BeForever?: Disability in American Girl Historical Fiction

… with inspiring characters and timeless stories from America’s past … BeForever gives girls today the opportunity to explore the past, find their place in the present, and think about the possibilities the future can bring.

—“American Girl Unveils Beforever Line”

Launched in August 2014, the American Girl BeForever line is the brand’s attempt to make historical fiction more marketable to the contemporary “tween” girl market with “all-new, historically accurate outfits and accessories for dolls; new and refreshed fiction books; and an original line of historically inspired clothing for girls” (“American Girl Unveils” n. pag.). This repackaged line contains the same stories American Girl has been publishing for nearly thirty years in a revised format which tries to emphasize that girls and the qualities the company associates with them, such as can-do attitudes, creativity, and helpfulness, are “forever.” Not all girls throughout history, however, fit into the optimistic, bright, and marketable images of the BeForever line and this rebranding does little to address the qualms many critics of American Girl have already expressed about the brand’s watering down of history and its encouragement of rapid conspicuous consumption among its young audience.

Who fits into the BeForever image of the continuity of girls throughout time and who must be kept off the glossy pages of the American Girl catalog in order to sell this particular understanding of history to children? In what follows, I analyze the role of disability in the historical fiction of the American Girl brand. I argue that the American Girl brand represents disability as mostly absent from history, while gender, race, and class are depicted as universal concerns which exist throughout a variety of historical periods. I further assert that the representation of disability in the American Girl BeForever line is emblematic of concerns with diversity in children’s historical fiction and reflects the particularly fraught nature of the incorporation of disability into neoliberal diversity models which prioritize specific notions of empowerment.

American Girl (AG) is a multiproduct brand that is marketed through discourses of gendered empowerment and education which appeal to both girls and their caretakers. The AG brand produces books (including a line of historical fiction, a line of contemporary fiction, and a line of self-help and craft books), dolls and accessories (including items which match the characters from the two fiction lines), girls’ clothing and accessories, a magazine, an interactive Web site, movies, and several flagship brand stores and smaller retail outlets. The brand has recently expanded to sell products in both Canada and Mexico. AG earns more than 400 million dollars per year and is recognizable to over ninety percent of girls in the United States (Borghini et al. 364, Schlosser 1).

The origin narrative of American Girl begins in 1986, when a former teacher and textbook writer, Pleasant Rowland, was inspired to start the brand after two experiences: first, visiting Colonial Williamsburg and wishing there was a way to bring history to life for children and, second, being dissatisfied choosing a doll for her nieces when the options were either a sexualized Barbie doll or a Cabbage Patch baby doll (Chuppa-Cornell 107, Borghini et al. 364). Rowland sought to create high-quality dolls which girls could befriend (rather than emulate or mother in the cases of Barbie and Cabbage Patch dolls, respectively) and which, through stories, would connect girls with history in interesting ways (Chuppa-Cornell 107). Thus American Girl was created, starting with just three dolls/characters, each with their accompanying six-book series (written at a fourth to fifth grade reading level) and a collection of text-related accessories for girls and their dolls, all sold by mail order catalog.

The brand rapidly expanded into the avenues noted above and in 1998, Rowland sold American Girl to Mattel (Rowland 41). Since then, the brand has remained consistently popular and revenue-generating with over 147 million books and 25 million dolls sold since 1986 (“American Girl | Fast Facts”). Mattel’s takeover of AG has resulted in an increased focus on and expansion of the contemporary line, while simultaneously resulting in the relative stasis...