F is for Feminism: Understanding 1970s Social Conflict through Sesame Street

Abstract

Debuting in 1969, the producers, psychologists, and educators of Sesame Street created an empathetic, educational, and engaging world to develop literacy, mathematics, and socioemotional skills in preschool-aged children. Although Sesame Street has been analyzed extensively for its learning outcomes and legacy in popular memory, historians have neglected to look at the discourse surrounding the program. Preserved in the University of Maryland’s Special Collections Archives, tens of thousands of children and adults wrote letters to Sesame Street and explored a variety of topics, from asking Big Bird to come to a birthday party and praising the cast’s racial diversity to communicating dissatisfaction with the promotion of lackluster nutritional values or expressing outrage over a lack of female representation. Focusing in on letters from the first decade of production (1969-1979) and letters from women who self-identified as mothers, who were uniquely responsible for their child’s care and education, two topics emerged as the most pressing: nutrition/breastfeeding and gender representation. The combination of asserting an identity and voicing an opinion in the same letter serves as meaningful examples for how Americans engage in civil discourse to change the world around them. Viewed through this lens, Sesame Street was more than a show with joyful characters, catchy music, and a vampire teaching numbers: it was a two-way mirror into the consciousness of American culture.