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

Acknowledgments

307 Acknowledgments It is a pleasure to acknowledge many people who helped us bring this book to fruition. First, we thank all of our contributors for writing the thoughtful essays that comprise this volume. We would not have been able to document this history without input from the original Free to Be collaborators, and we are very grateful to them for recording their stories here. We thank Marlo Thomas for her invaluable support and dedication to chronicling Free to Be’s history. She graciously provided access to archives, shared photographs from her personal collection, offered many helpful suggestions , and wrote a wonderful prologue. Thanks also to Francesca Dolce for aiding our research and to Amy Novak for attending to many details in the final months. We are indebted to Letty Cottin Pogrebin for sharing her knowledge and insight with warmth and generosity and for encouraging us at every step along the way. Carole Hart and Carol Hall offered suggestions and clarified important details as we revised our work. Our agent, Cecelia Cancellaro, had faith in our project from the moment we contacted her, and we have benefited from her sound advice and support ever since. Our trusted editor at the University of North Carolina Press, Chuck Grench, expertly shepherded us through the thickets of the publication process. Many others at UNC Press also supported our work and kept us on track, including Sara Jo Cohen, Paul Betz, Ellen Bush, Beth Lassiter, and Dino Battista. As we researched, edited, and revised this volume, we benefited tremendously from the perceptive comments and incisive suggestions of our external reviewers, Amy Erdman Farrell and Christina Baker Kline. We were fortunate indeed to receive their discerning remarks at several important junctures along the way. We are also grateful to those who provided photographs or permission to reproduce images, includingThom Loubet of the Free to Be Foundation, Bettye Lane, the Sophia Smith Collection, Abigail Pogrebin, and Rita Waterman. We benefited from many comments we received from fellow panelists and audiences at the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth conferences in 2009 and 2011. In addition, we appreciate the feedback we receive from our 308 Acknowledgments students, who remind us why projects like this are important to pursue in the first place. From Laura Lovett: I thank Jessica Weiss and her copanelists at the American Studies Association as well as the first UMass ISHA Writing Group, whose support and critiques were invaluable. Marla Miller’s work on the Women’s Action Alliance materials in the Sophia Smith Collection, as well as the support , knowledge, and good humor of Sherrill Redmon, Maida Goodwin, Karen Kukil, Susan Barker, and Amy Hague at Sophia Smith have made this research possible. I also thank Deb Meem and other scholars at the University of Cincinnati for their incisive comments on the project. Bengt Sandin of the Tema Barn in the Department of Thematic Studies at the University of Linköping introduced me to students who helped me think about the international impact of this project. Thanks also go to the scholars at the Five Colleges Women’s Studies Research Center, who appreciated the importance of this project and who made my time there memorable. As always, my coeditors at the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Alice Hearst, Brian Bunk, and Martha Saxton, made thinking about the importance of children an enjoyable process. I could not have undertaken this work without generous aid from the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts , Amherst, Department of History or the support and resources of the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College, especially Adrian Randolph, Colleen Boggs, and Annabel Martín and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. I am grateful as always for the support of my daughters and spouse, who help me understand the importance of feminist parenting. From Lori Rotskoff: I thank the Sophia Smith Collection for awarding me a research travel grant and the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for a research support grant. For helpful comments on earlier drafts of my work, which I presented at annual meetings of the Organization of American Historians, the Berkshire Conference on Women’s History, the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth, and the Sarah Lawrence College Women’s History Conference, I thank Kirsten Swinth, Amy Farrell, Molly Ladd-Taylor, Heather Munro Prescott, Elspeth Brown, and Uta Poiger. I’m also grateful to the Larchmont Historical...