Because I Said So (7 page)

For middle-class and upper-class families, however, the American Girl brand seems to work in part
because
it is so expensive. “Few goods are purchased as flat-out status symbols; each one carries a subtle message about its owner and user,” writes Michael Silverstein, the co-author of
Trading Up: The New
American Luxury,
and a great fan of Pleasant Rowland’s vision.

“When a mother gives her child an American Girl doll, she is telling the child, ‘I love you and care about your emotional and
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intellectual development.’” There are easier and less expensive ways, perhaps, to convey such things, but maybe we don’t consider them as surefire, or as likely to please our little girls. Or maybe they require more time and resourcefulness than harried mothers feel they have to give.

But the other reason the American Girl brand succeeds is that it aims to please both mothers and daughters in equal measure.

For years, moms with feminist leanings had been complaining about Barbie and her ilk. But previous attempts to sell edutaining alternatives to Barbie—dolls in lab coats, dolls with briefcases—

had failed. Sometimes they failed because they were too transpar-ent, too earnest—kids could see that adults were aiming straight for their self-esteem, as zealously as Mormon missionaries.

Sometimes they failed because their trappings of empowerment seemed faintly absurd—okay, it’s Barbie, and she still has those torpedo boobs and those pointy little feet that fit only into stilet-tos, but now she’s a dentist! And the doll Emme, the plus-size model, which came out a few years ago—how literal-minded could you get? Since dolls are role models, the thinking went, a size-twelve doll will help big little girls accept themselves—as though any doll, let alone a doll of a model, could be entrusted with such a task. Even the GetRealGirl dolls, the well-meaning attempt to introduce more “athletic figures,” fell short. “They’re active girls,” crowed a toy website, “who have all kinds of toys and they can kick Barbie’s butt like you wouldn’t believe.” Well, all right! I guess. But the GetRealGirls were still babes—it’s just that they were in the babe mode of today (tanned and toned surfers, snowboarders, and soccer players), not of the 1950s.

And, anyway, wouldn’t a girl who loved action sports prefer to be out doing them to playing with dolls?

American Girl dolls set out in a different direction, going backward in time and in age: the American Girls were nine-year-old girls, not happenin’ teenagers or blowzy adults. Parents liked the idea that their girls might be learning history from them. (The company has a new line of contemporary dolls, American Girl Today, but the historical dolls are still the brand’s most distinctive
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franchise.) And Rowland understood that, for kids, history is in part a fantasy realm, a distant land of eternal dress-up and inscrutable, vigorous chores, such as churning butter and pounding flax seed, a place sufficiently different that it might as well be Oz or Hogwarts. American Girl offered a festive view of history, one that was full of character-building hardship but also of really neat stuff—little lockets and fringed shawls, sun bonnets and bee veils, washstands and split-log school benches, jelly biscuits and rock candy.

Of course, there are sober-minded critics—mostly of the ideo-logical left or right—who fault the dolls and their books for offering too anodyne a view of history. Peter Wood, writing in the conservative
National Review
a few years ago, chided American Girl for creating “cloying p.c. play worlds.” He particularly loathed Kaya because, he contended, she is shown at “the apex of the Nez Perce culture” to which she belonged, while the other American Girls are shown living through periods of “ethnic oppression and social crisis.” But then, American history pretty much consists of

“periods of ethnic oppression and social crisis.” And, besides, the American Revolution and World War II (the backgrounds for Felicity and Molly) are generally considered heroic moments in our history, social crises though they may also be. What did Wood expect—a Kaya doll who works the night shift in a reservation casino?

From the other end of the spectrum, Cynthia Peters, writing in the left-wing
Z Magazine
, complained that the Pleasant Company’s multiculturalism didn’t go nearly far enough. The Kirsten books ignored the “fact that the pioneer presence in the area, made possible by fraudulent U.S. treaties with the various Ojibwe bands, leads to the displacement of most of the Native people.” Peters is disappointed that Kirsten’s cousin Lisbeth says, the Indians might get angry, but “we need the land, too.” Yet that seems more or less what a pioneer girl in 1854 might say—at least a pioneer girl willing to acknowledge the feelings of native Americans at all, which would already make her slightly ahead of her time. What did Peters expect? That little Lisbeth would run
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off and join a nineteenth-century version of AIM, shaking her blonde pigtails and denouncing fraudulent treaties all the way?

The truth is there is history that evokes, that summons up a brightly colored though flickering and incomplete picture of the past, like a home movie or a dream. And there is history that analyzes and criticizes. History written for eight-year-old girls about their dolls is probably going to do the former. Eventually eight-year-old girls grow up and some of them, with appetites for history piqued by the kind of sunny, commercial culture that some purists disdain, go on to read the critical and analytical kind.

When I was a kid in L.A. in the sixties, my family used to go to a restaurant called the Old North Woods. It was meant to be a log cabin, though it was surely made of fiber glass and Sheetrock, and I was utterly taken in by it. I still remember the hurricane lamps on the tables, the waitresses in calico, the peanut shells you were encouraged to throw on the floor—in keeping with some agree-ably old-timey, and probably made-up, custom. It was my first intimation that the past could be simultaneously cozy and alien, recondite and inviting—and I loved it.

What the American Girls
phenomenon best represents, though, is the fact that fathers and mothers, even if they do not consider themselves social conservatives, want help in keeping at bay certain aspects of the pop culture. And they want help they can buy.

“Mothers are tired of the sexualization of little girls,” Pleasant Rowland said in an interview with
Fortune
magazine. Dolls based on girls of the past are appealing because girls of the past presumably weren’t being pressured to give blow jobs or sending sexually explicit videos of themselves to the guys they liked. Girls of the past weren’t hip-hop like the Flava dolls or diva-esque like the Bratz dolls. They were, or so we are content to imagine, “good girls.” This was a supreme irony: that in an era when feminism had given American girls so many more opportunities to exercise ambition of all kinds, there was still a way in which a girl who was growing in the 1940s or the 1930s or even the 1700s and 1800s could seem less
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encumbered—freer, if that is the word—to work on the content of her character rather than on the condition of her skin.

In part, of course, this was a simplification, if not a white-wash. The notion that kids, and girls especially, “just grow up too fast today” is a cliché now, and it was probably a cliché in our parents’ time, and in their parents’. It’s too easy to embrace; it dovetails too neatly with the common feeling that each of us has about our own children— that childhood really is a fleeting thing, which is both just as it should be and deeply sad. And it is also a convenient shorthand for expressing a generalized nostalgia, a sense that the world is no longer as we knew it, to its great mis-fortune and ours. Moreover, to answer the question “Are children growing up faster today?” you first have to ask which children you’re talking about. For child laborers in nineteenth-century mills and factories and, of course, for children born into plantation slavery, childish innocence could scarcely have been supplanted any more swiftly and cruelly.

And yet there is some truth tangled in the proverbial longing for a “simpler” time, when a girl, or at least a white, middle-class girl could be a girl, in the bosom of her family, as they say, for just a little longer. For all our precious gains, for all the opening-up of the wider world, for all the possibilities that I would never, ever want to foreclose for my daughter, there is a way in which girls enjoyed a sense of themselves as vitally needed and yet protected by their families that they do not quite have today. In a book called
The Essential Daughter: Changing Expectations for Girls
at Home, 1797 to the Present
, historian Mary Collins argues that although the kind of work that daughters did to help their mothers throughout much of our history—sewing, canning, taking care of brothers and sisters—narrowed their horizons in ways we would never accept today, it also accomplished something good: it imparted competence. And there might be “something in that culture of usefulness,” Collins argues, that is “worth salvaging.”

The hale, resourceful, family-minded American Girls are always pitching in—Kit sells eggs door-to-door to help her family make ends meet during the Depression; Kirsten milks cows and catches
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fish enough to feed “nine hungry people”—and though the emphasis on their can-do helpfulness might seem treacly at times, it’s also a big part of what makes their characters appealing.

Life for American girls of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not characterized by unrelenting oppression, as we used to think, in the early, sometimes smug, days of feminist history. In that sense, the high-spirited American Girls are not necessarily anachronistic. “Little girls lived as unfettered and vigorous an outdoor life as their brothers,” writes Anne Scott McLeod in her essay “The Caddie Woodlawn Syndrome: American Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century.” Indeed, mothers were advised to encourage open-air exercise for their daughters to counteract

“artificial habits” and maladies that afflicted genteel girls.

“Millions of us lived in small towns where we . . . had complete freedom of movement on foot, roller skates, and bicycles,”

recalled one woman about her early-twentieth-century girlhood.

In surveys about toy use taken in the late nineteenth century—yes, apparently there were such things, even then—girls preferred jumping rope, playing tag or hide-and-seek, and bicycling to more sedate pastimes such as playing with dolls or doing embroidery, according to Miriam Formanek-Brunell, the author of
Made to
Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American
Girlhood, 1830–1930.
Girls “walked fences, flew kites, belly-bumpered down hills on [their] own sleds.” And, though the American Girl characters aren’t usually intellectual types, the truth is that in the late nineteenth century, middle-class urban girls, at least, did have opportunities to exercise their minds.

Many of them attended intellectually rigorous boarding schools, wrote and read constantly, challenged themselves to improve their minds and characters, and led rich interior lives, illuminated by the poetry and novels they cherished. It isn’t really such a stretch, in other words, to make role models out of Victorian girls.

For all that, though,
the curatorial meticulousness of the American Girl world can seem a bit oppressive. Silverstein argues
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that the dolls appeal to middle-class buyers who want something with a pedigree—in this case, the elaborate back story that comes with each of them. But in a way, that’s what is disappointing about this doll world. An American Girl doll comes with so
much
story, so much baggage, it’s hard to know whether a girl could approach play with an untrammeled imagination—making of the doll whatever she wants. The catalog copy for Kaya’s pretend food is a typical study in detail-oriented pedantry: “Help Kaya gather huckleberries and camas roots in her woven basket—cover it with huckleberry branches to keep all her food safe inside.

Later, she can lay everything on a tule mat to dry: her berries, some salmon, and a bowl of mashed cama to make into finger cakes.” (Or maybe you could just put some mud in a cup and call it soup.)

And it might be harder still when a girl’s parents are deeply invested—both emotionally and financially—in a particular kind of child’s play. “When you own dolls and accessories that cost thousands of dollars, you really like to keep it going,” as one mother told a Massachusetts paper, explaining why she had enrolled her daughter in an American Girl doll club whose meetings they attended together. Sometimes, evidently, kids begin to feel a bit encumbered by the particular intensity of adult interest in their hobby. Ten-year-old Talia, writing in for advice from a teenage counselor on a PBS website, described this scenario: “A few years ago, I begged my mom to get me a doll that everyone had,” writes Talia. “Now I never touch it, even though it was very expensive. My mom wants to take me to a place in New York that’s all about the doll: American Girl Place. Since I never play with my doll, I don’t want to waste $500 on a trip there. My mom is all excited about it. Should I go or not?” I don’t blame Talia’s mother—it’s an entrancing world she wants to linger in with her daughter, an elegant and a safe one. And besides, the moment when a daughter relinquishes those dolls is poignant. A few years ago, when I was writing a magazine article about “mean girls,” I sat in on several classes in which twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls were meant to apologize to one another. One girl said she
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was sorry for having spread it around that her friend still had an American Girl doll. It was apparent that this was somehow worse than saying you still had a Barbie. It was more like saying you cried for your mother every night at sleep-away camp. It was something that could make you hot-faced with embarrassment. It was saying that this was a girl in conspiracy with her mother—or at least her elders—to remain, for a little while longer, a little girl.