Kids special took the revolution to the playground
“Free to Be ... You and Me,” the 1974 kids-tv special and feminist milestone, begins with footage of children riding a carousel. I was one of them. Not literally — I watched the show on TV like millions of other baby Gen Xers. But these kids, laughing and spinning, were my cohort at a strange point in history.
We were born at the tail end of one of the country’s great periods of social revolution. Our mothers were getting jobs outside the home, and so was Mary Richards on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Later in our childhoods would come the era of Phyllis Schlafly and He-man, and things would jerk backward again for a while, maybe without our even being aware of it at the time.
But on “Free to Be,” the future was baby steps away. The theme song, by the New Seekers, imagines a land “where the children are free” and says that “it ain’t far to this land from where we are.” The children transform into cartoons on lively horses. They leap out of the spinning wheel’s orbit, galloping through an animated desert, girls and boys side by side.
Marlo Thomas, the former star of the sitcom “That Girl,” created “Free to Be” as an album in 1972, in collaboration with the Ms. Foundation for Women. She was inspired, she said in the introduction to a 2010 DVD of the TV special, by reading bedtime stories to her niece — books that “told girls and boys who they should be, who they ought to be, but seldom who they could be.”
Through songs, skits and stories, “Free to Be” told them they could be, and do, anything. Girls could run races and grow up to be doctors; boys could play with dolls and grow up to push a stroller. A princess could decide not to marry a prince, or anybody. A man could cry.
The TV adaptation, which first aired March 11, 1974, echoed the artyeclectic sensibility of early “Sesame Street” (Carole Hart, who helped develop that show, was a producer of “Free to Be”), selling its lessons with animation, vaudeville and guest stars.
The opening sketch features Thomas and Mel Brooks as cue-ball-headed puppet babies in a hospital nursery, daffily trying to work out which of them is a boy and which is a girl — the Brooks baby declares himself a girl because he wants to be “a cocktail waitress” — and setting up the bigger themes of the special: What is a boy and what is a girl?
As newborns, they’re indistinguishable, just baseline people — eyes, ears, hands, mouth. They haven’t yet been programmed with all the lessons about boy things and girl things, boy colors and girl colors, boy games and girl games. The rest of the special gives its young viewers a decoder ring for those messages, and permission to disregard them.
Take “Parents Are People,” a duet with Thomas and Harry Belafonte, which remains one of the most innocently radical things I’ve ever seen on TV. The lyrics explain that your mom and dad are just “people with children,” who have their own lives and a wide range of careers open to both of them.
Thomas drives a cab in New York City; Belafonte puts on a baker’s hat. They act out a photo shoot on the steps of the Met museum; first she’s the model, then he is. You could see this impossibly attractive duo as a couple, though the network resisted a scene in which they push baby carriages, lest viewers think that, gasp, a Black man and a white woman had children together. You could see them as friends, or colleagues, or just two New Yorkers with stuff to do. You can think what you want; they’re too busy to worry about it.
This was the optimistic spirit of “Free to Be,” the belief that both girls and boys could be not just equals, but also partners, each with everything to gain from feminism. In the show’s animated stories, chivalry doesn’t protect girls, selfreliance does: In “Ladies First,” a “tender, sweet young thing” who insists on special treatment ends up eaten by tigers, while in “Atalanta,” a princess who loves science and exploration foils her father’s plan to marry her off.
And in “Free to Be,” sexism doesn’t make boys better off; it stifles them and limits the kinds of men they can become. Rosey Grier, a former pro football player with a side passion for needlepoint, sings “It’s All Right to Cry.” In the song “William’s Doll,” written by Mary Rodgers and Sheldon Harnick and sung by Alan Alda and Thomas, a boy asks for a doll to play with. His classmates jeer, his father frets, but his grandmother approves. William, she says, just wants to learn to be a caring father someday (pointing out, by the by, that men ought be able to change their kids’ diapers).
Today, finding “Free to Be” requires some legwork. You can find uploads on Youtube; I bought a DVD to rewatch it. Like many works from the early ‘70s, it can seem simultaneously a dated product of a specific time and an artifact from an alternative future that never quite arrived.
The show, aired on network TV in 1974 for children, assumed heterosexual, mom-and-dad families; it doesn’t distinguish between biological sex and socially constructed gender. Its gender-neutral optimism might now ring naïve, after a half-century of backlashes and “Can women have it all?” features.
If you’re going to ask how well “Free to Be” has aged, though, it’s only fair to ask how well we have, too. Sure, “Barbie” grossed more than $1 billion by saying, like “Free to Be” did, that women and men are held back by stereotypes peddled in the toy aisle. Kids’ entertainment such as “Bluey” model egalitarian parenting.
But gender essentialism is still alive and well. It starts before birth: Parentsto-be blast pink-and-blue confetti cannons and burn down forests with genderreveal parties. Culture warriors and state legislatures are consumed with angst over how much authority children (and even adults) should have to assert their gender identities; some young people are bullied and physically attacked for refusing traditional categories. “Men’s rights” influencers sell the idea that women’s gains are men’s losses. Politicians use macho displays to assert dominance and not-so-subtly telegraph nostalgia for the old days.
And having reached middle age, not a few of my fellow Gen Xers have decided, like members of generations before us once did, that the level of progress we reached when we were young was perfect and sufficient, and the world should stop there. They might look back at “Free to Be,” with its simple gender binary — every boy “grows to be his own man” and “every girl grows to be her own woman,” the theme song says — as evidence that today’s spectrum of identities has gone too far.
“Free to Be” was a product of its time. But it would seem perverse to claim that this wild, rebellious work about self-determination was intended to enforce any rigid gender boundaries. Its best claim to timelessness is its simple affirmation: Only you get to decide who you are.
In the show’s end sequence, the cartoon children gallop back to the park, turn back into fleshand-blood kids and continue their carousel ride. As they grow up, they will spin forward for a while, and they’ll spin backward, and so on. That’s what revolutions do sometimes; they revolve.
But I hope that all of us who took the “Free to Be ... You and Me” ride still carry some of it inside us. That’s the advantage that art has over carousels: Even when it brings you back to where you started, it doesn’t leave you in quite the same place. Because now you know what it feels like to get away.