51 pages • 1-hour read
Freaky Friday
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Background
Historical Context: Coming of Age in 1970s America
In 1972, the idea of adolescence as a distinct stage of life was still relatively new in the Western world. Changes in child labor laws at the turn of the century and an increasing emphasis on universal secondary education meant that most young people were no longer pressured to assume adult responsibilities as quickly as possible. During the early decades of the 20th century, adults began to wonder how society could best guide young people through this newly expanding stage between childhood and adulthood. At first, teenagers were usually kept close to the family and carefully supervised.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, American culture was changing. Americans began to value conformity less and individualism more. Many people embraced things that were once taboo—illegal drugs, casual sex, gender nonconformity, interracial relationships, skepticism about authority figures, and so on. There was a new emphasis on personal freedom and growth. In this cultural atmosphere, teenagers were also granted new freedoms. They spent more time away from their families and were given more room to express their individuality. People began to worry about what teenagers might be doing away from home with their friends, however. They worried about young people being exposed to drugs, alcohol, and sex. They worried that teenagers were not developing self-discipline, a work ethic, and a sense of responsibility to themselves and others.
In Freaky Friday, Annabel is in her early teens. Her initial characterization—as a sloppy, somewhat rebellious girl arguing for greater personal freedom—reflects some of the anxieties about teenagers in the wider culture of the early 1970s. The changes Annabel experiences as a result of swapping places with her mother suggest that Annabel does need to learn how to take responsibility for herself and appreciate the importance of the rules and norms in place around her.
Authorial Context: Mary Rodgers
Mary Rodgers (1931-2014) was an American author of the mid-to-late 20th century. She was the daughter of the famous composer Richard Rodgers, who composed the scores of more than 40 musicals. Working with Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers helped create well-known musicals such as Pal Joey and Babes in Arms. Later, he and Oscar Hammerstein wrote some of the most beloved musicals in American theater: Oklahoma!, South Pacific, and The King and I are among their many works. Mary Rodger’s son, Adam Guettel, is a Tony Award–winning composer of both operas and musicals. Given the accomplishments of her father and her son, Mary Rodgers often felt “sandwiched” between two powerful talents, insignificant in comparison.
Mary Rodgers was not, of course, insignificant. As she describes in the memoir she co-wrote with Jesse Green, she grew up in a cold but privileged household dominated by a world-famous father and expectations that she would behave herself like a modest, cultured young lady of her time: “What I wanted, desperately, was my parents’ affection, but it wasn’t there to be gotten. Or I didn’t know how to get it,” (Rodgers, Mary and Jesse Green. Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022. p 17). The restrictions placed on her as a girl of the 1930s and 1940s only made her more determined to express herself and find her own place in the world. The tensions that Annabel Andrews feels in Freaky Friday—between independence and rebellion on one side and responsibility and love for family on the other—are evident in Rodgers’s early life, as well.
As an adult, Mary Rodgers became an accomplished composer, writer, and philanthropist. Rodgers was one of the few women writing for Broadway in the 1950s, composing the score of famous musicals like Once Upon a Mattress and The Mad Show. She also wrote many other songs, including music for the beloved 1970s children’s album Free to Be… You and Me. Her books include Freaky Friday, A Billion for Boris, Summer Switch, Freaky Monday, and The Rotten Book.
Genre Context: Body Swap Narratives
Freaky Friday is part of a long tradition of stories called “body swap” narratives, in which people’s minds are transposed into other people’s bodies—or even into the bodies of animals. In Western English-speaking cultures, the idea is often traced to philosopher John Locke’s 1689 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in which he argues that personal identity is synonymous with consciousness and that if a person’s consciousness could be transferred to another body, they would still be the same person. Some of the earliest fictional body swap stories are Mary Shelley’s 1830 “Transformation,” Thomas Anstey Guthrie’s 1882 Vice Versa, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s 1928 The Master Mind of Mars, and Maud Cairnes’s 1935 Strange Journey. Mary Rodgers was inspired to write Freaky Friday after reading Thorne Smith’s 1931 body-swap narrative Turnabout, the story of a bickering husband and wife who switch bodies.
Because body swap stories force characters to actually experience others’ lives, they allow authors to explore themes related to identity, perspective, and empathy. Characters can learn what it is like to be someone of a different sex or gender, a different social class, or—as in Freaky Friday—a different age group. Body swap narratives are a popular subgenre of fiction. They are the basis of operas, short stories, novellas, novels, plays, comics and graphic novels, films, and television shows—they are even featured in many video games. Among more recent body swap stories are Tim Powers’s 1983 The Anubis Gates, Kristin Hannah’s 1992 Once in Every Life, Anne Rice’s 1992 The Tale of the Body Thief, R.L. Stine’s 1995 The Barking Ghost and Switched, Neal Asher’s Agent Cormac series, David Levithan’s 2012 Every Day, Stuart Turton’s 2018 The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, and Ann Liang’s 2025 I Am Not Jessica Chen.
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