Pleasant Company started off with three American Girl dolls in 1986. Kirsten was from 1854, Samantha from 1904 and Mollie from 1944. The dolls came with scads of historically accurate and really expensive accessories, as well as mediocrely written stories in which they demonstrated how caring, assertive and morally sound they were. The Pleasant Company line soon exploded in popularity, resulting in its inevitable buyout by Mattel and the current proliferation of American Girls in all colors from all time periods.
Now a “premier lifestyle brand” containing books, magazines, movies [including the recent Kitt Kittredge: An American Girl], toys and clothing, American Girl the media machine markets not only products, but a host of problematic assumptions about race, class and gender. [See screencap above for expensive fun available at the New York City location of American Girl Place.] Not only were the first wave of American Girl dolls all Caucasian characters, but the entire American Girl enterprise promotes conspicuous consumption and an aspiration to upper bourgeois “gentility” composed of salon care for your doll and $33-a-head tea parties.
In an informal discussion on Slate about American Girls, commenter Nina made the following astute observation:
I like the idea of teaching kids that quality and craftsmanship matter and that investing in special items can be OK. But it doesn’t just stop at the dolls—there’s the outfits, and the furniture, and the tea parties. And that makes me a little uncomfortable. It feels too much like a patina of morality masks conspicuous consumption. It’s the kind of rationalization that makes it seem OK to spend thousands of dollars on, say, a mint-condition Eames chair.
If you have the time for an extended radio episode, you may be interested in the segment that This American Life did about the American Girl Places. [If you follow the link, you can stream this episode through your Internet connection for free.]
Comments 7
Penny — September 8, 2008
American Girl stuff is grandma bait--I don't know a lot of parents who buy the expensive stuff; it's something grandparents get for their grandkids, something you can order from a catalog without worrying about quality (which will be quite decent) or fit (the dolls don't grow eh?).
$33/kid parties aren't an excess specific to American Girl--that's in the ballpark for any kind of event birthday party. Lucky Strike bowling parties, for example, run from $24.95/kid to $33.95/kid (depending on how much food and souvenirs you're springing for). Kid Concepts, an indoor playspace in Torrance, is $350/10 kids for the basic package, and they run up from there (deluxe party: $599/15 kids).
Adventure City is a relative bargain: 10 kids for $199, includes all-day passes and a coupla pizzas and pitchers of punch.
Why do parents do these parties? Well, if you have more money than time, it's certainly easier than having a party at home. And not having 15-20 little kids at liberty in your house for three hours is also worth something. I suspect in places where people have yards, the home party is an easier option, but in Southern California...well....
OP Minded — September 8, 2008
My daughter has Kirsten but never really got into the accessories. She loves the books and has devoured them.
We are taking a day in NYC (down from Boston) and will do the AmGirl breakfast and then see The Lion King on Broadway. We are doing all this for her ninth birthday... It's a bunch of $$ but I want her to go to NYC ....
Bri — September 8, 2008
I know many US mothers who buy these dolls for their daughters because they prefer these non-sexualised dolls to their counterparts (Bratz and Barbie). They also buy the accessories, often from Ebay.
Arnold — September 8, 2008
Dinner at American Girl Place is the least-expensive 3-course tablecloth meal in Manhattan. The plastic daisies in the dessert are NOT edible.
I generally agree with the American Girl product, but one inadvertant negative value statement that comes with collecting the doll's accessories is that they are low-cost-labor goods mass-produced in China, and the values developed in those hoping to obtain them are reduced to the ability to beg or coerce parents and grandparents to buy them.
A better statement would be accessories that require some effort to sew or otherwise assemble--more than just opening the pretty box with the pretty paper. While in some eras colonialized goods were probably authentic, a more complete lesson for young women would include material and manufacturing skills as well as marketing and celebrity PR.
If you have granddaughters who collect American Girl accessories, this holiday season, how about giving them a sewing machine, too? Or an Amada NC Turret Punch Press, though they take up a lot more space.
Kirsten — September 16, 2008
It does all seem very expensive, but I'm not sure it's any worse than the themed parties and collectable toys when I was little in the 1980s. Yes, that was supposed to be the decade of conspicuous consumption... but I think children just like to collect things and the marketers know that.
Incidentally, I would have died and gone to heaven if someone had given me a nineteenth-century doll named Kirsten in, say, 1988. (Unsurprisingly, you do not get American Girl stuff in Britain. The name Kirsten is also fairly unusual.)
Rainicorn — February 7, 2011
When I was a little girl, Addy was my favorite American Girl doll. In her books she escapes from slavery and tries to find her family. My next favorite was Josefina. I guess I found the white girls kind of boring :P
Elizabeth — February 14, 2011
Speaking as someone who grew up with the dolls, visited American Girl Place and felt like she'd died and gone to heaven, I really think a lot of the appeal for me was this element of escapism, of immersing myself in some other world - in this case, an idealized version of the past. That was why I wanted to get the dolls and collect all their things. I was never really into dolls and dressing up in general; I destroyed my sister's Barbies rather than play with them :P
I may just be speaking personally here. I was always into the "collection" things where there was more to it than that; Pokemon was another example, where it was about immersing yourself in a fantasy world. I was never into Crazy Bones or POGs or any of the other trends where the collecting was the whole point. I think this also may be the reason why American Girl and Pokemon have stood the test of time and continue to be popular with both the people who grew up with them and the current generation of kids, whereas something like Beanie Babies has not.