In the current issue of
The American, a terrific new magazine published by the venerable American Enterprise Institute, Amity Shales
lauds the American Girl doll, "an exceptional artifact that combines the commercial with the good."
A girl’s childhood is a passage through her own Valley of the Dolls. Girls spend hundreds of hours with these toys and absorb the cultural content the doll is meant to convey. Yet the information that Barbie supplies is relentlessly about relationships—between Barbie and Ken, between Barbie and her little sister, between Barbie and the crowd that admires her 2006 Fashion Fever black cowboy boots. A Barbie childhood is a content-free childhood. It is disconcerting, therefore, to see the leggy creature hogging so much space on the doll shelf.
But there’s another doll in this story, also from Mattel: the American Girl. She has a round childish face, the braidable hair of an eight-year-old, and, at least sometimes, glasses. The deeper difference, however, is that the American Girl’s culture is rooted in fact, not relationship.
Shales informs us that "one and a half million girls and their parents traveled an average of over four hours last year to visit the American Girl Place flagship in Chicago (there’s another in Los Angeles), spending an average of four hours and $225 there." Soon you can add my daughters to that list, as Susie will write about in a forthcoming post.
In the current issue of The American, a terrific new magazine published by the venerable American Enterprise Institute, Amity Shales lauds the American Girl doll, "an exceptional artifact that combines the commercial with the good."