free to be you and me

[metaphortunate]

Free to Be You and Me was released 40 years ago this year. Slate has a fascinating article on it.

The Junebug and I have been listening to the copy we got for him. (Of course we did.) It's not perfect. I particularly note how there are two songs criticizing kids for performing femininity. They're different, though. In "William's Doll", William is mocked by his peers for wanting a doll; the nyah-nyah "William wants a do-oll! William wants a do-oll!" is by far the catchiest part of the song, unfortunately, but the authorial viewpoint validates and supports his behavior. Whereas in "Ladies First", the little femme girl is hatefully annoying and gets eaten up by tigers and the authorial point of view is definitely that this is a good thing, too. (Per the Slate article, it was written by Shel Silverstein, and suddenly I am much less surprised. Not particularly feminist, that guy.)

Apparently the nobody-actually-likes-doing-housework-so-everyone-better-pitch-in "Housework" poem turned out to be problematic, to the point that they wished they hadn't put it on the album. I have to say that we were hoping to Tom Sawyer the Junebug into wanting to help with chores, so it won't be particularly helpful to have this album telling him that everyone hates housework and he will to. However, to me, it is completely worth it for its introduction to the concept that TV lies to you and marketing is manipulation. Never too young to start.

Comments

[kore]

Back in New York, a mutual friend put her in touch with Ursula Nordstrom, the doyenne of children’s publishing who’d edited E.B. White, Maurice Sendak, and Margaret Wise Brown at Harper & Row.

That article about Harriet the Spy's beginnings was just going around - Nordstrom got that published, too (in fact she helped turn it into a novel, not just a series of journal entries). And she reshaped children's picture books with Where the Wild Things Are. She was pretty amazing. Charlotte Zolotow, too.

[(Anonymous)]

That whole album still runs through my mind regularly. Although I grew up not really noticing the problems with "Ladies First" until I was sharing it with a friend who had the same reaction you did.

[trouble]

Sorry, that anonymous comment was me.

[badgerbag]

When I grow up, will I be pretty?
Will you be an engineer?
Will I have to wear things like perfume and gloves?
I can still pull the whistle while you steer...

(Despite this and the other problems I loved this album and grew up listening to it, i just mentally edited these bits out! The hungry tiger story was a problem though and added to my internalized misogyny.)

[wild_irises]

Little kids as a rule love to do chores and "help." A good friend of mine has gotten kids to do actually useful weeding when they are just a month or so older than the Junebug. To a significant extent, it seems to be the adult dislike of chores that perpetuates itself in kids--by the time they're around their peers, this changes.

[dancingsinging]

I was totally going to post to say essentially this. If my experience as a nursery school teacher applies generally, it seems that if *you* find a way to kind of bliss out over the chores (it sounds corny, but I could really get into dishwashing when I saw it as an expression of love for those little tykes) then the kids naturally want to do it, too. Also, one angle of the waldorf pedagogy that I found really useful was the concept that children profoundly benefit by seeing the adults around them do useful work that looks like work to a child (i.e., not just pushing buttons on a computer). Like, having useful work is a fundamental human need and the kids learn how to do it by watching us.

[dancingsinging]

Also, William's Doll (we have the book, I haven't heard the album) always kind of bothered me, but I couldn't figure out why. Like, the point of the story is that it's cool to do what you want regardless of what people around you think of it and regardless of stupid social pressure about gender roles. But the way that the neighborhood boys' "you're such a sissy, William" stance was portrayed as normal kind of grosses me out. I dunno, maybe the story is just dated?