"we were, in effect, rewriting our own childhoods"

November 26, 2022 7:21 AM

"The songs and stories on "Free To Be" showed kids that they could question the world they lived in, that parents are just people and that emotions are real. And what's on TV might not be."

Free to Be... You and Me, the children's entertainment project, was created by Marlo Thomas 50 years ago this week. A book and record, which later became a TV special and a stage play, it used poetry and songs and stories to confront sexual and racial stereotypes and tell children that they could be whatever they wanted to be. Football player Rosey Grier told kids that it's all right to cry and Alan Alda did a duet with Thomas about a boy named William who wanted a doll.

While it was occasionally "derided as feminist propaganda disguised as entertainment" the album went platinum and the prime time television special won multiple awards. Sixteen years later, Thomas' Free to Be Foundation created Free to Be…a Family used a similar format to explore the changing perceptions of family life with actors such as Robin Williams and Penn and Teller. In 2007 they published Thanks & Giving: All Year Long which touches on topics such as family, friendship, giving, thankfulness, and love, using actors like Hilary Duff, Rosie Perez and Ray Romano.

posted by jessamyn (53 comments total)

I can still sing many of the songs, and might even be able to noodle them out on a piano. I was seven when this came out, and I never saw any of the media but I owned the songbook.
posted by Well I never at 7:50 AM on November 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

This came around just a wee bit before my time so I wasn't around for the initial wave of it, but I had the album on vinyl and my day care center used to show parts of it on "movie day" pretty frequently.
posted by LionIndex at 8:12 AM on November 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

I didn't hear this as a child, but some of my peers passed it on to me in high school and i found it just as compelling then as if I'd always known it. Sure, it doesn't teach its lessons subtly, but it teaches them effectively and touchingly. I still love it unreservedly.
posted by rikschell at 8:31 AM on November 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

I can't overstate how influential this was for me, especially "Atalanta" and the short course in media literacy that is "Housework." It informs my politics to this day.
posted by jocelmeow at 8:36 AM on November 26, 2022 [9 favorites]

I have the album and saw the special. I can probably sing several of the songs for memory still. When my mother was a school teacher she incorporated Free to Be ... into her classroom for many years.

"Hi, I'm a baby!" "Well what do you think I am, a loaf of bread?" "You could be! I was just born and I don't know anything!"
posted by jazon at 8:55 AM on November 26, 2022 [7 favorites]

Had the book, had the record, watched the special on 16mm in class probably 3 or 4 times in gradeschool. Strong memories!

I often thought of "William's Doll" as I was changing my baby's diapers. This is not to pat myself on the back at all, just a memory.

Boys are bald and girls have hair!

Ju-OOOOOLS!
posted by hearthpig at 9:10 AM on November 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

God I loved this album book and special. And yes, jocelmeow, as a little girl, those stories and poems were especially formative for me.
posted by tzikeh at 9:11 AM on November 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

(missed my edit window) Some of the gender stuff hasn't aged well. It was important at the time, but we've definitely moved on from a lot of it. It was an important step in the long staircase of Gen X's conceptions of gender.
posted by tzikeh at 9:38 AM on November 26, 2022 [4 favorites]

I can remember the book and record being around when I was a kid, though I don't actually recall any details and listening to the songs in the link didn't ring a lot of bells. I think we had it in the house but it didn't get a lot of use.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:51 AM on November 26, 2022

Some of the gender stuff hasn't aged well.

Yeah, although it's a good step on the way to recognizing gender freedom, and I don't imagine we end up where we are now on recognizing gender diversity without first progressing through that stage. There's a lot of what we'd recognize today as essentialism behind the fundamentally progressive message that "Boys and girls can both do what ever kinds of jobs and hobbies they want and dress however they want" but it was a really important message and far less gender-essentialist than the prevailing discourse, even though it wasn't quite willing to take that further step of "you don't have to conform to a societal/biological notion of whether you're a boy or a girl in the first place (or none of the above)".
posted by jackbishop at 9:52 AM on November 26, 2022 [6 favorites]

I had it as a kid and my own kids found it baffling, because it was countering sexist ideas which they had no awareness of.
posted by metasarah at 10:18 AM on November 26, 2022 [12 favorites]

I had it as a kid and my own kids found it baffling, because it was countering sexist ideas which they had no awareness of.

That's good. That means it worked, we moved past those sexist ideas to the point that your kids don't even know about them. (if I understand right).

I loved Free to be You and Me. It was on heavy rotation in my pre school in 1976.
posted by Liquidwolf at 11:09 AM on November 26, 2022 [4 favorites]

I had it as a kid and my own kids found it baffling, because it was countering sexist ideas which they had no awareness of.

And that's exactly why I say it was important at the time.

(I'm not saying FTB...YAM single-handedly changed our culture. But it sure was a part of it.)

On preview - what Liquidwolf said
posted by tzikeh at 11:10 AM on November 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm not sure we have moved past the sexist ideas FTB... YAM was countering 50 years ago. I remember talking to a woman at my shop a few years ago, and suggesting products for her little boy. She was deeply offended that I suggested an aqua and pale orange striped pencil case, because that was much too feminine, and how dare I suggest this for her little boy?! I had to be out of my mind, clearly.

At the time, I thought of FTB...YAM, and I thought some people needed exposure to the ideas in that movie, because good God.

Anyway, this movie means so much to me. There's not a week that goes by where I don't think of the title song. I remember, back in college, when I first heard that song again for the first time in what had been 20 years, and I almost started crying.
posted by suburbanbeatnik at 11:19 AM on November 26, 2022 [6 favorites]

I'm 55 so yes, this was a foundational part of my childhood. Playing it back for my own kid, when he was little, I laughingly noted it was recorded before the Martha Stewart-esque glorification of homekeeping and cooking. Every reference in Free to Be to cooking/cleaning/etc. is only in terms of it being a giant drag that *nobody* would want to do.
posted by BlahLaLa at 11:48 AM on November 26, 2022 [3 favorites]

We don’t all move forward at one rate. There are definitely families where this content would be bewildering, and there are still families where it would be heinously radical. To some people, bodily autonomy is an obvious inherent right, to others it’s still the purview of the Patriarchy. Overall, things are better now than 50 years ago, but we can never get complacent. Keep singing the old songs and writing new ones.
posted by rikschell at 11:51 AM on November 26, 2022 [9 favorites]

Back in the summer of ‘92, before my junior year of high school, my friend Julia made me a mix tape that alternated between FTB, Pixies, Sonic Youth, etc. I remember it very fondly.

We were alterna-teens in Cambridge MA, the children of Massachusettes liberals, and the sentiments reminded us of our elmetary school teachers and maybe our parents’ friends: quaint, well-intentioned, sweet, a little dorky, like an old PSA or after-school special, affirming and familar on one hand, and a little embarrassing on the other.
posted by ducky l'orange at 12:01 PM on November 26, 2022 [8 favorites]

I believe I can still sing this entire album. Growing up in the 70's I was in that perfect sweet spot for the album, the special... all of it.

It's such an important part of my upbringing. Thanks for the post! Lovely memories.
posted by asavage at 12:09 PM on November 26, 2022 [10 favorites]

Overall, things are better now than 50 years ago, but we can never get complacent. Keep singing the old songs and writing new ones.

Yep. I was exactly the target demo age for this book/album and can sing every word. I agree entirely, the gender essentialism hasn't aged well--I decided not to quote from some of the 40th or 50th anniversary paeans that talked about how it promoted "gender neutrality" since I don't really think that was what it was about because that just wasn't where mainstream socially aware discourse was at he time.

So much of what it talks about was so important to kid me. I grew up in a Cambridge-adjacent family with a mom who was simultaneously feminist and also had a husband who "didn't let her" have a job because that was just more normative at the time. Her mom's rebellion was not cutting her hair and nails when she got married (conservative Jewish family) and my mom's rebellion was marrying outside the faith so other stuff like jobs was less important to her from an independence standpoint. My rebellion was, I guess, not having kids or getting married. But I also grew up in an environment where that was more normative and I thank Marlo Thomas and people of her ilk for helping create a world where I could more easily make those choices.

I loved researching this post and I'm so happy people like it.
posted by jessamyn at 12:22 PM on November 26, 2022 [22 favorites]

I believe I can still sing this entire album.

Let’s form a club.

We’ll call it, the “I can still sing the entire album” club.
posted by Melismata at 12:22 PM on November 26, 2022 [9 favorites]

Wow, I had completely forgotten about this! My mom grew up with this and played it for me as a kid, until my dad decided that he Did Not Like It and got rid of it - so I experienced that idea of not all moving forward at one rate within my family.

The Atalanta story particularly made an impression on me, and it's interesting to think about how complicated and ingrained the idea of marriage and kids can be even now. I've spent a lot of time in environments where that wasn't framed as the most important thing, but am also hitting the age where I need to explain myself for not wanting them. People can be nuanced about princess stories and still baffled by the idea of women, in particular, living alone. I'm grateful for this album, and for art like it that challenges those sorts of ideas!
posted by earth by april at 12:54 PM on November 26, 2022 [3 favorites]

I listened to the album a lot around the time I learned how to read. It blurred together with "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", which I also loved. I don't think I could sing it all now.

I recently had a Catholic friend mention it on Facebook, he was wondering if people had encountered it, because I think he was, for the first time. I don't think he had... I wondered what it must seem like to him. I knew he was sort of de-radicalizing; I think the Trump years shocked him out of conservativeness. That and getting married and having kids. I thought about all the scaremongering about secular liberal culture that he must have been soaking in his entire life. In the FB comment his dad said he listened to the album and didn't find anything objectionable about it. And IDK I want to think they like... maybe for the first time in their lives, took an honest look at liberal secular culture w/ FTBYAM and saw something that was actually good-hearted and reasonable.
posted by fleacircus at 12:55 PM on November 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

I loved this album as a kid. To this day "some kind of help..." is friendly family shorthand for "you are trying to be helpful but getting in my way please don't feel bad but I'd rather you'd let me do this myself."
posted by aspo at 1:28 PM on November 26, 2022 [5 favorites]

>I grew up in a Cambridge-adjacent family with a mom who was simultaneously feminist and also had a husband who "didn't let her" have a job because that was just more normative at the time.

We had this book and record and played it a lot.

I remember clearly my mom arguing with my dad about getting a job and having to negotiate how she would fit that in around being home to care for us kids, and it was clear at that point that it was going to be his decision. They later went on to family therapy, my mom joined a feminist conscious-raising group, and things changed. I'm fairly certain FTB...YAM arrived after mom joined the CR group.
posted by Wilbefort at 1:34 PM on November 26, 2022 [3 favorites]

I have the album and saw the special. I can probably sing several of the songs for memory still. When my mother was a school teacher she incorporated Free to Be ... into her classroom for many years.

Same here! My mom taught Family Studies in high school and when my sister and I were young she got us to record ourselves doing the baby sketch on a cassette and she played it in her class for freaking YEARS, like I think she was still playing in when I was in high school.

But just give William the fucking doll.
Reason: because he wants one. That's all.
posted by chococat at 1:44 PM on November 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

Goo.
posted by ulotrichous at 2:09 PM on November 26, 2022 [8 favorites]

Oh man I had forgotten about "Some Kind of Help". Everlovin' Tommy Smothers!
posted by hearthpig at 2:27 PM on November 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

I loved this album but haven't heard it since I was a kid. If anyone needs me I'll be following the links and wallowing in nostalgia and you can add me to the sing-along club please
posted by The otter lady at 3:34 PM on November 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

The book is part of a very special collection I've carried with me from house to house for the past 50 years. From the age of 3 to 8 (1970-75), it was just me and my mom - her reeling from an unexpected divorce and finding a new identity as a single, working mom and staunch feminist. I'm so glad those years coincided with kids' media that charted a new course for what girls and boys could aspire to be.
posted by Sweetie Darling at 3:59 PM on November 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

I was most likely steered away from this as a kid in the 70s, because I'd never heard of it until 1998 or so, when I borrowed it on CD from of the library after seeing the list of actors and writers on the cover. Then I played and listened to it with my three-year-son probably 100+ times after taping the CD. It was a car-trip-cassette standby: if n_o_d_jr gets cranky in the back seat, just pop in the F2BU&ME cassette and rewind it until you heard Rosie Greer's song and then sing along to that and everything else after it. (Same story with The Best of the Baby Sitters Album.)

I had no idea it had also a TV show aspect. And really, I had no idea it was a cultural phenomenon at the time because neither my parents nor their friends with kids ever had it lying around, nor did they probably share the sentiments of the album at the time. I feel lucky I ran into it.
posted by not_on_display at 4:12 PM on November 26, 2022

Born in 1967. Saw it on TV; Watched it in class; Sang all the songs in music class; Owned the record. It was a huge deal.
posted by ba at 4:16 PM on November 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

My childhood seemed to revolve around this. I grew up in the planned city of Columbia, Maryland in the sweet spot, born in 72. It was all part of a natural progression and then the Reagan people came along to trample the garden and turn it all into a fight. There are a lot of things that made me a little weird but those confusing and liberating deep breaths of fresh childhood freedom primed me for a desperate antagony of righteous misfit with nearly everything that came after.
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 4:33 PM on November 26, 2022 [5 favorites]

I remember the vinyl album vividly. Like ba, I was born in 1967.

Every so often I connect with folks over our shared GenX memories of it.
posted by doctornemo at 4:40 PM on November 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

Count me as another early Gen-Xer who was deeply influenced by this. I grew up with a mother who went through two divorces, so I already saw strong womanhood in action, but FTB... reinforced what I was seeing and made it seem normal. And I think the messages of love and acceptance paved the way for how uncontroversial it was in our family when our son came out.
posted by underthehat at 5:20 PM on November 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

" To this day "some kind of help..." is friendly family shorthand..." - aspo
I mutter it wearily at work at least once a month.... but my wife didn't grow up with the album, so she just wearily says, "Yes, you're 'helping' " at me when I try to help without necessarily understanding what she's going for.

I was surprised in my teens when I learned that Atalanta came from Greek myth, since I had only known it from the record.
posted by Mutant Lobsters from Riverhead at 6:39 PM on November 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

Funny how when I listened to it as a kid, it was just this album I liked to listen to. And then I heard it again as an adult and waitaminnit that's Tommy Smothers? And Alan Alda? And Mel Brooks??
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 7:12 PM on November 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

Technically, it's Tom Smothers doing a Shel Silverstein poem.
posted by LionIndex at 7:40 PM on November 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

I haven't thought about this in years! I was born in '82 so a bit past the original demographic. Someone at the radio station probably told my mother about the set.

Listening to it in the eighties meant I missed out on the tv show parts, but I had the record and both books. I remember the books better; I could go fetch one myself, where I'd have to ask for help with the record player.

Some kinds of help.. oh man.
posted by cmyk at 9:33 PM on November 26, 2022

It’s always hard for me when discussions of this pop up, because they are always full of positive memories of it, and mine are entirely negative. My elementary school screened it at some point, and I have a very clear memory from sometime shortly after. I was crying. My dad was shouting at me to stop crying. I sniffled ‘it’s ok to cry!’ because of the stupid movie. He informed me loudly that it was not ok.

There was a lot of shouting in my house.

I certainly don’t blame the filmmakers and it’s wonderfully idealistic. I’m sure it helped a lot of kids. But I also know that it must have caused an extra helping of abuse for a lot of kids who tried to bring those messages home to abusive households. Which sucks.

That is all.
posted by bq at 10:04 PM on November 26, 2022 [5 favorites]

I'm sorry you went through that, bq.

Count me in as someone for whom the album was formative - a kid growing up in the 70's. It's funny - every other male in my family turned into a Trump voter. I know I probably would not have been one anyway because I'm gay. But I was much more liberal than others even before I understood I was gay, and I think this album - a present from my mom that I listened to over and over again - had something to do with it.
posted by Chanther at 10:59 PM on November 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

This sounds like a great idea, but, in the household that I was living in at the time, we were no more likely to hear this than we were to go golfing on the moon. Too bad, it sounds great.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:00 PM on November 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

My wife and I (born in '69) loved these songs when we were kids. We were delighted to dig up a tape and excited about our daughters (born '99) getting old enough to enjoy it. I think they were in first or second grade when we played it for them.

Friends, they were irate.

They had literally never heard the idea that girls can't throw a ball or climb as well as boys (or whatever the skit/song was refuting). They proceeded to go off at great length about why this made no sense and was clearly false because I can do this and she can do that and so and so can't even climb as high and...

So my wife and I listened to them go on and on about that instead of the rest of the tape. We were kinda disappointed, but kinda not.
posted by straight at 11:48 PM on November 26, 2022 [8 favorites]

(They were going to public school in Idaho at the time.)
posted by straight at 11:51 PM on November 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

I was born in 1970 and I know nothing about this show or book or record. I had all the Sesame Street and The Electric Company and ZOOM and 321 Contact ever.
posted by bendy at 1:53 AM on November 27, 2022

During lockdown I started sending my laundry out to free to bee.
posted by bendy at 1:57 AM on November 27, 2022

This record was definitely part of the soundtrack of my childhood, but I'm a late Xer, and so I also got the related oddness of Free to Be a Family, which used a similar cast to teach us that Soviet kids were kids just like us (right before the USSR broke up), and had Muppets.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:57 AM on November 27, 2022

When I showed my son the special, he liked some of the songs, but he had the same puzzled reaction to them. He had dolls. He thought the joke was that William’s dad was a dummy. And of course it was all right to cry (plus he never heard of Rosie Grier and didn’t care about football) - I was glad we as a culture made progress enough that it was irrelevant, but it was still kind of sad that this wasn’t something I could really share with him in the same way. Ladies First still landed, though. And it was delicious.

I think I sing the end lines to the Helping song a few times a year (I know I did just last week, as it happens - yay exasperating family members). I’m also someone who still puts custom ringtones on my phone for a few people, and when it came to my mom, it was almost a no-brainer to give her the opening banjo notes of Free to Be. So I literally heard a snippet of it this morning before even seeing this post.

So thanks so much for making it!
posted by Mchelly at 7:52 AM on November 27, 2022

→ "You could be! I was just born and I don't know anything!"

Thank you for enlightening this clueless Scottish person. The "I was just born..." phrase was a very minor meme in a tiny corner of the internet in the early 1990s, and I'd no idea of the source until today.
posted by scruss at 2:51 PM on November 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think the genius of Mel Brooks knowing he's a girl because he wants to be a "cocktail waitress" is that you could definitely then say "well maybe you are a girl!"

I had no memory of the Dustin Hoffman bit but my kid and I agreed that it sounded like he was reading the thoughts of someone w ADD (which I do, pretty sure she does). But it was really actor-y and not something a kid could understand.
posted by emjaybee at 8:13 PM on November 27, 2022

I would love to find out what the commonalities are among GenX adults who never heard this album as a child. Because I heard not a peep about it until I (1972) was well into adulthood. But like bendy, I had everything else PBS fully available. I can speculate all day long (blue-collar, Vietnam vet Dad, stay at home Catholic Mom, no college for either one) but it’s fascinating. It could be conservative attitudes or maybe just the exhaustion of having a 2month old baby when the project was launched.
posted by kimberussell at 3:36 AM on November 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

My third-grade teacher used to play us cuts from this alum as a reward for the class being well-behaved. I remember I used part of Atalanta's story as support for a writing exercise we had to do in 9th grade (to write an ending to Frank Stockton's short story, "The Lady or the Tiger." And I can still recite Mel and Marlo's parts from the babies sketch, whine "A dahhhhhl, a dahhhhhl, William wants dahhhhhl!" in a sing-song voice, and I definitely remember the classmate I wished would get eaten by a tiger.
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 6:48 PM on December 3, 2022

I would love to find out what the commonalities are among GenX adults who never heard this album as a child. Because I heard not a peep about it until I (1972) was well into adulthood.

Same. Born in 1969 and raised on a steady diet of PBS. My parents were older (mom b. 1932, dad b. 1938) and not very political but also conservative. They were not certainly hippies. We didn't really have much music around the house growing up aside from a few Burl Ives and Gene Autry Christmas albums from the 1950s. The only live performances we ever went to happened at church.

My parents weren't the type to scrutinize lyrics are even to look into the media we were consuming (aside from my mom making my brother get rid of his "Satanic" Kiss records later on) but this record or show were just not on our radar. They didn't really bring any media into the house for us, no books, no records, I watched PBS because that was what was on and that's where the good children's shows were.

I never even heard the song until I listened to it when this thread went up and now it's been in my head for a week and I wish someone would make it stop.
posted by bondcliff at 9:10 AM on December 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

I wish someone would make it stop.

It's alright to cry.

(My brain-radio had the bridge and chorus on repeat this morning while I was trying to catch the last hour of sleep. Such an earworm. I was annoyed but I couldn't help but hum along.)

(also happy birthday)
posted by not_on_display at 7:07 PM on December 6, 2022 [1 favorite]