Produced in collaboration with the Ms. Foundation for Women,[1] it was a record album and illustrated book first released in November 1972 featuring songs and stories sung or told by celebrities of the day (credited as "Marlo Thomas and Friends") including Alan Alda, Rosey Grier, Cicely Tyson, Carol Channing, Michael Jackson, Roberta Flack, Shirley Jones, Jack Cassidy, and Diana Ross.

[2] The original idea to create the album began with Marlo Thomas,[3] who wanted to teach her then-young niece Dionne about life, in particular that it is acceptable to refute or reject the gender stereotypes expressed in children's books of the period.

In an Emmy Legends interview Thomas explains: I told my sister Terre "it would take Dionne 30 years to get over it [stories featuring traditional gender roles], the same as it took all of us.

Well-known songs include "It's All Right to Cry," sung by football hero Rosey Grier; the title track by the New Seekers; "Helping," a Shel Silverstein poem performed by Tom Smothers; "Sisters and Brothers" by the Voices of East Harlem; and "When We Grow Up" performed by Diana Ross on the album and by Roberta Flack and a teenage Michael Jackson on the special.

Other sketches, some of them animated in the television special, include "Atalanta," co-narrated by Thomas and Alda, a retelling of the ancient Greek legend of Atalanta; "Boy Meets Girl" with Thomas and Mel Brooks providing the voices for puppets, designed, performed and manipulated by Wayland Flowers, resembling human babies, who use cultural gender stereotypes to try to discover which is a boy and which a girl; "William's Doll", based on Charlotte Zolotow's picture book about a boy whose family resists his requests for a doll until his grandmother explains that William wishes to practice being a good father; and "Dudley Pippin" with Robert Morse and Billy De Wolfe, based on stories by Phil Ressner.

A number of pieces from the record did not make the special, most for lack of time, although "Housework" was left off due to the somewhat condescending tone it lent to its description of domestic workers.

Thomas says in the Emmy Legends 40th anniversary interview: In among all the praise we got for the project as a whole, we kept getting all these letters and phone calls talking about the track sounding as if it wasn't normal to be fond of cooking and cleaning and caretaking etc.

My little message for Dionne had gone straight to the hearts of moms and dads and aunties and uncles and, most of all, teachers, who embraced it as a way to teach the kids in their lives a new way of thinking about themselves.A television special, produced by Marlo Thomas and Free to Be Productions, in association with Teru Murakami-Fred Wolf Films, Inc. and cosponsored by the Ms. Foundation, first aired March 11, 1974, on ABC.

A Region 1 DVD was released in November 2001, and in 2010, a newly remastered version was issued featuring a number of new extras, including a deleted scene showcasing Dustin Hoffman.