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

Notes

277 Notes “Introduction” by Lori Rotskoff and Laura L. Lovett 1. The marketing of children’s gender differences is thoroughly explored in Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown, Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers’ Schemes (NewYork: St. Martin’s, 2006); Lyn Mikel Brown, Sharon Lamb, and Mark Tappan, Packaging Boyhood: Saving Our Sons from Superheroes, Slackers, and Other Media Stereotypes (New York: St. Martin’s, 2009). See also Peggy Orenstein, Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (New York: HarperCollins, 2011). 2. According to a recent study that polled more than four thousand students and teachers, 28 percent reported that when students were bullied, called names, or harassed, it was because of how masculine or feminine they appeared to be. And 33 percent replied that students were bullied because the tormenters thought the victims were gay, lesbian, or bisexual. See “From Teasing to Torment: School Climate in America,” a 2005 survey conducted by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, cited in Charles M. Blow, “The Bleakness of the Bullied,” New York Times, October 15, 2011. 3. Letty Cottin Pogrebin, “Toys for Free Children,” Ms., March 1974, 48–53, 82–85; Women’s Action Alliance Records, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Library, Northampton, Mass. 4. On the theory and practice of a collaborative approach to recording women’s history, see Linda Shopes, “Oral History and the Study of Communities : Problems, Paradoxes, and Possibilities,” Journal of American History 89, no. 2 (2002): 588–98; Thomas Charlton, Lois E. Meyers, and Rebecca Sharpless, eds., Handbook of Oral History (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira, 2006); Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, eds., Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York: Routledge, 1991); Barbara W. Sommer and Mary Kay Quinlan, The Oral History Manual (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira, 2009). 5. In her book The Mother Knot (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), Jane Lazarre writes poignantly about this kind of ambivalence, the fierce love she felt for her children as well as the frustration she felt about integrating motherhood with her literary ambitions and need for intellectual development. Another legendary critique of motherhood as a patriarchal institution is Adrienne 278 Notes to Pages 5–28 Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton , 1977). For more on this topic, see Lauri Umansky, Motherhood Reconceived: Feminism and the Legacies of the Sixties (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Anne Roiphe, Fruitful: A Real Mother in the Modern World (New York: Penguin , 1997); Amy Richards, Opting In: Having a Child without Losing Yourself (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008). 6. Leslie Paris also situates Free to Be in the context of the women’s movement in her contribution to this volume and in “Happily Ever After: Free to Be . . . You and Me, Second-Wave Feminism, and 1970s American Children’s Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, ed. Julia Mickenberg and Lynne Vallone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Our own contributions in part 2 of this book elaborate on the roles that children and childhood played in second-wave feminism. For a more general and particularly lucid discussion of children’s agency and participation in historical change, see Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), xiv–xv. “The Foundations of Free to Be . . . You and Me” by Lori Rotskoff 1. Katie Kelly, “Marlo Thomas: ‘My Whole Life I’ve Had My Dukes Up,’” New York Times, March 11, 1973; Marlo Thomas, Growing Up Laughing (New York: Hyperion , 2010) 303–9. 2. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992). Between 1940 and 1956, the median age of women at first marriage fell from 21.5 years to 20.1 years; for men, the figures dropped from 24.3 to 22.5 years. The drop in the median age of first marriage is even more striking when comparing figures from the mid-1950s to those of 1910, when the median age for new husbands was 25.1 years and the median for wives was 21.6 years. See www.census.gov/population/socdemo/ hh-fam/tabMS-2 (accessed January 25, 2012). 3. On the history of women during and after World War II and the rise of postwar domestic ideology, see Susan M. Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond : American Women in the 1940s (New...