I’m young and I love to be young
I’m free and I love to be free
To live my life the way I want
To say and do whatever I please
— John Madara and Dave White, “You Don’t Own Me” (1963)
“You Don’t Own Me” addressed what has been the central issue in human history for thousands of years:
Are women people or property?
Do women own their bodies, or do men and governments own them? That question remains central today, with Republicans again asserting that women’s bodies are not their own and Democrats standing up for women’s freedom.
In February sixty years ago, Beatlemania was getting almost all the attention, but there were several other major cultural developments with historic implications, including the film Dr. Strangelove and, late in the month, the stunning victory of Cassius Clay over Sonny Liston for the world heavyweight boxing championship. I’ll be writing on those in subsequent essays. More important than all the others was the song that would have been #1 had it not been for the Beatles arriving simultaneously.
As 1964 was dawning, Jack Jones’s recording of the Burt Bacharach/Hal David song “Wives and Lovers,” which had made its chart debut at the beginning of November, was climbing toward its eventual peak at number fourteen in the second week of January. In May, the recording would win the Grammy for Best Male Vocal Performance. It had a remarkably backward message for women. In order to understand how reactionary that message was, it should be put in the context of another 1964 song, the Dixie Cups’ “Chapel of Love,” which would top the charts for three weeks in June.
As 1964 was dawning, Jack Jones’s recording of the Burt Bacharach/Hal David song “Wives and Lovers,” which had made its chart debut at the beginning of November, was climbing toward its eventual peak at number fourteen in the second week of January. In May, the recording would win the Grammy for Best Male Vocal Performance. It had a remarkably backward message for women. In order to understand how reactionary that message was, it should be put in the context of another 1964 song, the Dixie Cups’ “Chapel of Love,” which would top the charts for three weeks in June.
The lesson that the culture had been teaching young females was that the only happy ending for a girl was marriage. This point was made explicit in “Chapel of Love.” The main hope offered in this classic is that getting married meant that they would never be lonely again.
But, months earlier in “Wives and Lovers,” Jack Jones had warned married women that they still needed to ask the Shirelles’ question of their husbands: “Will you still love me tomorrow?” “Don’t think because there’s a ring on your finger / You needn’t try anymore,” Jones’s voice cautioned married women, reminding them that, “day after day / there are girls at the office / and men will always be men.” So, if you thought goin’ to the chapel would end your worries, girlie, have another think. The message couldn’t be clearer: Be nervous; be afraid; do whatever your husband wants; be subservient; buy things to make yourself more attractive. You must strive constantly to please your man, or you will lose him.
The lesson of complete male dominance and control seemed to be: Amuse him or lose him. And if he does desert you, dearie, know that it’s all your fault. Men, after all, “will always be men.” That line sounds much like one from Tammy Wynette’s 1968 song, “Stand By Your Man.” Wynette’s song, though, indicated that the choice of whether to stay with a man was the woman’s. According to “Wives and Lovers,” the only choice women have is whether they will go to extraordinary lengths to please their man; whether to stay is entirely his decision. Nothing new there.
But 1964 witnessed two hit musical Declarations of Women’s Independence*, both of which were written the year before, the same year that The Feminine Mystique was published. In the week after “Wives and Lovers” topped out on the charts, a song with a radically different message, one that indicated that the times were decidedly a-changin’ for women, soared past it in the Billboard rankings. Lesley Gore—who had risen to the top of the charts only eight months earlier with a musical pronouncement of female powerlessness in which she had cried helplessly at her party when Judy stole her boyfriend—would reach number two at the end of 1964’s first month, blocked from the top spot only by the Beatles attaining that position for the first time that same week. Gore’s startling song would remain right behind the Beatles for three weeks.
This song’s protagonist wasn’t having any of that hand-holding stuff. The lyrics contained ideas that at least bordered on—no, let’s revise that—that were revolutionary:
You don’t own me
I’m not just one of your many toys
You don’t own me
Don’t say I can’t go with other boys
And don’t tell me what to do
And don’t tell me what to say
And please, when I go out with you
Don’t put me on display, ’cause
You don’t own me
Don’t try to change me in any way
You don’t own me
Don’t tie me down ’cause I’d never stay
So just let me be myself . . .
I’m young and I love to be young
I’m free and I love to be free
To live my life the way I want
To say and do whatever I please.
The song was written by two men, John Madara and Dave White, but here was a woman—a girl, for god’s sake; she was “just seventeen, you know what I mean”—proclaiming her freedom from male domination, her independence, her refusal to be an object. This was something new—and, in the early weeks of 1964, second only to the just-arrived Fab Four in popularity.
“You Don’t Own Me” burst forth as a supernova of freedom out of a genre (songs by young female vocalists) that had been populated over the preceding two years by such sentiments as “I wanna be Bobby’s girl” and “I will follow him wherever he may go.”
I’m a woman and “I’m free and I love to be free.” Here was a bold, unmistakable proclamation that freedom is for females, too. This is the freedom that young white males had associated with blacks and demanded for themselves. Now women were insisting upon the same sort of freedom. That was revolutionary.
The title of a 1960 Good Housekeeping article by Betty Friedan that contained some of the argument she would publish in book form as The Feminine Mystique in 1963 put the issue directly: “I Say: Women are People Too!”
Women are people? And free? The hell you say! These ideas attacked the belief that had, throughout history, provided the model for all other supposed relationships of inequality, that male is superior to female.
“You Don’t Own Me” announced the arrival of the modern women’s movement even more boldly than Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had a year earlier.
* - The other was Gale Garnett’s “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine.” Seven weeks after the Dixie Cups completed their three-week stay at number one goin’ to the chapel and getting married, a song offering a drastically different view entered the Billboard Hot 100 at #48 on August 30. In 1964’s second musical declaration of women’s independence, in its own way as radical as “You Don’t Own Me,” Garnett pierced the carefully constructed pink/blue wall between what was considered proper and acceptable behavior for the two sexes. She had written “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine” in 1963 and recorded it herself in 1964. In a total reversal of the usual girl-needs-boy-but-boy-leaves-girl script, she tells her lover that she will never love him, because “the cost of love’s too dear.” She’ll stay with him for a year, then move on. She tells her lover not to cling to her because “I’ll soon be out of sight.” Her daddy had told her, she relates, not to love any man, but instead to take what they may give and return what she can.
In the traditional concept of “love ’em and leave ’em,” the unstated antecedent to ’em was, of course, women. Garnett’s song switched women to the subject and made men the object. “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine” rose steadily on the chart after its August debut, peaking at number four for three weeks in October.
Like “You Don’t Own Me,” Gale Garnett’s musical announcement of female liberation reached a different and younger audience than did The Feminine Mystique, and their popularity was a clear indication that a fundamental change was beginning to bore into the foundations of society.
{Robert S. McElvaine is Emeritus Professor of History at Millsaps College and the author of eleven books, most recently, The Times They Were a-Changin’ – The Year “The Sixties” Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today were Drawn. He is currently at work on a new book, tentatively titled “Diving Beneath the Wreck—and Resurfacing: On the Origin and Consequences of Sexual Inequality.” He writes a column on Substack, Musings & Amusings of a B-List Writer. }