Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood.

In this volume Miriam Formanek-Brunell examines the relationship between dolls and American culture over a one-hundred-year period that encompasses the Victorian era and the evolution of modem industrial society. Challenging specifically the prevalent interpretation of dolls as static agents of a uniform approach to gender socialization and, more generally, the interpretation of patterns of mass consumption exclusively through the lens of cultural hegemony, she presents a more nuanced picture of the interaction between doll production and consumption. Formanek-Brunell argues that although dollmaking was eventually appropriated by modern businessmen who produced and marketed commercialized, stereotypical gender symbols, women and girls did not passively acquiesce in this process. Rather they contested, although not always successfully, both male approaches to the design and construction of dolls and societal prescriptions and cultural expectations with regard to doll play.

Made to Play House traces the history of the doll industry in the United States from the antebellum period through the 1920s. A short epilogue summarizes the evolution of dolls in America since 1930. Individual chapters cover a range of specific topics and address a variety of issues. These include changes in the nature and function of dolls from the early nineteenth century through the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, and the 1920s; the technological and mechanical orientation of nineteenth-century male dollmakers; the doll designs, work values, and business methods of women dollmakers at the turn of the century and beyond; the eventual development of soft, clean, realistic dolls of both genders; the triumph of the American doll industry over European, particularly German, competitors; and the mass marketing of dolls between 1900 and 1930.

Formanek-Brunell emphasizes the contrast between women's approaches to dollmaking and those of male manufacturers. She maintains that the former were informed by a maternalist ideology and a thorough familiarity with children's needs and preferences, while the latter focused on inventive technology and scientific management rather than on characteristics that might make dolls good for play. Female designers, who frequently used their own children as models, understood what made dolls appealing. Their creations were more "human." They believed that boys as well as girls should play with dolls and accordingly, they produced dolls of both genders. Mothers responded positively to their products and bought them enthusiastically. Nevertheless, as the modern doll industry matured after World War I, professional businesswomen in the field were progressively marginalized or disillusioned, while their male counterparts engaged in the mass production and marketing of dolls as symbols of a resurgent idealized domesticity.

While adults viewed dolls as useful agents for female socialization throughout the period 1830-1930, their daughters actively challenged cultural prescriptions concerning doll play. Thus, like those businesswomen who pursued a distinctive approach to dollmaking, the young women for whom the dolls were intended assumed active roles in the construction of American girlhood. Many nineteenth-century girls expressed strong preferences for simple dolls over elaborate ones, black rag dolls over white ones, and unconventional doll games over "playing house." Often they rejected doll play altogether in favor of more invigorating outdoor activities. Doll funerals and actual destructive abuse of dolls were not uncommon, suggesting the presence of anger and aggressive feelings toward the gender socialization represented by the dolls. By the early twentieth century, however, such manifestations of resentment and resistance directed against dolls declined as a new generation of girls experienced less restrictive gender socialization patterns and hence enjoyed a wider variety of play activities.

In its examination of business methods and consumption patterns, this volume necessarily emphasizes middle-class attitudes and experiences--those of doll manufacturers and the consumers of their products. But the class-based nature of childhood is addressed in two particular contexts. The book describes the employment of Progressive-era immigrant children (and adults) as homeworkers in the doll industry. It also highlights the contrast between the lives of working-class girls, whose routine domestic responsibilities frequently included the care of real children, usually younger siblings, and those of their middle-class counterparts, who bought or were given dolls, "played house," and attended dolls' tea parties held in large department stores. Like the subject matter, the sources consulted represent an essentially middle-class orientation. In addition to examining actual dolls and doll patents, the author has drawn on a variety of other primary material, including periodical and prescriptive literature, mail-order catalogues, advertisements, oral histories, letters, memoirs, and the late nineteenth-century doll fiction that appeared in children's books and magazines in the years after the Civil War and consisted of stories about dolls, for them, and even ostensibly authored by them. More than fifty illustrations are interspersed throughout the chapters.

Made to Play House is densely written. Formanek-Brunell provides a plethora of interesting, specific data on numerous aspects of the doll industry, which sometimes overwhelm her main points. Occasional disjointed references to topics previously discussed and some awkward transitions detract from the clarity of the author's argument. Nevertheless, this book addresses a significant issue in the history of childhood through the examination of the links between material objects designed for children, the societal construction of childhood, and children's participation as agents of their own socialization. It explores the dynamic interaction between patterns of production and consumption in the emerging twentieth-century consumer culture, and it offers a new perspective on the nature of the relationship between dolls and American culture.