Movements of wildly different political aspirations have long understood that if you want to change the world, you start with the children. In Free to Be ... You and Me, second wave feminists embraced this idea, creating childrens songs and stories that are fun, pointed, and enduring. Its creators often claim that at the time, there were no feminist childrens stories. Mario Thomas visits the childrens section of the bookstore to find that only had nothing changed since she was a child, in some cases things had gotten worse (Thomas 2012, 14). Then, Gloria Steinern introduces Thomas to Letty Cottin Pogrebin, editor of magazine's Stories for Free Children, who tells her she has trouble finding even one book a month that meets her nonsexist, nonracist, and multicultural criteria, and may have to buy original stories written just for Ms. (Pogrebin 2012, 42). Realizing that she will also need to create feminist stories, Thomas enlists an all-star cast, including Pogrebin; producer Carole Hart; writer-composers Stephen Lawrence, Carol Hall, Sheldon Harnick, Shel Silverstein, and Mary Rodgers; performers Alan Alda, Harry Belafonte, Mel Brooks, Carol Channing, Shirley Jones, Diana Ross, Tom Smothers; and many more. result is the record album Free to Be... You and Me (Thomas and Friends 1972), followed two years later by a book and prime-time TV special.It's true that there were distressingly few feminist children's stories in 1972, but some of Free to Be's predecessors deserve mention. Anticipating Free to Bes Atalanta, Jay Williams created feminist fairy tales in the 1960s. In his Practical Princess (1969), Princess Bedelia defeats a dragon and rescues the prince; in his Philbert the Fearful ( 1966), a knight succeeds by thinking instead of fighting. A precursor to Free to Be s Parents Are People, Eve Merriam's Mommies at Work (1961) shows mommies doing kinds of work including rancher, dancer, writer, doctor, air traffic controller, architect (bridge-building mommies with blueprints and T squares), scientist (atom-splitting mommies), and factory worker (assembly-line mommies building cars). Part spoof of Kay Thompson and Hilary Knights Eloise (1955/1983), and part manifesto for liberated childhood, Sandra Scoppettone and Louise Fitzhugh's Suzuki Beane concludes with beatnik Suzuki declaring, Are People, after which she and her square classmate Henry Martin set off to find a place children can be themselves. As she tells her parents, have to go i can be me (1961, 87). A decade before the New Seekers sang the opening track on Free to Be, Suzuki was already dreaming of a land where the children are free.While Free to Be wasn't the first to give voice to that dream, it-more than any other single work-helped establish feminist stories for children as commercially viable. As Leslie Paris notes, The Free to Be enterprise was one of the most financially and culturally successful feminist projects of the 1970s. Nominated for a Grammy the year it was released, the album sold a very respectable 150,000 copies by March 1974. book landed on the New York Times best-seller list and won an American Library Association Award. TV special drew a large audience (a 18.6 rating/27 share) and won both an Emmy award for children's prime-time entertainment and a Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting (2011, 520). Indeed, though the Foundation was expected to underwrite Free to Be, Free to Be actually ended up underwriting the Foundation (526).Beyond bringing antisexist literature into American homes and classrooms, Free to Be helped bring second wave feminism into mainstream American culture. However, like all great progressive cultural works, it did not have as profound an impact as its creators and fans hoped it would. Throughout the Creating a World for Free Children section of Lori Rotskoff and Laura L. Lovett's fascinating When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children's Classic and the Difference It Made, contributors convey the sense that-while sexism is far from over and gender inequalities have not been solved-Free to Be has helped create a world in which, in the words of educator Barbara Sprung, several generations of children have grown up knowing that it's all right for boys to cry, that girls can be leaders, and that both mothers and fathers can take care of babies (2012, 77). …