I won't forget when Peter Pan
Came to my house, took my hand
I said I was a boy, I'm glad he didn't check.
--Dar Williams

My mother tells this story. When I was three years old, she became pregnant and wanted to know what I was going to do with my new brother or sister. I answered, "If it's a girl I'll give her one of my dolls, but if it's a boy, I'll have to give him one of my trucks!" The story always gets a lot of laughs, mostly from adults over forty. For younger adults, the story rings too true.

I was born in 1972, and just then, the world of children's education was changing with leaps and bounds. Probably the most important leap in education for very young children was Sesame Street. The first television show with a curriculum, Sesame Street and its creator-company, the Children's Television Workshop, was often criticized for presenting too much information too quickly. Those of us who watched it adapted remarkably quickly, though, and Sesame Street had an enormous effect. It taught us our numbers, our letters. Same and Different. These are the People in your Neighborhood. Before the world of kindergarten ever started, Sesame Street was our street.

On the more sinister end, others accused the Children's Television Workshop of trying to brainwash children, with their repetition and bright and colorful screens and catchy tunes. In a way, maybe they were right. In any American town, start singing "Sunny day, sweepin' the clouds away" and see how many people under thirty join in. Brainwashed or not, we learned our letters and numbers, and enough social skills to get us ready for kindergarten. What else could we have been made to believe?

What we saw on television had an enormous effect, and not just on Sesame Street. And these shows also gave us an understanding of gender roles. We were quite possibly the first generation to have Television as Babysitter, and it was an excellent opportunity for this generation to learn that boys and girls were more alike than anybody else said. In television, at least, it didn't quite work. We may have seen intelligent women on these shows, but they were far surpassed by modern damsels in distress, Muppet girls in dresses, and even Muppet Monster girls in dresses. The Land of Make-Believe was a monarchy, and even if King Friday wasn't the ripest apple in the bunch, he was still the King.

So where, then, did I get the idea that I could play with trucks even though somewhere I learned that trucks were for boys? For that, I introduce you to another medium, separate from television but, at least in my life, more powerful than Sesame Street ever was. I refer to the record. Actually a specific record. An experiment by a group of 60s and 70s entertainers who were tired of seeing no positive gender roles for girls. It was called Free to Be...You and Me, and it was in so many ways more powerful than the CTW ever was.

Led by Marlo Thomas, the album starred voices such as Carol Channing, Diana Ross, Alan Alda, Mel Brooks, and Harry Belafonte. The ideas were radical for the early '70s, even if they seem obvious or even silly by today's standards. "William's Doll" told us that it's OK for boys to play with dolls, and large, booming football-player voices told us that "It's All Right to Cry." "Ladies First" told us that acting like a princess all the time might get you attention that you don't want (getting eaten by a tiger, for one). "Atalanta" showed us that boys and girls could both excel in sports if they both try hard enough. And "Boy Meets Girl" reminded us that we all looked the same in diapers in the nursery. The main message of the album? Straight from one of the album tracks: "A person should do what he wants to/ and not just what other folks say/ A person should be what she likes to/ A person's a person that way."

I have often wondered how many other people in my age group had the same mix of entertainment, and how it affected them. By the age of five, I had made distinct proclamations about what was for boys. Baseball was for boys, as were auto racing, trucks, and monster movies. But these were also things that I loved. Did the boys make similar proclamations about what was for girls, and did they, even secretly, love those things, too?

Dar Williams, a 30-year old modern folk singer, performs certain songs in concert to explain to her audience just who she is. Her first song from her first album-the song that introduced the world to who she is is titled "When I was a Boy." And what a song. When I heard it for the first time, I knew. This was someone who shared my experience. "When I was a boy," she sings, "see that picture that was me/ grass-stained shirt and dusty knees./ And I know things have gotta change/ they've got pills to sell/ they've got implants to put in/ they've got implants to remove./ But I am not forgetting/ that I was a boy too." Dar doesn't just explore the gender ambiguity of her childhood but expands it to include current trends that women face today. How can it be that I, who rode the bus alone at age ten, need to be escorted home at night by a man, seventeen years later?

The '70s were a changing time for everyone. '60s teenagers were growing up and having their own children. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to educate us in one way or another. Sesame Street was for the mind. CTW probably didn't even think about gender; they just needed their ABC's and 123's to get through. Free to Be...You and Me was for everything else. Somewhere along the line, the signals got crossed. But along with the entertainment-adults unknown to us deciding what we should know-there were the parents. My mother, a college student in the '60s, wanted strong-minded, free-spirited girls, and to be sure, she tried to turn us into modern girls. But she still had some older notions of what girls did, how they behaved, what they wore. As much as I may have wanted to climb trees, it's damned hard to do in a dress. Moreover, as much as my parents may have said that we would grow up to be whatever we wanted to be, the fact remained that Dad went to work and Mom stayed at home. Example itself showed that women were mothers. When we were asked what we would be when we grew up, both my sister and I would respond with a modification of "mother." I was to be a "Doctor-Mother" and Whitney would be a "Pedodontist-Violinist-Mother," because, no matter what anyone else said, girls grew up to be women, and women were by definition the mothers.

Further, our parents and television were not the only influences, though they may have been the strongest. Once school started, we faced the opinions of other adults. The same teachers who showed us the film of Free to Be...You and Me (I didn't even know there was a film until I was seven) encouraged girls toward traditionally female roles and boys toward traditionally male ones. In our drawings, anyone in pants was presumed to be male; anyone in a dress was presumed to be female.

It's not their fault. All of them, every adult I had contact with who tried to mold my awareness of the world around me thought that they were doing the right thing. It was a remarkable time-just a short span of years between old gender roles and new ones. Were I born ten years earlier, I likely would have had no attempts at early-childhood gender modernization. I would have been a regular, dress-wearing, doll-playing girl, and I'd have probably picked up more modern gender identification by high school. My sister, born just four years later than I, faced far less ambiguity. In fact, she finds Free to Be...You and Me to be insulting in its simplicity. She still doesn't understand. It was first, and it did more than any other medium had ever attempted. I count myself lucky to have been a part of these very first attempts. When I meet someone, male or female, born in the U.S. between 1970 and 1974, we often discover a bond that just doesn't exist in people slightly older or slightly younger. We had the Children's Television Workshop. We knew Mister Snuffalupagus when only Big Bird could see him. We had visions of being a guest on Romper Room. We had "William's Doll" and Dudley Pippin, who learned first that "It's All Right to Cry." And we had a childhood where we didn't always know what or who we were supposed to be but where we learned that eventually, whatever we wanted to be would be just fine.