American Girl crazy!

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 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 whitewash. The notion that kids, and girls especially, "just grow up too fast today" is a clichi now, and it was probably a clichi in our parents' time, and in their parent'. 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 misfortune 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 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, 18301930. 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 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.)

Next Page: It is hard when a girl's parents are deeply invested -- both emotionally and financially -- in a particular kind of child's play

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