extend to the quarter of the population living in poverty, who did not benefit from the postwar economic boom, and to many minority families , who were actively excluded from suburban communities. At the same time, the rising divorce rate meant that the number of femaleheaded households and the number of women in the workforce were increasing substantially.4 Combined with the counterculture of the 1960s, economic change and high divorce rates in the 1970s created incredible anxiety among experts and legislators who worried about a perceived decline in parental authority and the absence of fathers from middle- and upper-class families. Some of these policy makers associated absent fathers with poor and African American families, where female-headed households were more common. These officials feared that a decline in paternal involvement in white middle- and upper-class families meant that those families would soon resemble poor and African American families. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an assistant secretary of labor in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, was charged with developing policies for the War on Poverty. In his resulting report, he famously labeled the African American family a “tangle of pathology,” claiming that the legacies of slavery helped create African American families where women had too much authority. Moynihan argued that this trend toward matriarchy should be reversed by making African American men economic breadwinners and parental authorities. For Moynihan and others, reconstituting a patriarchal African American family was the solution to the rapidly increasing numbers of womenheaded African American families living on...