Pop Culture and the Ideas of Freedom | INSIDE THE BOOK: “You Don’t Own Me”

Lesley Sue Goldstein was only 17 when her third hit record was released. Using her stage name Lesley Gore, a year earlier she hit success with her pop single “It’s My Party,” about her boyfriend Johnny’s infidelity with her rival Judy. But her third success “You Don’t Own Me” left that sorrow behind for a message of independence.

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 

The timing was perfect to make Gore’s song –written by two men– into the first feminist pop ballad in a context of female passivity and male dominance. 

The idea of “You Don’t Own Me” reaches back to the 17th-​century revolutions in England that set the terms on which the American Revolution would later be fought. Great works of the time, like Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” Locke’s “Two Treatises of Government,” and Sidney’s “Discourses Concerning Government” centered around the question of whether we are owned by other people or are free to live our own lives.

For example, Hobbes argued that subjects are in a sense the property of the state, since they have surrendered themselves to the state’s authority by joining in a political covenant. Whatever freedom the subject enjoys, is essentially a permission granted by the father-​figure sovereign. 

Locke and other Classical Liberals found this unacceptable. No person, they thought, owns anyone else, or has any right to decide how others should live. No mature, responsible subject should be regarded as a child. Instead, those in power obtain their authority by the consent of the governed– they must ask for permission to rule. 

Locke’s older contemporary, John Milton, further explained why rulers can claim no natural right over others. For Milton, any effort to domineer over others is a sort of theft. He rejected the idea that political figures might dictate behavior or decide what we should think or how we should act. Milton’s principled stand led him to support the liberalization of the nation’s divorce laws, arguing that marriage is not an institution of patriarchal rule, but a partnership. 

Going back to Gore’s song, she tells Johnny: 

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.

In the context of the 1960s, this demand for independence struck many as dangerous, especially by the more religious conservatives known as the “Moral Majority.” The debate about whether women, or anyone else, had a right to self-​determination was a pressing issue throughout the era. But “You Don’t Own Me” became a standard not only for feminists but also for gays as well. The experience of being shunned for one’s deepest feelings has long been an inspiration to art. 

Artists like Elton John in his song “Nikita,” released in 1985 still under “anti-​sodomy” laws, reveals the struggles of the time. In his music video, John sits in a red convertible on the free side of the Berlin Wall, singing across the line to a female border guard. Yet, Nikita is a man’s name, and the song plumbs the hopelessness of a forbidden love behind the borders of an oppressive state, brilliantly conflating the oppressive political authority of Soviet Communism with the moral and legal strictures on same sex relationships. Anthropologist Vladislav Krasnov, who defected from the USSR a year later, wrote that the basic principle of the communist state was that “all citizens are considered state property.” 

The idea of “You Don’t Own Me” speaks not only of self-​agency but also of maturity. Grown adults are not to be treated as children. In the years after independence, slave holders continued to deploy language of parent and child to justify their claim to own others. They rejected the Declaration of Independence’s claim that all men are created equal. According to Genesis, they defended, only two people had been created, and one of them was “pronounced subordinate.” Over a century later, and four months after the release of Gore’s song, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his speech “I have a Dream,” in which he revealed how Blacks continued to be infantilized by whites, and therefore “stripped of their adulthood.” 

Films like “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” explored these themes, in which two families of different races need to come to terms with accepting their children as adults. In the film’s climactic confrontation, the clash is not between the white and black families, but between John and his father.

From the very beginning, those insisting on the power to control others’ lives have asserted one simple claim: due to their superior birth, race, gender, or age, they have parental authority over others. Those seeking freedom, in contrast, proclaim that they are neither property nor children and they have the right to direct the lives that are their own.

Read this and a lot more stories about the intersection of pop culture and the ideas of liberty in Tim Sandefur’s new book “You Don’t Own Me.”