“In 1972, there was no woman in the Senate. Now we have 20 women in the Senate, and all of them are married, and they all have children.”
Marlo Thomas in the Free To Be You And Me TV special
Courtesy of Marlo Thomas
One of my earliest memories is being probably 3 or 4 years old, and listening to the Free to Be You and Me album on my Holly Hobbie record player, over and over. It was the early '80s, my mom had a subscription to Ms. Magazine, the Equal Rights Amendment hadn't failed yet, and the promised land of gender equality seemed, if not immediately within sight, then perhaps not too far off. Free to Be — which had come out as an album and book in 1972 and aired as a musical TV special on ABC in March 1974 starring co-creator Marlo Thomas, along with Alan Alda, Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and many others — told the stories, through a series of songs and brief sketches, of little boys who have dolls, little girls who want to be engineers, princesses who don't want to get married, moms who are ranchers and doctors, and dads who take care of their kids. It was an indelible turning point in the conversation around male and female roles, and particularly for the generation that was raised singing along to its music (and their parents), its legacy endures in the zeitgeist even 40 years later. In the new Amazon pilot Transparent, the ringer of one of the mom's phones is the first few bars of the opening song: "There's a land that I see / Where the children are free / And I see it ain't far to this land from where we are..."
But certainly much of what felt revolutionary in the '70s and '80s feels dated, or obvious, now; Dick Cavett has a 30-second bit from the perspective of a little kid trying to figure out if his dog is a boy or a girl: "Perhaps he's a girl, which kind of makes sense — since he can't throw a ball and he can't climb a fence. But neither can Dad, and I know he's a man. And Mom is a woman, and she drives a van." And it's a world where same-sex couples just don't exist. But it's also somewhat dispiriting to listen to the album again, in this age of leaning in and having it all, and realize just how much farther we have to go — and how in some ways, particularly when it comes to rigidly gender-normative children's toys, we seem to have slid backward. (I was, however, heartened to discover that I still remembered almost all the words to the songs.)
The 40th anniversary of the TV special will be commemorated this weekend when the Paley Center for Media screens Free to Be in its entirety in New York and Los Angeles, and then again on Tuesday, March 11, when the New York location hosts a panel on Free to Be at 40, moderated by Marlo Thomas and Gloria Steinem.
When I spoke this week with Thomas, who is now 76, she had a lot to say about Free to Be's continued relevance, women in entertainment, princesses, and who she'll be campaigning for in 2016.
Michael Jackson and Roberta Flack in the TV special
ABC Photo Archives / Getty Images
Which of the songs do you feel like are really timeless? And which ones feel dated to you now?
Marlo Thomas: Actually, none of them feel dated. I wish they did. If they felt dated, then maybe our culture would have progressed further along.
That's a good point.
MT: I think really all children need to hear that it's all right to cry and that boys and girls are pretty much the same except for something in their underwear, and that mommies and daddies are people, and that we're all sisters and brothers. I don't really think there's anything on Free to Be that is dated. I think the one thing that's dated is we don't have anything about same-sex marriage and families with two moms or two dads. But other than that, I think we pretty much cover it, about what it's like to grow up in a family.
On songs like "William Wants a Doll" — do you think it's still weird for boys to have dolls? Is the message in that song still resonant?
MT: I think the terrible thing is that it's even more so. It seems to have snapped back. Right after Free to Be and in the decade after that, toys did start to change and become a little more unisex, but now when you walk through FAO Schwarz, there's the pink section and the blue section. So unfortunately, it's interesting that you bring that one up because that's kind of sad that that isn't dated. But also, it's about bullying too, isn't it?
What do you mean?
MT: Well, the children bully William. They make fun of him and they mock him: "William wants a do-oll." They laugh at him. It's a lot about bullying too.
Bullying wasn't as much of an issue then as it is now.
MT: We didn't have the cyberspace then — we just had school and then it would be over. But now it follows you home and it's on the web, and it's pretty devastating, what it can do.
