50 Years Ago: “Free to Be…You and Me”

One of the many debates currently raging in our culture and politics is focused on education, particularly at the elementary school level. 

There is a widely held belief that public school teachers, with the endorsement of school boards and administrators, are advancing a progressive agenda, with a heavy emphasis on gender and sexuality that many parents believe is inappropriate to be introduced to children that age. It’s not education but indoctrination, they say, and it’s being done without the consent of parents who would prefer those subjects be addressed at home.

Those on the opposing side of the issue do not necessarily dispute the allegation but dismiss any objection to it as bigoted and closed-minded. As Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recently said, commenting on a case before the court dealing with this very issue, “You don’t have to send your kid to that school…you can homeschool them.” 

Well.

While this feels like a relatively recent standoff, it made its first foray into our society more than 50 years ago, spearheaded by one of classic TV’s most familiar faces – Marlo Thomas. In her Academy of Television interview (which can be viewed here) she relates being upset that her sister Terry was reading the same fairy tales to her little girl that she had grown up hearing, about princesses being rescued by a handsome prince. “It’s going to take her 30 years to get over this,” Marlo warned. 

Fans of That Girl were already familiar with Thomas’s resentment at traditional gender roles. In that show’s fifth and final season, Donald Hollinger proposed to Ann Marie and she happily accepted. The network wanted the show to end with a wedding, but Thomas refused. “I said ‘No way,’” she recalled on a commentary track for the DVD release. “I didn’t want all the girls to watch it and think the only happy ending would be to get married. It was really important that we didn’t do it.”

The first piece I wrote for this blog, back in 2012, was called “Why That Girl Didn’t Marry That Guy.” It was my belief, then and now, that Ann Marie certainly wanted to get married, and since the show was about her and not about Marlo Thomas, she should have gotten her wish. But she didn’t, and as a result a very sweet series was left with a slightly bitter aftertaste.

Flash forward a couple of years and Marlo is in a bookstore looking for books that told little girls they could be anything they wanted to be, but she couldn’t find any. That was the inspiration for “Free to Be…You and Me,” which was first conceived and released as a record album with songs and stories intended to liberate boys and girls from gender stereotypes. The record company anticipated sales of 15,000, but the album sold more than 400,000 copies, which then sold ABC on doing a TV special. 

The show debuted in March of 1974. I was nine years old. I honestly don’t remember if I watched it back then – given how many schools played the album in classes and likely viewed the show as well (on 16mm prints distributed to anyone who asked), it’s possible I saw it there. 

But I watched it earlier this week, courtesy of YouTube. I know this Emmy-winning special remains a precious memory for many people, so fear not – I have no intention of decimating it. Most of its stories, songs and skits were no more revolutionary than what kids were already seeing on Sesame Street. There was, however, an undercurrent amidst its positive messages about friendship and acceptance suggesting that there is too much emphasis on gender distinctions, and boys and girls are basically the same. 

The opening scene set a fitting tone – children ride on a merry-go-round, and then the scene changes from live action to animation as the kids and horses fly off the carousel, showing how they can go anywhere their imagination takes them. 

Next scene is in a maternity ward where two Muppet-like babies voiced by Mel Brooks and Marlo Thomas are having a chat. The girl baby says she wants to be a fireman when she grows up. The boy baby says he’d like to be a cocktail waitress. That’s followed by a sweet duet about friends between Michael Jackson and Roberta Flack. 

There were three animated segments that drew the ire of some conservative critics. “Ladies First” is about a little girl who enjoys wearing nice dresses and curling her hair, and being treated special. The other kids resent her for this, and she gets her comeuppance when the class goes on safari and when she says “Ladies first” a tiger accommodates her by eating her before the rest of the class. 

“Atalanta” put a feminist twist on a Greek mythological tale that was already about a powerful independent woman. A similar approach was taken with this year’s live-action film adaptation of Disney’s Snow White, which became one of the biggest box office failures in the company’s history. I guess many people still prefer the old fairy tales. 

But the segment that was considered the most inflammatory, that ABC tried to get removed from the special, was called “William Wants a Doll,” about…well, the title pretty much gives it away. 

There’s an upbeat, earnest tone to all of this, fueled by a self-righteous confidence in the benefits of breaking away from established mores deemed best left to antiquity. And history has shown that the culture largely followed the new path forged by shows like this.

The credo Marlo Thomas was so eager to espouse in That Girl, that marriage and family may be one option but not necessarily the best one, runs steadily through Free to Be…You and Me. In one duet with Harry Belafonte, Thomas sings that “Mommies are people too” and that they also have “other things to do.” The message isn’t just that you should have those other opportunities, but you should be obligated to accept them, and to do otherwise is not living up to your full potential as a human being. 

Would it have been asking too much for an acknowledgement that the decision to stay home is all right too? And that, in fact, many women find the prospect of sitting at a desk in a middle-management position at Chase to be a less fulfilling life choice than raising children into principled adults? 

I don’t believe anyone’s choices should be demeaned, if they’re not hurting anyone, making unreasonable accommodation demands on others, or breaking any laws. But we should be honest about the impact of these cultural shifts. Before the 1970s the divorce rate was 9.2 per 1,000 married women. After the 1970s it increased to 22.6 and now hovers between 35-50%. Marriage rates have been steadily declining since then and continue to do so. And 2/3 of couples that are married are both working full-time jobs. 

One last observation – what once seemed revolutionary can, with the passage of time, be deemed offensive by the very people it once sought to liberate. More than one 21st century viewer of Free to Be…You and Me dismissed the special as “very cisgender privilege.” 

And that’s the problem with the social justice crowd. There will never be enough tolerance and acceptance among those who profit from inequity, whether real or perceived. Because when the goal is achieved, they’d have to find something else to do. 

Free to Be…You and Me was rightly considered groundbreaking 50 years ago, and some of that ground perhaps needed a good shake. But earthquakes break ground too, and sometimes all they leave behind is a pile of rubble.