Online Museum of Historical Kitsch, Toys for Girls of Color

My fascination for Historical Kitsch actually seems to be one for historical dolls and toys. What can I say? I was a girly girl, played with dolls, and had my dolls work on the Underground Railroad, or light out on the Overland Trail, or raft down the Mississippi like Huck Finn, or spy on the British in the American Revolution, or help Casket Girls escape abusive husbands. You could say that dolls and history were fairly central to the formation of my identity as a historian. That is, until I sort of lost my identity in that Ophelia stage of adolescence and had to spend half of my adulthood getting it back. But that's another story.

As the discussions reveal in Historiann's posts, "Colonial Barbie" and "Seriously, I Need This Doll for My Research," dolls are one part of the process of creating public memory, that history or heritage making that determines what is or is not worthy of inclusion in the public narrative of the American past. As we all know, certain people are left out of that process. As the commentors on Historiann had great fun in pointing out, peasants, revolutionaries, and other members of the rabble are less likely to be represented for children's play than the elite, nobility, and other representatives of the status quo. Even when minority-status people are represented, they are those who are anointed as exceptional, and portrayed as less than threatening to the status quo.

In fact, that makes the Douglass action figure that I wrote about in my last post on the subject a bit of an anomaly. The doll makers reproduced the intense glare of his early portraits, and include a tiny Narrative for him to hold. This is Douglass at his most radical. Perhaps because the position that he took can now be accepted as the right position -- that is, today we think "of course fighting against slavery was the right thing to do! Who wouldn't?" -- he can be depicted as angry and forceful.

What to make of the Harriet Tubman version of the action figure, from the same company?:
I found this in the Gift Shop of the Reginald Lewis Museum in Baltimore, itself a fine museum to Maryland Black History. Yes, that is supposed to be Harriet Tubman. The box says so. She has a gigantic grin on her face. She does not carry a gun, but does carry a map -- a map! -- of the Underground Railroad. Compare to this image of Tubman herself:

The doll Tubman shows no indication of the subversion, danger and secrecy of the actual Tubman's mission, or the hard life that weighed upon her. She gleefully skips down the trail, map in hand, to help slaves escape bondage -- or so that is the impression that I get. No gun. No stooped posture. No grim visage.

Now, don't get me wrong. I was thrilled that there was a doll for girls of color, for once, especially one that did attempt to give the doll African-American features rather than on that put a white doll in black face; but the toy makers seem to take the power out of Tubman. Do they think that little girls don't want a tough-looking action figure? Or perhaps they fear that parents will object to a doll with a rifle, especially if that rifle is in the hands of a woman, especially if that woman is a woman of color.

Douglass, in this scenario, can be depicted as powerful because he is male and because his power was public, on the stage, and in a cause that most people (yes, "most," because you'd be surprised -- or not) agree was just. Tubman engaged in the same cause, but she was subversive, illegal, willing, to do violence in protecting her charges. To turn her into a toy, she must be rendered non-threatening, just a happy woman engaged in the work of the just.

I also wonder about the issue of "pretty." Tubman was not "pretty" by the patriarchally-approved standards that produce dolls today. You may notice that the Tubman action figure has softer features than Tubman actually did. In fact, the doll has such soft features that she no longer resembles Tubman herself. The face is oval and oblong, the eyes wide, the eyebrow elegantly arched and high, the mouth soft. Tubman's face has been eradicated in this depiction of her.

I would have just thought that this was another poor rendering of a historical face on a child's toy -- after all, none of the presidents or other "heroes" produced by this toy company look anything like their subjects -- except I saw this toy on the next shelf:That is Bessie Coleman, the first African-American female pilot. She was poor, a sharecropper, and wanted to learn to fly. As with the black men who wanted to become pilots, she had to go to France to take lessons, which meant that she also had to learn some French. Who has passion enough to do that? She returned to the U.S. to perform in airshows in the 1920s. She died in a fall from her aircraft when she failed to secure herself in. So she also left behind the cautionary tale of "always wear a seat belt."

In any case, here is what the actual Coleman looked like:As with Tubman, she's beautiful, but not in that patriarchally-approved way. she has a round face and a tough expression. She's also a little on the stocky side, round not lithe -- or at least appears so in this picture with all of her garb on.

The doll, on the other hand, is longer and leaner, although fortunately not of Barbie dimensions. Her face is oval, not round, and her expression is as expressionless as a Stepford Wife. Her features, too, are not as broad or as round. I wonder, too, at the accuracy of the skin color. Coleman wasn't as dark as Tubman, but was she this light, or this tone?

I also cannot pass up mentioning the creepiness of the two heads. I really wanted to buy this doll, but the two heads just disturbed me. Couldn't they make a separate little cap for her, as they did with the goggles? Did they have to make a whole new head? She's not Marie Antoinette, for chrissakes!

Again, as with Tubman, I'm thrilled that there is a doll for girls of color, I'm thrilled that they have retained some African American features, I'm thrilled that this doll is not another Harriet Tubman or another Amelia Earhart, and I'm thrilled that this doll represents intellectual prowess not normally attributed to girls of any color. Yet, I'm disappointed that the doll makers can't seem to let the doll fully represent the woman, that they have to somehow make the woman not herself in order to sell a doll to ostensibly teach about her life.

I'm not sure what to make of these dolls. They are toys, after all. The little girls who play with them probably aren't concerned about the accuracy of the image. They are probably happy to have a doll who looks like them and whom they can send on all sorts of adventures as their own proxy. I remember I was thrilled at dolls that simply had brown hair and brown eyes instead of the "prettier" blonde and blue. I also did not develop eating disorders because of my Barbies, whom I had live more exciting lives than shopping and dating (Ken, by the way, was useless in my Barbies' world). This is to say, I'd be curious as to what the little girls who play with these dolls think of them and how these dolls affect their sense of self and the formation of their identity.