I’m a Samantha. I was five when my grandmother gave me an eighteen-inch Samantha doll, from the American Girl line, for my birthday. I read and re-read the six Samantha books (“Samantha Learns a Lesson,” “Samantha Saves the Day,” etc.). I brushed her hair with a special wire brush that came with her and wrote tiny poems on a slate from her schoolroom accessories. In our local theatre’s production of “Carousel,” I wore a girl-sized version of Samantha’s sailor dress. When the rest of my toys went into the attic—when even Samantha’s trunk was consigned upstairs—Samantha stayed.
My friends were the same way. Today, we might identify with the women of “Girls,” but in the nineties we were our favorite American Girls. Felicitys were the horse girls. Kirstens had arts-and-crafty streaks. Addys were bossy and always decided which game we would play next. Mollys were cool nerds before that was a thing. One Molly friend faked having bad vision so she could get glasses; when she finally confessed, she had to wear re-corrective lenses to bring her eyes back to normal. Samanthas—well, Samanthas were bookish but outdoorsy, smart but not show-off-y, and loyal friends. (Not that I’m biased.) “I was very dedicated to the cause,” Elizabeth Phillips, a twenty-six-year-old Kirsten, told me. “I was trying to be that one doll to the depths of my bones.” Phillips used an Advent wreath as a headdress for Santa Lucia, the traditional Swedish holiday Kirsten celebrated at Christmastime. She wore her Santa Lucia dress when she went with family members to a Republican convention: “Fiscally conservative, socially Kirsten.”
In July, American Girl announced that it would “archive” Molly, one of the original three characters, as well as Emily, her “best friend,” introduced in 2006. There’s no specific retirement date set, but they’ll likely be gone by the end of this year, Julie Parks, a spokesperson, told me. Molly’s journey to the big doll box in the sky means that none of the earliest three dolls introduced by the manufacturer that launched the American Girl brand, Pleasant Company, will be available. (Samantha was retired in 2009, Kirsten in 2010.) Felicity Merriman, introduced in 1991, has also been archived. Addy Walker is the only character from Pleasant Company’s first ten years of existence that remains in active circulation.
Bloggers lament that American Girl has sold its soul. Amy Schiller argued in an April piece on The Atlantic’s Web site that the company, instead of confronting real historical issues, like child labor in factories and Native American persecution on the plains, now teaches girls how to do splits and go to the spa. Even a sixth-grader who owns Samantha and Felicity told me, matter-of-factly, “I like the discontinued ones.”
In 1986, a children’s textbook writer named Pleasant Rowland saw a huge void in the doll market: there were no quality companions that looked like girls—as opposed to babies or women—made for eight-to-twelve-year-olds. Inspired by a trip to Colonial Williamsburg, Rowland founded Pleasant Company with meticulously researched dolls representing various historical eras. Rowland viewed American Girl as not just a collection of dolls but a whole world (which happened to also serve the goal of getting girls, and their parents, to buy more stuff). Each doll was associated with books about her life, a rich wardrobe, and a glittering array of accessories sold separately.
Today, more than twenty-three million dolls have been sold. American Girl magazine—a sort of Real Simple for the prepubescent set—has a circulation of nearly half a million. The first American Girl retail store, American Girl Place, opened in Chicago in 1998. The store is an interactive experience: girls have tea with their dolls and get their dolls’ hair done at the Doll Hair Salon. In addition to the flagship American Girl Places in Chicago and New York, there are retail stores in more than a dozen other cities nationwide. In 1998, Mattel acquired Pleasant Company, and American Girl has boosted Mattel’s portfolio: in the second quarter of 2013, American Girl’s sales rose by fourteen per cent, whereas other Mattel lines like Barbie and Fisher-Price posted declines.
American Girl began with Samantha Parkington (a Victorian), Kirsten Larson (a pioneer), and Molly McIntire (a Second World War patriot). The company now sells more than fifty versions of the dolls. Not including Molly and Emily, there are eleven historical characters. There’s also the “Girl of the Year,” a limited-edition contemporary model. Since the company’s 1993 introduction of Addy, an African-American doll, the line has become increasingly diverse. In 2002, American Girl almost literally broke the mold with Kaya, its first Native American doll; it had to create a new face shape to make her features more authentic. In 1995, the company rolled out the American Girl of Today dolls, now called My American Girl. This is a line of customizable dolls: you select from forty permutations of skin, hair, and eye color so that you can, as American Girl says, “choose the doll that’s right for you!” Since 1995, American Girl has also sold infant dolls, called Bitty Babies, and, since 2002, it has sold the toddler Bitty Twins.
The base price for a doll is a hundred and ten dollars, up from sixty-eight dollars in 1986. From there, you can buy accessories galore, from spa chairs to velvet settees to VW Beetles. In 2004, the company began marketing pairs of characters as “best friends”: Julie and Ivy, Marie-Grace and Cecile, Kit and Ruthie. Several big-ticket items, like Caroline’s skiff, are built for two. Dolls are buddies who acquire more buddies. American Girl’s exponentially expanding and ever-changing cast of characters has turned the dolls into commodities instead of personalities. You’re encouraged to collect them all and get them before they’re gone. (At the American Girl store in Boston, sales representatives said the Girl of the Year was consistently the best-seller, not because lots of girls related to her story but because she was a limited-edition product.)
In 2010, American Girl launched Innerstar University, an online world for the My American Girl dolls. “Consistent with how books bring our historical characters to life, Innerstar University allows us to build a bridge between the contemporary doll a girl owns and the online world where she is spending more time,” Julie Parks, the spokesperson, said. Girls are encouraged to create avatars of their My American Girl dolls; your doll “comes 2 life” in the virtual community, the catalogue promises. Ilona Szwarc, a photographer who has shot a series of portraits documenting girls and their lookalike dolls, sees the My American Girl line as an extension of Facebook profiles: the dolls are mini-me versions of girls themselves. (“While the games and activities are meant to be fun and entertaining for girls, they also test their smarts, courage, and teach them more about themselves,” Parks said.) The online versions of the physical dolls can be homework buddies, dance at U-Shine Hall, get streaks in their hair at the Real Bright Salon. You can communicate with fellow Innerstars through a pre-written set of messages. Innerstar U is also linked to a series of books in which the readers are the main characters. The books are written in the second person (“The next afternoon, you and your friends wait for Zoé in the lobby of Brightstar House”), and girls can choose their own endings to the print books online.
When a girl buys a My American Girl doll, she gets an access code to “enroll” her doll online. Since there’s no way to enroll without a physical doll, I couldn’t check out the whole U, but I did get a mini-tour from “Shelby,” my virtual guide. Shelby directed me to the “Real Spirit Center” so I could do yoga with a doll avatar. To play doll yoga, you slowly trace your mouse over the doll as she goes through sun salutations. It’s as exciting as it sounds.
American Girl promotes Innerstar U as being an extension of what the brand has done for years, but there’s a crucial change. Girls used to dive into the doll’s world and identify with her across time and distance. American Girl has more characters than ever, and in many ways, this is a good thing. The ethnic diversity reflects the all-inclusive philosophy that has driven the company from the start: we embrace our differences, and we can all connect by being American Girls. But the problem with the huge cast of characters today is that it creates an American Girl world that—rather than allowing girls to identify with the lives of others (fictional as they may be) and thereby helping them understand the shared history that links us all together—teaches girls about little other than their own burgeoning personalities. With the sense, in the old days, that your doll was a permanent, separate friend with her own world, you were invited to get to know her history—which, of course, reflected facets of the real world’s cultural history. But now, you customize your American Girl experience. “You buy yourself,” Robin Bernstein, a Harvard University professor and cultural historian, told me. “It’s all about you, you, you.” Instead of you becoming your doll, your doll becomes you.
Samantha entered my world, but more importantly, I entered hers. In doing so, I entered the world of 1904 America. The historical dolls may still be the heart of the brand (a girl in the American Girl store in Boston called them “the famous ones”), but it’s nearly impossible to identify with a single one. It’s fun to learn about life in 1853 New Orleans or 1812 Lake Ontario. But with characters coming out and disappearing each year, American Girl’s emphasis is on expanding your network of friends, rather than deepening your relationship with one doll and her world—and, in turn, with the world.
Photograph by Andy Cross/The Denver Post via Getty.
