American Girl crazy!

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 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 transparent, 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 stilettos, 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 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 ideological 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 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 agreeably 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.

Next Page: Dolls based on girls of the past are appealing because girls of the past presumably weren't being pressured to give blow jobs

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