Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830-1930 (review)

In Made to Play House, historian Miriam Formanek-Brunell traces the evolution of dolls, the growth of the American doll industry, and the commercialization of girlhood from the antebellum period to the 1930s. She effectively challenges the popular assumptions that dolls are representations of “patriarchal culture” and that girls are “passive consumers” of that culture. These assumptions, she argues, “have led us to overlook the significance of struggles between women and men for the cultural control of dolls.” Dolls were not simply “trivial artifacts of a commercialized girls’ culture,” nor were they mere “representations of femininity and maternity.” Businesswomen used dolls to promote their various social agendas and political goals. While men created the dolls they marketed as idealized symbols of feminine domesticity, women produced dolls that suggested more flexible representations of girlhood and boyhood. Therefore, Formanek-Brunell maintains that we cannot assume that all doll manufacturers promoted uniform notions of gender over time (p. 1).

When originally published by Yale University Press (1993), Made to Play House was the first scholarly monograph to explore dolls’ roles in the history of American culture and society. This study is particularly useful for women’s historians, business historians, and historians of technology, as well as anyone who has played with, purchased, or collected dolls. Formanek-Brunell builds her argument upon a rich variety of sources, including diaries, autobiographies, newspapers, advertisements, trade journals, popular magazines, patent records, and dolls themselves. She argues that the differences between the attitudes of businessmen and businesswomen in the doll industry can be ascertained from the ideas embedded in the respective products that they invented and produced. Accordingly, Formanek-Brunell adopts the research methodologies of anthropologists, folklorists, and other scholars who use material objects to analyze and interpret the evolution of specific cultures.

Made to Play House is structured chronologically. Formanek-Brunell explains that even though the number of available toys increased during the colonial period, there were still relatively few dolls in the average middle-class household in the 1850s. After the Civil War, the number of dolls in America increased as citizens enjoyed higher levels of affluence, new consumer outlets surfaced, and parents encouraged children to imitate adult social rituals through doll play. The study also poses a series of interesting case studies spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the dollmaking activities of Martha Chase (Hospital Baby), Mary C. W. Foote (Fairyland Rag Dolls), E. I. Horsman (Campbell Kids), and Rose O’Neill (Kewpies). It traces the growth of the modern doll business along with the various advertising strategies and marketing techniques that doll manufacturers employed to sustain demand for their distinctive products.

Formanek-Brunell focuses her study on a series of tensions that developed between parents and children who clashed over the meanings of dolls and the purposes of doll play; the male and female dollmakers who produced different kinds of dolls; and the American and European (typically German) doll manufacturers who competed for economic dominance in the United States. Perhaps most intriguing and problematic is Formanek-Brunell’s emphasis on the distinction between men’s and women’s doll cultures. Although many scholars consider a distinctive “women’s culture” misleading, Formanek-Brunell argues that “American men and women who manufactured dolls did, in fact, live in different symbolic worlds” (p. 2). The differences between women and men dollmakers were most striking at the turn of the twentieth century, when dolls produced by businesswomen were endorsed by progressive reformers and professional organizations as safe, sanitary, and educational. At the same time, businessmen hired more child labor to make dolls in unsafe, unsanitary, and exploitive work environments.

Although such gender-based distinctions are analytically useful, they impose conceptual limitations as well. This study would benefit from more emphasis on the complex interaction between the men and women who functioned as producers and consumers of dolls over time. Formanek-Brunell [End Page...