All 3 of my daughters have owned — and loved — American Girl dolls thanks to generous gifts from family members over the years. Despite the obvious pleasure they’ve taken in these dolls, I’ve long had conflicting feelings about these very expensive playthings.
On the one hand, I really liked them having dolls modelled on nine-year-old girls rather than heavily made-up, impossibly skinny teenage girls. I enjoyed the racial diversity represented in their range (however imperfect). And given the voracious readers I was dealing with, I especially liked the wonderful series of chapter books from the American Girl Library detailing each character’s adventures in different historical time periods.
On the other hand, I loathed the incredible expense involved and the implied conspicuous consumption. The dolls’ clothes cost more than I usually spent on my own kids’ outfits. The Manhattan store we visited on trips to see family was a mobbed temple of rampant, thoughtless consumerism. When we made the mistake of going down there one Easter weekend several years ago, I feared my children would be literally trampled by hordes of frantic mothers stampeding the cash register to fork over $100 for their kids’ dolls. I cringed at the sight of all the little girls dressed in identical outfits to their dolls, mentally calculating the astronomical expense of each cheaply made outfit.
And I succumbed to their excitement and the euphoria.
On more than one occasion.
When we tried out the brunch at the store’s restaurant (complete with tiny seats and dishes for the dolls), my husband was disgusted to learn there was no men’s washroom easily accessible (“Don’t little girls have dads?” he wondered aloud).
I always felt a bit guilty about not buying my girls Canadian versions of the AG dolls (called Maplelea dolls), but they just weren’t nearly as cute (with the notable exception of Saila, their brand new Inuit doll, who is really quite lovely).
We also noticed some odd absences. There was no Asian doll in the AG line-up until very recently. Only one token doll for each race other than white. And the Native American, Latina, Jewish and African American dolls, though beautiful, were defined in their character bios and storylines entirely by their ethnicity. It’s not as if they were just regular girls with a range of skin colours and hair textures; they had to have teepees and make tortillas and have narrowly escaped slavery.
These details are important — I don’t mean to suggest they are not. And they do need to be part of the spectrum of kids’ toys. But if that is the only way non-white characterizations are allowed to occur in the mainstream, then we are missing an important opportunity to really normalize the concept of diversity. And if you aren’t sure about my point, look at the Playmobil line-up: we have princesses and veterinarians and farmers. All white. Then we have Asian Family (complete with camera around Dad’s neck) and African American Family. Where is the Asian vet? The African American princess?
Aside from one not terribly 2009 successful release of an American Girl homeless doll (named Gwen Thompson – see the Good Morning America clip here) there hasn’t been much criticism in the media.
(Really? A doll representing a homeless girl living in a car with her mother that retailed for $95? When 1 out of 50 American children are truly, honest-to-goodness homeless? Someone wasn’t thinking too clearly about the price of privilege with that one. But I digress.)
It seems that compared to so much of what is on offer in the raging acid-pink girly aisles of your local toy store, these dolls come out looking pretty darned good (if you can afford them, that is).
But one recent Huffington Post article just caught my eye, in which the author takes the AG company to task for the ultra-thin models in their successful American Girl Magazine:
And so my question to American Girl is why — if they care about little girls, if they want them to grown up with a life full of imagination, to grow up and be caring, responsible babysitters — why aren’t you doing anything to act out against what seems to be the biggest issue that girls, both big and little, face on a daily basis? Flip through your own magazine. It’s full of ways to be a better person, to have clean, safe fun with friends. And yet every picture is of adolescent models: thin girls who in a few short years might be walking the catwalk, selling us the products and the body image that we’re supposed to want and have, but ultimately can’t and won’t. I look through your magazine and I don’t see my daughter. I don’t see normal girls, some who are short, some who are pudgy or overweight alongside the tall thin ones. The reality I see in your magazine isn’t the reality of Isabela and some of her friends and classmates; it’s the reality of an industry that profits by telling us that we’re not good enough. American Girl magazine runs the risk of telling my daughter, aged seven, that she’s not good enough. Is this the best you can do?
Excellent question. And perhaps this diversity of size might also be applied to the dolls themselves, which while relatively normally proportioned, certainly don’t reflect the 20% of U.S. children under 11 who are considered clinically obese according to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta.
It comes down to our choices as parents: what do we want to reflect to our children in their toys and playthings? How much range of choice do we have in offering them different kids of representation? How much dialogue do we have with them about what is on offer?
I’d prefer my daughters to have an American Girl doll over a Bratz doll any day, but I’m not entirely satisfied there either. So we’ve used it as a platform for discussion about all of these different kinds of things since they got the dolls as presents from their great-aunt and uncle, right down to our fraught visits to the shops (in which they chose to spend their birthday money on stuffed dog companions for their dolls).
I was surprised and touched to see one of girls (then six years old) choose Josefina, the Latina doll, for her own, (though we live in Montreal and don’t personally know anyone Latino/a), simply because she loved her olive skin, thick hair and the accompanying chapter books about life two hundred years ago in New Mexico. I was always pleased to see the open-ended ways they played with the dolls (though my older ones have long since passed them down to their younger sister), where they were not limited to recreating the narrative of the TV shows that seem to define other dolls and action heroes.
In many ways, the dolls offer the girls whose families can afford them a wonderful play experience. But as a parent, it’s important not to ignore the complex issues that lurk beneath the blank, conventionally pretty faces we offer up to our children as models of girlhood.
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