{"id":65002,"date":"2014-11-19T09:00:09","date_gmt":"2014-11-19T14:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=65002"},"modified":"2014-12-21T13:51:46","modified_gmt":"2014-12-21T18:51:46","slug":"theories-of-the-first-topsy-turvy-doll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2014\/11\/19\/theories-of-the-first-topsy-turvy-doll\/","title":{"rendered":"Theories of the First Topsy-Turvy Doll"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lisa Hix has written a really nice story, “Why Black Dolls Matter,” for\u00a0Collectors Weekly<\/em><\/a>. The history of the topsy-turvy doll really caught my interest. The one below is characteristic. Believed to be from the 1870s, it is the head and torso of\u00a0a black and a white doll, sewed together in the middle with a long skirt. The doll can be flipped from one side to the other.<\/p>\n

\"2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The general consensus seems to be that these dolls were primarily for enslaved children, but the purpose of the dolls isn’t clearly understood.<\/p>\n

Hix\u00a0quotes one of the founders of the National Black Doll Museum<\/a>, Debra Britt, who says that the dolls enabled enslave children to\u00a0have something forbidden: a doll that looked like them.\u00a0\u201cWhen the slave master was gone,” she explained, “the kids would have the black side, but when the slave master was around, they would have the white side.”<\/p>\n

At wikipedia, though, the entry for the dolls cites the author of American Folk Dolls<\/em><\/a>, who makes the opposite claim.<\/p>\n

It has recently been suggested that these dolls were often made for Black children who desired a forbidden white doll (a baby like the ones their mothers cared for); they would flip the doll to the black side when an overseer passed them at play.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, author of Mammy:\u00a0A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory<\/a><\/em>, suggests that the dolls might not have been disallowed at all. Since enslaved black women often cared for their own children and the children of their white captors, perhaps the doll was designed to socialize young enslaved girls into their future roles as mothers to children of both races. According to Historical Folk Toys<\/a>, the black doll sometimes was dressed in a headscarf and the white doll in antebellum-style dress, supporting Wallace-Sanders’ theory that the idea was to socialize girls into their role.<\/p>\n

And, of course, we have even less of an idea of how the children themselves thought of these dolls or where their imagination led them.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted at Pacific Standard<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lisa Hix has written a really nice story, “Why Black Dolls Matter,” for\u00a0Collectors Weekly. The history of the topsy-turvy doll really caught my interest. The one below is characteristic. Believed to be from the 1870s, it is the head and torso of\u00a0a black and a white doll, sewed together in the middle with a long […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":65004,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[223,253,8118,1711,285,1760,23665,1757],"class_list":["post-65002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-childrenyouth","tag-history","tag-organizationsinstitutions","tag-toysgames","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-blacksafricans","tag-raceethnicity-history","tag-raceethnicity-whiteseuropeans"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/11\/34.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65002"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65469,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65002\/revisions\/65469"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}