If you grew up in
any remotely liberal enclave of America in the 1970s or 1980s, you grew up
believing a few things.
You believed that you lived in a land where the
children were free, where it did not matter whether you were a boy or a girl
because neither could limit your choices — not when you were a kid, not when
you grew up. You believed it was perfectly fine for William to want a doll and
if you were a girl, you might have been perfectly happy for him to take yours.
اضافة اعلان
You believed these things because of “Free to be …
you and me”. That landmark album, which had its 50th anniversary last month,
and its companion book shaped a generation. It took the idealism and values of
the civil rights and the women’s rights movements and packaged them into a
treasury of songs, poems and stories that was at once earnest, silly and
wholeheartedly sappy. It was the kind of thing a kid felt both devoted to and
slightly embarrassed by. The soundtrack got stuck in your head. The book fell
apart at the seams.
In other words, for a certain generation, “Free to
be” was childhood.
And that achievement is something to celebrate no
matter your age. Alas, marking that achievement — the brainchild of Marlo
Thomas and other trailblazers including Carole Hart, Letty Cottin Pogrebin and
Mary Rodgers — also means grappling with the erosion of those ideas. Is it
possible we have moved past the egalitarian ideals of “Free to be … you and
me”, and if so, is that a step forward?
To get to an answer, let us consider what “Free to
be” had to say — and to sing. The album opened with a title song that
proclaimed: “Every boy in this land grows to be his own man. In this land every
girl grows to be her own woman.” That does not sound like much now, but at the
time, it was revolutionary. No matter how liberated your parents were, the
larger culture still typically assumed rigid roles for boys and girls, the
latter still very much considered the fragile sex. I cannot count how many
times people told me, on finding out I had seven brothers, “how lucky you are
to have them to protect you!”
“Free to be” unshackled boys and girls from these
kinds of gender stereotypes. As Pogrebin wrote in the book’s introduction,
“what we have been seeking is a literature of human diversity that celebrates
choice and that does not exclude any child from its pleasures because of race
or sex, geography or family occupation, religion or temperament”. For what now
seems like a brief moment, boys and girls wore the same unflattering
turtlenecks and wide-wale corduroys. Parents encouraged daughters to dream
about becoming doctors and police officers. Boys were urged to express
feelings. Everyone was allowed to cry.
Then the pushback began. Some of it stemmed from
ongoing conservative resistance to feminism’s gains. Some of it was about
money. And some it of it emerged from a strain of progressivism that has
repurposed some of the very stereotypes women and men worked so hard to sweep
away.
These moves started with an ’80s backlash against
the women’s movement and, while much of it was ideological, not surprisingly,
some of it was about money. When lucrative boomers became parents, the toy
industry redivided playthings into separate aisles. In a round table for the
50th anniversary of Ms. magazine, also this year, Pogrebin remarked: “Now I
have a stroke when I go through toy stores where still everything is pink and
blue. When you order a toy online, they say, ‘Is it for a girl or a boy?’ They
don’t say, ‘Is this a child who’s interested in nature or in bugs or in
dinosaurs?’ They say, ‘Boy or girl?’ That was gone in the ’70s and ’80s. But
that’s all slid backward.”
Of course, when clothing, toys or books are
gendered, companies selling those goods make more money. In their 2012
anthology, “When we were free to be: looking back at a children’s classic and
the difference it made”, Lori Rotskoff and Laura L. Lovett noted with dismay:
“When crass commercialism shows its true colors, pink and blue don’t make
purple, they make green, multiplying profits every time parents buy into the
premise that girls and boys require different playthings, books, websites and
computer games.”
Such stereotypes belie the lessons Mel Brooks and
Marlo Thomas imparted in the beloved sketch “Boy Meets Girl”, featuring a girl
baby and a boy baby, the latter of whom thinks he might be a girl because he is
afraid of mice and wants to be a cocktail waitress. Back at Main Street School
in 1980, where my third-grade class performed the play version of the book,
those were the most coveted roles. Everyone wanted to be one of those babies! I
did not get the part, but I did get the message. Like other liberated kids, I
accepted the reality of biological science that I was a girl — and rejected the
fiction of gendered social conventions that as such, I should incline toward
pink dresses and Barbies.
Now we risk losing those advances. In lieu of
liberating children from gender, some educators have doubled down, offering
children a smorgasbord of labels — gender identity, gender role, gender
performance and gender expression — to affix to themselves from a young age. Some
go so far as to suggest that not only is gender “assigned” to people at birth
but that sex in humans is a spectrum (even though accepted science holds that
sex in humans is fundamentally binary, with a tiny number of people having
intersex traits). The effect of all this is that today we are defining people —
especially children — by gender more than ever before, rather than trying to
free both sexes from gender stereotypes.
We have found new ways to box children in.
In 2012, when I interviewed Marlo Thomas on the 40th
anniversary of the “Free to be”, she told me: “The ideas could never be
outdated.” But whereas the 35th anniversary got a newly illustrated edition and
the 40th anniversary was marked with an anthology of essays and stories in
places such as Slate and CNN, the 50th anniversary has quietly slipped by, but
for a brief segment on NPR in which the host noted subsequent “huge changes
when it comes to gender” and called some of the album “dated”.
Let’s not lose the positive changes. Why not open the book
again, still widely available? Stream the album for your kids on Spotify. This
is one case in which winding the clock back a little would actually be a real
step forward.
Read more Opinion and Analysis
Jordan News
.jpg)
.jpg)
