Life Like Dolls
Life Like Dolls
Life Like Dolls
A.F.Robertson
Routledge
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Published in 2004 by
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Published in Great Britain by
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Copyright © 2004 by A.F.Robertson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robertson, A.F.
Life like dolls: the collector doll phenomenon and the lives of the
women who love them/A.F.Robertson. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-415-94450-3 (hardback: alk. paper)—ISBN 0-415-94451-1 (pbk.: alk.
paper)
1. Dolls—Collectors and collecting—Psychological aspects. 2. Women—United
States—Psychology. I. Title.
NK4893.R62 2003
688.7'221'075–dc21 2003009895
List of Pictures vi
List of Figures vii
Preface viii
Appendices 231
Notes 251
Bibliography 266
Index 277
List of Pictures
lived, and how you view your own past and future. In this
strange phenomenon of the collector doll, some aspects of the
way women have grown during the course of the twentieth
century have been fixed in porcelain. If we can read the features
of these dolls with sufficiently open minds, they may tell us
something interesting about our collective history, and perhaps
also something significant about our constitution as human
beings.
This project was an offshoot of my undergraduate and
graduate classes on the family at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. Around 1990, we noticed the increasing number
of advertisements for porcelain collector dolls (PCDs) in the
Sunday newspapers and mailbox fillers. It was immediately
obvious that they were intended for adult women rather than
children, and that they could tell us something interesting about
family life in contemporary America. The 440 advertisements we
clipped and discussed became the core of the project, as it
developed.
Many people may think it odd that a man should have
started and carried through this particular project. In our
radically gendered society, a male with a large stack of pictures
and texts dealing with effigies of little children will inevitably
attract some suspicion. I offer no apologies. Apart from the
captivating strangeness of the phenomenon, I came to the dolls
from a lifelong interest in the ways in which human
reproduction is socially organized. American and European
women who seemed to be accumulating substitute children
were obvious grist to my mill. The collectors I got to know
seemed relaxed about or even indifferent to my sex. There are
men everywhere in the doll business, sculpting and trading,
driving to fairs and minding stalls, helping their spouses at home
with care and maintenance. A few look sheepish, but most are
breezy and self-confident. One of my early mentors and sources
of inspiration, the anthropologist Meyer Fortes, used to declare
bluntly that you couldn’t be a proper anthropologist if you had
never raised a family of your own. I argued back vehemently
that someone like myself, married but without children, may
actually be more observant about family life than someone
afflicted with diapers, teenage delinquency, and school bills. I
xii
The doll you buy today may be a wise investment for the
future. Once an edition is sold out, those who want a doll
from the edition must pay whatever the market will bear,
if and when one becomes available from dealers or at
auction. That’s why fine collectible dolls often sell for
more then their original prices within only a few years of
being issued. Of course, not all dolls increase in value;
values can go down…
2 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
diminutive monks, but wear bibs and little sweaters, and often
have toys. “Jizò is quite remarkable in that it is a stand-in for
both the dead infant and the savior figure who supposedly
takes care of it in its otherworld journey. The double-take effect
—one moment a child and the next a Buddhist savior in
monkish robes—is intentional.” Children are welcome at these
cemeteries—there is even a playground. “The sense of kitsch
arises because two things are conflated here that we in the West
usually want to separate as much as possible—that is, the
cemetery and the nursery.”21
There are some interesting parallels with the phenomenally
successful Precious Moments dolls, manufactured by Enesco,
that are to be seen from time to time among the motley objects
that appear in American cemeteries. This is a highly
standardized, hand-sized, androgynous doll reminiscent of the
earlier Kewpie. The signature feature is the eyes, which are tear-
shaped (set vertically in “drop” mode), evocative of dewy-eyed
newborn innocence. The originator of the Precious Moments
dolls, Samuel Butcher, hoped that “these figurines, fashioned
after my artwork, would be little messengers delivering the
inspirational thoughts and teachings of the Lord.”22 One
Precious Moments collection of about 22 dolls is “Sugar
Town,” whose styles and accompanying texts closely reflect an
essentially white, Christian-right market. A worldwide complex
of collector clubs has sprung up around these dolls, focused by
Butcher on a chapel to which Precious Moments enthusiasts can
make pilgrimage. It has a ceiling in the Sistine style, but
decorated with the familiar Precious Moments figures. With the
motto “Loving, Sharing, and Caring,” the Precious Moments
movement raises charitable funds, notably for the Easter Seal
Society. We traced 477,000 Web sites related to Precious
Moments.
quite a lot about the commodity and the people who produce
and sell it, by other means.
Today, doll collectors are not hard to find. Since the
phenomenon got under way some 25 years ago, they have been
“coming out” in increasing numbers. If you are curious, log
onto the Internet, or drop by your local doll store and chat with
the proprietor and the shoppers who linger there. It’s a passion
to share, and of course you might also succumb to the charms
of Madeleine or Dana or little Christopher: as the
advertisement says, “Who could say ‘no’ to such a cute little
boy? With that mischievous grin, those deep blue eyes and
incredible dimples, Christopher can get away with just about
anything—including stealing your heart!” And just think, you
can “bring the joy of this adorable little boy into your home for
only $76!”
Chapter Two
The Commodity
ANTIQUE DOLLS
Dolls, however we may define them, have been around for a
very long time. A 2,000-year-old doll from a child’s grave in
Peru is “a fine example of the cross-culturally ubiquitous style
of doll: its soft responsive body, warm colours and appealingly
stylized face offered the tactile pleasure and reassurance that
children have always sought from dolls.”1 Similar objects have
been found in the ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman graves
of adults as well as children. Such dolls were evidently made at
22 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
home, and it is interesting that the doll industry today still draws
much of its creative energy from very small scale “kitchen
table” design and production, mostly by women.
The first clear evidence of large-scale manufacturing of dolls
comes from Germany in the fifteenth century. From the
workshops in cities like Augsburg and Nürnberg we have early
indications of “mass production,” such as the “ring” method,
by which a profile was cut horizontally through a piece of
timber then sliced vertically and carved into dozens of figures.2
The dolls produced in these workshops were mostly female
adult figures, made in simple materials (wood, clay, wax) and
costumed in local styles. The baby doll of the modern period
was not yet born. These earlier dolls were evidently intended
for women as well as children, and the more elaborate ones
were exchanged as gifts among the expanding European middle
class and aristocracy. These were the forerunners of the
“character,” “fashion,” and “ladies’” dolls of the nineteenth
century, important strands in the ancestry of today’s collector
dolls.
The elaborate dolls of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
were developed not for lucky children, but to model women’s
clothes. This is probably the origin of the expression “all dolled
up.” Scaled down to less than half life-size, these were
despatched by European couturiers to clients around the world,
and became treasured items in their own right. They were
exchanged as gifts at Easter (the start of the new fashion season)
and to commemorate weddings, originating the enduringly
popular tradition of the bridal doll. As the craze caught on,
celebrities like the young Queen Victoria (herself a doll
collector), the Empress Eugénie of France, and the Swedish
singer Jenny Lind were used as models. Subsidiary industries
developed to provide clothes and accessories: seamstresses,
milliners, shoemakers, jewelers specializing in the trade. These
dolls were much desired by (rich) little girls, to whom they were
entrusted as icons of femininity, models of etiquette, and
exercises in needlework, not as playthings in the “rag doll”
mode. In these mannequin figures there is at least a hint of
Barbie, the precocious mini-adult with a passion for fashion.3
THE COMMODITY 23
CHILDREN’S DOLLS
The twentieth century is the epoch of the child’s doll. From the
seventeenth century onward, play dolls in robust materials
(wood, cloth, leather) intended for “real” children were
produced in increasing quantities, but not in the factories of
Pierre Jumeau or Casimir Bru. The classic bébés and
mannequins of the nineteenth century became antiques in the
twentieth: old-fashioned, highly valued, and definitively in the
display rather than the play category. There was a brief revival
of the adult character and fashion dolls in the 1920s in the
craze for “boudoir dolls.” These languorous, stagey, decorative
dolls with cigarettes and spit curls were much influenced by the
cinema and such personalities as Clara Bow, Rudolph
Valentino, and Jean Harlow. But the Great Depression
“marked a sudden end to this creative fantasy.”9
In the twentieth century dolls were adjusting to a new
historical phenomenon, recently dubbed “the invention of
childhood”:
of them and not with others. If you don’t connect with them,
chances are you won’t even notice them.
It is impossible to understand the PCDs without paying close
attention to the life circumstances of the women who buy them.
To dismiss the PCD craze as “childish” would miss the
distinctively adult meanings the collectors, as older women,
attach to the dolls. And yet, children are the models for the
dolls, and it is to childhood passions that the women’s desire
for these particular dolls harks back. Making sense of this,
putting together a convincing objective explanation, turned out
to be less easy than we supposed when we began looking at
PCDs in 1991. But there is no doubt that the doll
manufacturers were already very smart at reading, and catering
for, those very special demands.
THE FIRMS
The trade in collectibles, through which the main firms came to
doll production, generated an estimated $7.6 billion in sales in
1994.23 They were the companies best placed to manufacture
and distribute the new commodity when demand for it arose,
and it was from this motley product environment—not “dolls
and stuffed animals”—that the PCD emerged.
We latched onto the PCD phenomenon through the
advertising campaigns, and soon identified the leading firms.
All of them were, or soon became, parts of larger
conglomerates dealing in collectibles, and all specialized in
direct sales to customers through intensive advertising:
Teasing out information about these firms and the PCDs from
the limited, publicly available information about their parent
companies was a tough task. The industry in the mid-1990s
THE COMMODITY 37
MANUFACTURE
The history of doll production has a tendency to repeat itself,
shifting back and forth between production on the small scale
and large scale, from kitchen table and workshop to factory
and international enterprise. The contemporary collector doll is
no exception to this pattern. Viewed just as a physical object
that someone has to make, it has some notable characteristics:
Figure 2-a: Number of doll manufacturers and total sales in the United
States, 1967–97
United States, and to Hong Kong and the Guangdong
hinterland in China in the twentieth century. It was not always
the complete doll that moved: in the early days German body
parts were sewn into torsos and dressed in France, and today,
crates of little heads, or dresses, or rocking horses converge
from around the world in the creation of Sarah or Harry.
This “globalization” of production has attracted much
negative publicity, and manufacturers are less than candid about
where their dolls are produced. In general, the more expensive
the doll, the more likely it is to have been manufactured in one
place. Danbury seeks to outsource as much as possible, whereas
Franklin, whose dolls cost about twice as much, prefers in-
house production staff.40 In the early 1990s, Knickerbocker
(Georgetown) had eight facilities, two of which are in Bangkok
(where the company has a total of 39,500 square feet).41 Given
the diverse origins of the PCD’s components, there are few
traces of those “Made with Pride in the USA” labels. The
Economist says of the phenomenally successful American Girl
series: “These quintessentially American dolls are made in
THE COMMODITY 43
Figure 2-b: Total sales of U.S. doll firms and wages of production
workers, 1967–97
Figure 2-c: Total employees and total production workers in U.S. doll
firms, 1967–97
middle-aged, motherly women. It is very clear that their
customers who phone in for a chat feel completely at ease.
In parallel with this there has been a shift from in-house
designers to relatively well paid freelancers, the “geniuses” who
create the “magic” of the PCD. We have the strongest
impression that the firms now recognize that the fountain of
new ideas is out there among the clientele, rather than among
its own staff. Ashton-Drake advertises for designers on its Web
site, declaring “We pay on a project by project basis…. Ashton-
Drake maintains an extensive Artist Resource File, which is
constantly reviewed by our product development team as new
doll concepts are created.” Jobs are also available for wig
makers, prop makers, and illustrators “that can capture
realistic babies, toddlers, children, brides, fashion and religious
figures.” They should “have understanding of expressive
posing, and realistic features and proportions.”44
Prolific designers like Yolanda Bello, who works for Ashton-
Drake, seem to have entered the collectible doll industry in the
mid-1980s. The biographical sketches that have accompanied
their emergence in the sales’ process have a strikingly similar
THE COMMODITY 45
Figure 2-d: Number of production workers in U.S. doll fims and average
wages, 1967–97
pattern. They usually have some basic training in, or talent for,
painting and sculpture. They began making dolls at home for
themselves, their children, or friends. Laura Lee Wambach has
been designing dolls for 15 years: “I was just shopping one day
and saw a box of clay in a craft store and someone had sculpted
a little person there and I thought well if they can do it and sell
it then I can too. I have always loved art and I love to draw and
paint.”45 Pauline Bjonness-Jacobsen has been sculpting dolls
“forever…30 years, something like that”:
A talented artist can make single “custom” dolls and sell them
for several hundred dollars. Her materials are typically
synthetic clays andpolymer resins like “Fimo,” “Cernit,” and
“Sculpey,” which are pre-colored and can be hardened at low
temperatures in a kitchen oven. Butnone of these has the
texture or the kudos of porcelain, whichdemands a different
order of expertise and apparatus. Not many dollmakers,
however skilled and ambitious, can graduate to this
material,and fewer still manage to scale up production and
sales on their ownaccount. Most sell their talents to the larger
firms, where they bringto the commodity a passion and an
immediate rapport with the consumers that are so easily lost in
(male-controlled) mass production.The big firms have learned
THE COMMODITY 47
MARKETING
Collectibles, dolls especially, became “the definitive example of
classic direct marketing” in the 1990s.49 Middle America is very
accustomed to catalog purchasing, and the graduation of direct
sales to TV shows came naturally. But as the recurrent phrase
“from our home to your home” suggests, there is a strong
feeling that this special, almost-human commodity should move
swiftly and directly from the hands of her Maker to the bosom
of the Collector, unsullied by intermediaries like wholesalers
and retailers. The TV sales shows conjure up this moment of
private satisfaction:
The sales strategies for the PCDs are quite different from those
for children’s dolls, which have to be sold to parents “through
adver tisements in print media based on claims for educational
value” as well as to children themselves through “television
commercials based on their ‘badge appeal’ to peers.”51
Advertising and sales for the PCDs aim much more directly at
their adult targets. From the mid-1980s, advertisements for
PCDs appeared in the clutter of ads for processed foods and
housewares, costume jewelry, and ready-to-wear clothes which
spill out of every mailbox, TV guide, and Sunday newspaper. In
the 1990s they featured prominently in magazines that picked
out the private, homebody clientele quite clearly: McCalls,
Country Home, Ladies Home Journal, Parade, USA Weekend,
Woman’s Realm (UK). The advertisements might catch your
48 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
The dolls were also spread out fairly evenly by age category
among the main firms, except that Ashton-Drake produced 21
of the 26 “infant” dolls in our sample. Infant dolls with their
closed eyes, partial bodies and simple garments were the
cheapest ($85 on average). The adult dolls were slightly more
expensive ($109) than the average price for children and
toddlers ($107). There was little difference in the price averages
for dolls of different ethnicity: Caucasian dolls cost on average
$105, African Americans $114, and Native Americans $97.
The two largest-selling companies, Ashton-Drake and
Georgetown, produced the most ethnically diverse range.
Between them they accounted for all but 1 of the 18 African
American dolls in our sample.
The dolls are porcelain mainly because they imitate the
antiques that doll enthusiasts can no longer afford. The hope is
that they will, in the fullness of time, become real antiques, but
like their predecessors their future value depends heavily on the
fragility of the material. Every doll that gets broken adds to the
54 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
worth of those that remain. Down the years, dolls have been
saved from attrition by being carefully conserved. With an eye
to investment, the “serious” collector keeps everything intact,
from bows and shoelaces to wrappings, labels, and receipts, and
must resist the temptation to make little changes to clothes and
hair. Nearly all the doll owners we met were critical of
collectors who put material values above emotional values.
Keeping a doll boxed, with her label and price tag still fixed to
her wrist, is considered inhumane. We were repeatedly assured
that every doll was out on display, that all of them were loved
and carefully handled, and that nobody was hidden away
waiting for her dollar value to appreciate.
The manufacturers of the PCDs have to strike a delicate
balance between the realism of the doll and its price. Our
sample suggests that $100 is the threshold at which enough
detail can be applied to the doll to make it look realistic, while
producing it in sufficient numbers to make it commercially
viable. Around $200 is the starting point for the production of
individual, hand-made dolls. A doll by a reputable artist which
has some chance of holding and enhancing its value costs more
than $500. Small-scale specialist producers encounter this
threshold when they expand business. Ken Shader turned his
hobby making porcelain dolls into a $4 million business,
Shader’s China Doll Inc. Each part of each doll was signed and
dated by the craftsperson who made it, a feature that
recommended it to the serious collector. As business expanded,
three quarters of Shader’s dolls were produced on contract for
other firms, leaving him in a quandary about whether to step
up mass production at lower values, or continue trading up-
market in his own name.66
Until the mid-1990s, many PCD advertisements stressed the
investment value of the dolls, including little charts of the
escalating resale value of previous items.
more into their lives. It is something that they can take ownership
in. That is why we chose to license. It is a way to get the Coca-
Cola trademark to consumers around the world.”70 More
generally, the collectors seem quite capable of holding the
material and the emotional qualities of the dolls in separate
cognitive compartments. The prices and installment terms, the
references to glass eyes and hand numbering, and the
merchandising tricks do not seem to detract from the romance
of the story line.
In the advertisements, the value of the dolls is talked up by
every means at the disposal of the manufacturer. Much play is
made on the classy European origins of the tradition, from the
materials of the dolls to the origins of the artists. The
advertisements are peppered with specialist vocabulary, much of
it with a French accent: “petite” (less than 10 inches),
“soutache,” “ecru,” “voile,” “pantalettes.” Nicolette is
“exquisite European artistry at a noteworthy price!” Becky was
“created by European-born designer Bets van Boxel.” Gudrun
Haak and Sylvia Natterer are both “renowned European” doll
artists.
A big marketing challenge is putting a price tag on the dolls,
while playing up their priceless emotional value. “Let this
toddler know he’s still loved for only $59.95!” (Tommy). Sweet
Carnation is “so posable and cuddly, at a tiny price” ($54.95).
“Welcome ‘Ethan’ into your home for only $69.95.” “Cuddle
her, dress her, and rock her to sleep for just $79.95 payable in
easy monthly installments” (“It’s a Girl”). “With all this
wonderful detail, Jenny is priced at a reasonable $119.” Really
expensive dolls tend to cut the sweet talk: “The price is $295”
(Lenox Christening Doll).
But there is no great need for the hard sell. The doll firms
have had one marketing asset that they have exploited to the
full. These customers want more—and more—dolls. They are
collectors, a fact which is imprinted squarely on the identity of
the commodity itself. As a prelude to tackling the question why
some women would want to collect these dolls by the hundred,
we must first consider the more general mystery of why people
should want collect large amounts of anything. How and why
60 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
from his employer “to feed his uncon trollable Bakelite habit”
and his collection of 400 Barbie dolls.22 In the main, collecting
is harmless, a Rutgers University psychologist and glass collector
told Ehrenfeld: “You don’t hear many case histories of families
where someone mortgaged the house for a collection. You’re
much more likely to gamble away the family fortune or drink it
away than use it up buying beautiful things.”23
A comprehensive psychology of collecting has yet to be
written, but it would probably dwell on five themes: childish
regression, sexual urge, anality (the urge to order, categorize,
and curate), the search for security, and loneliness. There is a
developmental connection to be argued among them, reaching
back to infancy and forward to old age, evocative of the
perspective on growth we have deployed in this book. But to
understand the PCD phenomenon it is also important to bring
these feelings into conjunction with the recent history of
collecting as a cultural phenomenon—our quest for the
biohistorical meaning. In the following sections we shall begin
the exploration biographically, considering what dolls mean as
childish things in the lives of adult collectors, and the
motivations of growth, before returning to the role of the
manufacturers in producing a new commodity that taps so
deeply into human feelings.
When Joan opens her front door, dolls greet the visitor,
sitting on either side of the hallway on their own chairs.
Walk around her house and dolls of every shape, size, type
and colour fill the rooms. They sit on the stairs, on beds,
74 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
As Angela became too old to play with dolls, they were put
into family storage…. Their role as toys of passage in
Angela’s childhood was over, but by the time she was an
adult in the 1950s, she began to add to the collection
deliberately by searching antique shops. Between 1950
and 1978, the years of her marriage and her young family,
the dolls became a collecting interest occupying the role in
her day-to-day life, which collecting does by structuring
leisure time and shopping trips and, in Angela’s case, by
creating a personal position and relationships through
showing her dolls and giving talks to local women’s
clubs.40
I asked her why she started to collect dolls. She was a bit
apprehensive about answering my question point blank. I
told her that I was doing some research for a paper, and
she asked me if she could get back to me. The next day
she came in to where I work, and showed me a picture of
her family. As I scanned the picture I noticed a perfectly
dressed, neat and orderly little girl holding a rag doll. I
asked if that was her, and it was. She then went on to
explain that her doll (the one in the picture) was taken
80 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
away from her by her mother when she was ten years old
because it was too ugly and dirty. Sandy says that her doll
was the only friend she had, and it was taken away so
abruptly. Ever since then, Sandy has missed her doll, and
always wanted her back. Sure, she was given other dolls
but she never loved one as much as “Jenni,” the one that
was taken away. Now Sandy collects dolls.
for yourself but for the people for whom you are responsible
(your family) in the human life process. Big businesses, nation-
states, and other human corporations use the same growth
justification, but in recent years this has been perceived as a
ruse, an overworked metaphor that draws accusations of
“corporate greed.” A similar sort of suspicion hangs over a
“collection” of material objects, especially if these objects do
not appear to be serving any useful, life-sustaining purpose.
For accumulation to appear wholesome, it should involve the
whole family. We found that an enthusiasm for collecting is
very often a family affair. Parents encourage their children, and
spouses encourage each other. Deb W.’s husband and sons are
into gun and knife collecting. She bridled at my ill-advised
suggestion that these were nastier things to collect than dolls.
She explained patiently that weapons are an inextricable part of
the American western traditions in which her family was rooted,
and that her menfolk were sweet and gentle people who
encouraged doll collecting among their womenfolk. Deb
insisted that they were connoisseurs, interested only in quality
guns and knives. I made a lame comment about my own
fascination with Swiss Army knives. “There you are then,” she
said, “you know how it feels.”
Husbands are commonly drawn into repairing, conserving,
or transporting dolls, but her collection and his are usually
separate enterprises. Ehrenfeld tells of a couple who collect,
respectively, dolls and “wheeled things” and have found ways
to collaborate: “They’ve decorated their home with vignettes of
her dolls riding his pedal cars or pushing his toy baby
carriages.” Living with an avid collector can be very trying, or
an exercise in mutual toleration. As his financial business
prospered, Ben E. started replacing the household furniture
with antiques. Now, he says, “Our house looks like a forest
there’s so many candlesticks around. We don’t have a
comfortable place to sit. We sit in wing chairs from 1710.” Ben
has to take time out of his busy schedule to “water” his
furniture: “I have 80 little plastic saucers of water in all the
hollow pieces at home,” he says.56 It is not surprising that
collections often feature in divorce proceedings, which are
84 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
But how could a little girl bear the burden of a collection that
had built up so much portentous value? Having made their way
sedately down the distaff side, expanding their numbers and
boosting their material value, Angela Kellie’s dolls were far
beyond play, and ready only for the sort of display afforded by
the museum she duly established.
Heirlooms do not draw random lines between relatives
through time. They are governed by rules: the rights of an
eldest son, or of someone specified in a will. Some objects
(guns, crockery) have selective qualities built in to them—they
are more likely to pass to a male or a female heir. Even more so
than jewelry, clothing, and domestic utensils, dolls are
distinctively—challengingly—female property. Anthropologists
have written a good deal about the importance of this in
helping to secure women’s lives in the face of male economic
privilege.61 In a patriarchal world such gendered goods have the
strategic advantage of passing from mother to daughter,
carrying both sentimental and material value that men cannot,
respectably, get their hands on. Flo, a Barbie enthusiast, “says
she views her collecting as a mothering activity, since mothers
are supposed to keep things for their daughters, and her
daughter and granddaughters will inherit her collection.”62
But something more than material values are being
bequeathed with the collection. It is a memorial to the
collector, a lifework that affords a degree of personal
redemption in a relentlessly secularized world. “If collections
can create the sense of a life-history, stretching back, perhaps
THE COLLECTION JUST GROWS AND GROWS 87
before the collector’s own birth, they also create the sense of
immortality, of life extended beyond the individual’s death.”63
Deb W. told us that the older collectors she knows wonder
uneasily what will happen to dolls they have “saved”: will an
unthinking relative regard them as “a load of old junk” and
heave them out, unaware of the emotional energy that has gone
into the collecting? They fear that heirs will not respect the
patience, opportunism, and aesthetic interest that went into
building up the collection. “We feel about our collections as if
they were part of our physical selves, and we identify with
them,” says Pearce. “Loss of collections brings the same grief
and the same sense of deprivation which accompanies other
bereavements.” People say, “It’s a permanent record of my
life,” and many of them have grandiose ideas of public interest
in their collections: “I’ve thought of putting it in a museum.”64
Judi H., who works for May Department Stores, dreams of
turning a Victorian house into a museum for her 2,800 dolls.65
The PCD advertisements make some play on such ambitions:
Catherine Rose is “created in a tradition which has seen dolls
of this [Victorian] era become priceless antiques, displayed in
museums and distinguished private collections.”
The precedent for this is the large museum or gallery
endowed by industrial barons over the last century and a half.
Art collecting, according to Oxford don Angelica Goodden, is
“the greed that can be glorious.” “The ‘real’ collector, as is well
known, has an obsessive desire to possess that may be simply a
different version of an earlier, less reputable, lust for
accumulation.” But the guilt of wealth can be expiated in “the
enduring art of acquisition.” According to Goodden, “luckily,
the odium attached to wealth lessens when the cash is
channeled into art, since art confers a kind of spiritual
respectability.”66 It does so, of course, mainly because so many
rich and powerful people have, for so many centuries, sought
expiation in such grand public gestures for notably egoistic
lives: the collection is a moral purgative when it is finally
dumped in a public gallery.
“The true collector thinks he’s never going to die and that if
he does, he’ll die with all his toys,” says Harry R., a
“passionate collector of puzzles.” He says his biggest rival has
88 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
PASSION ON DEMAND
“I collect dolls, primarily because I have so much joy and
passion,” declares a caller to the Home Shopping Network’s
Collectors Day program:
take the time to appreciate the joy and beauty that they
bring you because they are always there. They are always
with you, when you wake up in the morning, when you
have a lonesome day, they are there.70
and more dolls engages with the pas sionate urge of the women
to own not just one, but many of these exquisite objects. In this
chapter we have viewed collecting as a symptom of the urge to
accumulate, which is essential to the cycle of human growth. In
the next chapter we shall draw the biographical and the
historical lines more closely together, putting the lives of the
women who now appear mainly as distinct cohorts of collectors
into the historical perspective of the twentieth century.
We keep returning to the oddity of this commodity: the objects
collected are perceived ambiguously as things and as people.
Whatever dispassionate observers may imagine, they are
bought, and sold, as lifelike. Accumulating people is what
growth, both in the sense of human reproduction and social
expansion, is all about, but in every human society how this is
done is subject to intense moral regulation. Until it was
outlawed in our societies, slavery, the private appropriation of
people, was positively sanctioned; and paying money for
adopted children or human embryos remains morally
contentious. The dolls circumvent these restrictions: you can
pay for and possess not just one, but hundreds of these “real”
little people.
The ambiguity of these lifelike dolls allows the collectors to
carry to extravagant lengths an urge for family growth which
is, at heart, profoundly normal. These women are childless,
some permanently so, others mostly in the temporary sense that
their children have already gone or have not yet come. Quite a
few have real children of their own at home, but have room in
their lives for more. They often talk about their boundless love,
and it is hardly surprising that the modern marketplace has
allowed the suppliers to fulfill their desires. It seems that the
urge to buy more and more dolls will always and ultimately be
a fruitless search for a missing, abundantly real child. And yet,
for many of the collectors we met there is something absurd
about that possibility: asked if they would swap all their dolls
for a real living child of their own, they usually gave some
variant of this surprised response: “Well, for a start, I’d have to
be a whole lot younger!”
Chapter Four
The Doll That Needs You
desire.” But it turns out that what Sophie desires is not hugs or
kisses, but a doll of her own, which puts her acquisitive urges
directly on a par with those of the collector herself: “Little
Victorian girls used to fall in love with beautiful dollies every
bit as much as we do today. And Sophie had her heart set on
one of her mama’s dearest treasures…the famous Victorian doll
known as the Bru.”
Because the word “desire” seems inapt in doll talk, I have
side-stepped it in this book, talking instead—like the collectors
themselves—about passion. This powerful word shifts our
attention back toward bodily feeling, going beyond desire to
evocations of both agony and ecstasy. It helps us to identify a
wider range of sensations through the lives of the collectors, as
these have unfolded in particular historical circumstances. As we
got to know more about doll collecting, two distinct
biohistorical categories emerged: the women who were
experiencing, respectively, the agony of the “empty womb” and
of the “empty nest.” The two categories are not mutually
exclusive: a woman who has never had children has also in some
sense an empty nest; and a woman whose children have left
home may have very direct empty womb cravings for another
baby. But the distinction is a substantial one, about bodies in
time: the ticking clock of female fertility on the one hand, and
on the other the cyclical pattern of family growth that shifts
children out of the parental household to establish parental
households of their own. The empty nest and empty womb
present significant differences in the motives for acquiring the
dolls, different expectations of their functions, and different
preferences in design. And they are by far the most common
and the clearest explanations that the collectors themselves
offer for their passion for dolls.
week, and years later reproached her mother: “Why did you
burn it, I loved it so, and she loved me. She is in God’s house
and sometime I will see her.”9
Nancy G. lost her dolls in the Depression. “My dolls were up
there on the shelf, and then one day, when we had to move,
they just disappeared. Some, my brothers broke—not on
purpose. I guess I always wanted to have my dolls back.”
Nancy wanted those dolls, not just any dolls, and when she could
afford it she became a serious antiques collector. Nancy never
married—“I am a single person”—but had a successful career
in local government. Raised in Connecticut, she came to
California with her mother 30 years ago, after her father died.
She likes cats, is a wood carver, walks everywhere, and was
about 80 when I first met her in 1994, at a doll fair. She was
minding the local club’s display, a big chipboard doll house
filled with an assortment of “serious” dolls. She was cradling a
new purchase, a nineteenth-century china-faced German doll
that cost $700. It was small and rather plain, the face about
three and a half inches in diameter, with yellow hair molded
onto its skull. It had a simple white dress with a bit of
embroidery, and pointed leather boots on limp tubular legs.
The doll was one of a pair of “twins,” and her friend—a fellow
Club member— bought the other. Nancy said she keeps her
collection in drawers and chests. “You have to keep them
covered, because the clothes deteriorate.” Her pleasure is to
unpack them, undress and dress them, and then carefully put
them away again.
If we want to know more about the women who experienced
childhood during the Depression, we have as an excellent
source a psychosocial study of 167 people born in 1920–21 in
Oakland, California. They were white, mostly Protestant kids
from middle- and working-class homes, selected from fifth- and
sixth-grade classes in 1931. Their life experiences were tracked
through to the early 1990s, supplemented by a slightly later
sample from the Berkeley area.10 They form a valuable
reference group for our own California-based project—they
represent the grandmothers of our student researchers.
Although we have no record of how many of them actually
collected dolls, their circumstances are indicative of those who
104 THE DOLL THAT NEEDS YOU
do.11 During the PCD boom of the 1990s they were in their
seventies, very much part of the target clientele. The detailed
monitoring of these people’s lives gives us a pretty clear view of
who would be likely to collect dolls later in life and who would
not.
In the 1930s, when these people were adolescents, the
Oakland research was heavily preoccupied with psychosocial
testing and the “objective” reports of parents and teachers.
Today they would probably be observed much more directly,
with more attention paid to their own understandings and
activities. More account would also be taken of their relations
with other family members, especially grandparents, which the
study “unfortunately overlooked” (there were, after all, rather
fewer of them at the time of the study than now).12
Nevertheless, the children’s family circumstances emerge quite
clearly. Their parents were in their late thirties and early forties
at the depth of the Depression (the first months of 1933), and
Oakland was an area of relatively great deprivation in national
terms. That year their median family income dropped 40
percent to around $1,900.13 A third of the families sought
public assistance during the 1930s.14 The study explores the
relationships between these Depression kids and their parents,
and notes the difference between them and their own children:
a “sharp contrast in childhoods, one marked by scarcity and
the other by affluence.”15
Their adolescence was severely curtailed—“there were no
‘teenagers’ in the Depression.”16 Inevitably, for the children
who were sent to school with cardboard in their shoes to cover
the holes, toys were a very low priority on the family budget.
The two survival tactics—cutting expenditure and
supplementing income—meant children worked much more,
inside (girls especially) and outside (boys) the household, and
thus had less time, as well as money, to spend on toys. It is also
likely that if the toys they had were not actually sold, those of
any value went into the display/save category, rather than play.
Children made do with rag or clothespeg dolls and tin-can cars.
If the better-off children felt most deprived, it was probably
because toy manufacture had boomed in the first two decades of
the century, and expectations had been raised. In parallel with
LIFE LIKE DOLLS 105
dolls for the girls. These feelings were evoked not so much by
the logic of what “really” happened earlier in the course of a
long and eventful life, but by a second, parallel sense of loss,
the departure of children and the death of a spouse, an
encounter with the solitude of the empty nest. “‘When I was a
little girl we didn’t have the means,’ said Debbie Ray, mother
of six. ‘But now that I am a grownup little girl I can afford what
I want’ Having a lifelike doll in the house is a nice way to
sublimate the need to have a baby around. ‘And this way they
won’t grow up and leave me,’ a laughing Debbie Kay said.”35
Women who have devoted their lives to child rearing may feel
particularly keenly the sense of emptiness when the children
leave home. Doll collecting can start with the early onset of this
process, a solace to Mom as teenagers become absorbed in their
own affairs. We might imagine that a woman who has raised
five or ten children would regard their departure as a welcome
respite, but we hear repeatedly that such “supermoms” make
the most avid doll collectors. “As the last of nine children in the
blended family of Carol and Dennis Larsen left home, the dolls
arrived.” The Larsens farm 2,500 acres in Iowa; Carol has
taken computer classes and deals with the business side. She
collects and now makes her own porcelain dolls, “learning from
other artists and by reading.” Carol’s creative energy is a
reminder that the empty nest may also harbor sensations of the
empty womb. The domestic space vacated by the children has
been taken over by display and workshop areas, sewing tables
and kilns. “Can’t we ever eat supper without a naked doll on
the counter?” complained the youngest Larsen, who now works
the farm with his dad. Dennis has taken up carpentry and
makes dolls’ furniture, and he and Carol sell their wares at 20
weekend shows a year. “We work well together,” says
Dennis.36
The dolls that cluster around the older women are an
antidote for loneliness and the sense of purposelessness, the
great agonies of modern times. A more elaborate study than
ours would have paid close attention to numerous older women
who do not collect dolls. Our intuition is that a woman living
in close proximity to her grandchildren and actively involved
with them simply has no need for surrogates—she lacks the
LIFE LIKE DOLLS 109
buying dolls at the top, custom-made end of the doll range, two
were childless high achievers with incomes to match. They were
inclined to disdain the run-of-the-mill PCDs, which provided
solace for women with lower disposable incomes. Judi H. of
Portland, Oregon, is an executive with a division of the May
company, and “gets a high” buying dolls. She has 2,800 of
them, which she reckons are worth around half a million
dollars. She has hopes of establishing a museum to house them
in the future. Fiftyish and never married, Judi confides that the
dolls have “fulfilled a tremendous maternal need. I could never
mother 3,000 children and be a CEO.” Of her dolls she says “I
know what every one of them is doing. I know if a cleaning
woman has moved one.” They regularly receive the
professional attention of a seamstress, who handstarches their
costumes. She says her doll family lightens her heart when she
comes home at the end of a long day. Only one of them
accompanies her to the office, but is kept hidden away to avoid
adverse comments about what Judi calls her “ultrafeminine
hobby.”46
Although we lack statistical evidence, there are strong
indications that women in the 35-to-45-year-old, empty-womb
category are particularly attracted to newborn and infant dolls,
like “Homecoming”:
This doll might be a good match for Sarah J., 45, who works as
an account manager for a large, Atlanta-based insurance
company:
When Dan was born the only feeling that was in my mind
was pure joy. It was the exact same feeling when Tony
was born. I tried to have children; it was the only thing I
ever wanted. It was the happiest time in my life. They
were, and are, the light of my life. I love them the way I
never thought possible. If God meant for those
[miscarried] children to be born, they would have been
born. Instead, He sent me Dan and Tony, the two most
perfect children in the world. For a long time before they
were born I couldn’t understand why He took [the others]
114 THE DOLL THAT NEEDS YOU
away from me, then Dan and Tony were born and I
understood why. When I look at the dolls they remind me
of that time when everything was so perfect. They were
perfect little angels, but now they’re grown up and on
their own. I liked taking care of them, I miss taking care
of them. I think that is why I take such good care of my
dolls, they never have dust on them, never a hair out of
place. And they are always young.
for their own babies until they are old enough to smile at
them.”52
Dolls have for long been used as instructional aids for
prospective parents. This has become increasingly necessary as
families have fragmented and household sizes dwindled,
inhibiting the flow of essential advice and information between
the generations.53 Early in the twentieth century Martha Chase
produced her famous “Sanitary Dolls” for use in hospitals and
pre-natal clinics to instruct women on child-care practices. A
latter-day variation on this theme is “Baby Think it Over” for
teenage girls, especially those suspected of having a precocious
and persistent urge to be mothers. These $200 dolls have to be
“tended” at the usual awkward times, as a daunting test of
maternal endurance. Designed by aerospace engineer Richard
Jurmain, the doll wails at random intervals and provides digital
information to the supervisor about how much rough handling
it has received. With sales worth around $5 million in the
mid-1990s, these cautionary dolls come in white, black, Latino,
and Asian versions, and both sexes. They are used mainly in
high schools. “Teachers say that a few students have stabbed
their dolls, hurled them out of windows and ripped the electronic
circuitry out in order to quiet the crying. These students flunk
the assignment, of course, and are usually recommended for
counseling.”54
We noticed that collectors visiting the various Web chat
rooms frequently refer to the therapeutic function of the dolls in
relieving stress. Tending them has a calming effect, absorbing
emotional energy:
The objects in our lives that we wear, eat, work and play with
are all loaded with meaning. Our relationship with these things
is two-sided: we give meaning to them (cars, kilts) and they give
meaning, directly or indirectly, to us (drivers, Scotsmen). By the
same token, the things around us can become important aspects
of our relationships with one another. To a large extent, we
know who we and other people are by referring to the objects
around us. Cars and kilts remind us how we should behave
toward certain people, and what we in turn can expect of them.
Some things (wedding rings, uniforms) can become powerful
expressions of our relationships, in that we make important
connections (marriages, armies) with one another through them.
However, our relationships with certain things can get very
personal. They are more than just symbolic links with other
people: we give them identities and draw them into our social
relations as if they themselves were persons. We have the ability
to imbue almost anything, from pebbles to whole mountain
ranges, with personality. Things like houses or cars which get
intertwined with our lives can become like family or friends—
and occasionally enemies. Such objects can even substitute for
“real” family and friends if our social relationships are sparse.
The PCDs have all these personable qualities. The
manufacturers send them out into the world as virtual persons
with names, clothes, roles, and basic identities. They are then
DOLLIFICATION 117
ness” is usually more obvious and less troubling. The PCDs are
not simply collected as clever porcelain artifacts, they are
collected because they are like real children. But for the most
part the PCD enthusiasts and the doll makers have evidently
learned to deal with the ambiguity. The advertisements play up
the “person-ness” of the dolls for all it’s worth, but when they
draw our attention to their material value or details of their
manufacture they can bring us back to their “thing-ness” with a
jolt: Billy comes to us “brimming with personality” but unlike
your own son he “is inscribed with the artist’s signature on his
upper back” (ouch!).
NAMES
Realism depends not simply on appearances, but on fleshing
out a personality with which the purchaser can identify. The
most obvious starting point is the name. Naming dolls is a long-
established merchandising practice, as the “Fifis” and “Janes”
in any nineteenth-century doll collection will testify.8 Sixty-
eight percent of the dolls in our sample have unambiguous,
conventional, gendered names like Allison or Jonathan. The
importance of the name is signaled by the frequency with which
it is repeated in each advertisement—nine times in the case of
Stephanie. The main doll companies have worked hard to
differentiate this aspect of their product, virtually exhausting
the supply of familiar names, and spellings of these. The range
in our small sample is impressive, nevertheless there are four
Heathers, three Hopes, and three Julies.
A further 13 percent of dolls in our sample have
circumstantial names like “Cherry Pie” or “Mr Mischief.”
“She’s so sweet, so dainty, so enchanting that there was only
one name we could give her… ‘Peaches and Cream’!” says
designer Dianna Effner of this Ashton-Drake doll. “Her name is
Peaches & Cream,” insists designer Ann Timmerman of a rival
Georgetown doll.
The remaining 19 percent have narrative titles rather than
names: “Tickled Pink,” “Roly Poly Harvest,” or “First
DOLLIFICATION 121
Will Mommy ever forgive him? You bet. Her indulgence knows
no bounds. She has dressed Bobby up “in a clown costume of his
very own, and Bobby’s adding a few finishing touches—with
Mommy’s lipstick!” “Mommy has lovingly put a bandage on
Kayla’s boo-boo.” She scratched her knee, but “wiping her
tears away with a chubby hand, she will soon be on her way
again.” Kayla is “crafted of fine, bisque porcelain and expertly
hand-painted. With her turned down lips, button nose and big
blue eyes, this adorable pigtailed toddler is irresistible. Make
this precious little girl with her sweet-but-sad expression your
very own.”
Both sellers and buyers work hard to weave the dolls into the
web of family relations. Now that there are a lot more
grandparents around for a lot longer, their importance in family
networks has increased. Critics have recently complained that
Freudian psychology has made too much of the triangular
relationship between parents and children, and has paid too
little attention to the emotional and practical importance of the
third (and increasingly even the fourth) generation.11 “No
moments are more precious—or more warmly remembered—
than those shared between grandmother and grandchild” says
the advertisement for Susan. People need grandchildren (and
vice versa), and if her own children are not cooperating, dolls
help fill this next period of emptiness in a woman’s life. If being
a grandparent is, as one of our informants put it, “parenting
124 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
Grandma may not feel the need for dolls if she is warmly
attended by real grandchildren—until they in turn grow up.
Bernice, from Washington, has just bought Mandy on a TV
sales show: “She reminds me so much of my granddaughter.
My granddaughter is nine months old. Her little clenched fists,
and open hands. Darling. I babysit her and so I am with her all
day. And when she is all grown up and I don’t get to baby-sit
her any more I will have Mandy to remind me of her.”12
These days grandparents commonly provide a great deal of
material and emotional support to the hard-pressed “nuclear”
family. During the twentieth century many aspects of
grandmotherhood have been expanded and redefined.
Nevertheless, it seems as far as the PCDs are concerned older
women still hanker to be mommies, and the advertisements
recruit them in this role. Grandma is more usually evoked
indirectly as an important figure in the family environment of
the child, but she has the wisdom to keep a discreet distance.
There are even hints of rivalry:
DOLLIFICATION 125
“I want my mommy!”
Nicole has been very good for Grandma—almost the
whole afternoon. But after a while, there comes a time
when a little girl just wants to go home. Biting her lip…
hugging her Teddy…she bravely manages not to cry. And
everyone’s happy to hear Mommy’s footsteps coming up
the walk. Don’t make her wait any longer. Give your
heart to Nicole today. After all—she just wants to go home
—with you!
that in just a moment, he’ll sweep her into his arms and
lift her high over his head…. “Lindsay” premieres an
irresistible new collection of Daddy’s Little Girls…. As
her owner, you will have the opportunity to acquire each
doll in the collection…. Dressed in her adorable romper
sprigged with flowers and trimmed in eyelet lace
“Lindsay” is just waiting for you to pick her up and bring
her to your home today! “Lindsay’s” very special pendant
tells everyone she is “Daddy’s Little One.”
It’s Megan singing a lullaby to her baby! The day her baby
sister came home, Megan got a new baby, too. At first,
she didn’t know what to think, but now she’s proud to be
the big sister. And like Mommy, she’s rocking her baby
off to sleep singing “Lullaby and good night” She hasn’t
even noticed Mommy’s peeking in! Share in the sweetness
of this tender young mother.
alike doll of her own was a popular motif around the turn of the
twentieth century, recapitulated in many PCDs today. This
points to an intriguing involution in the way the collector is
drawn into relationships with her dolls: Megan is acting the
role of Mommy with her doll, just like the collector herself. The
tableau is a demonstration both of what a good mother and a
satisfactory relationship with dolls should be. Amber carries the
refraction further, with sisterly, motherly, grandmotherly
relations all converging in “Little Amber,” the doll’s doll. This
image of a child carrying an image of itself is surely a very
curious notion: the three levels of representation must pose
quite a challenge for the designer. Although Amber declares
triumphantly “I Have a Doll That Looks Just Like Me!” of
course it does not—it looks like a doll. But why Amber, or the
collector herself, would want a doll that “looks just like me”
rather than somebody else is an intriguing question to which we
shall return later.
Unlike most real children, dolls will be and do whatever you
imagine. They have the capacity to be completely submissive,
acting out the little roles the manufacturer and the collector
devise for them, absorbing affection and admiration
unconditionally. But the relationship with any doll is not
without its anxieties. Because people trust their dolls and
extract so much comfort from them, there is always the muted
fear that they might be disloyal, untrustworthy, malicious.
This, says one of our researchers, Marilyn, is “like the tension
of a love affair: many have an actual fear of commitment
because they are afraid of betrayal.” If dolls have a life, they
may also have a life of their own. “One look at Sweet
Strawberry and you have entered her world …you wonder,
what’s she thinking of now?” In the daylight hours they sit
there oozing charm but—a recurrent neurosis among doll
owners young and old—who knows what this little gang gets
up to at night?
This role modeling came in for stern criticism from our student
researchers. Advertisements that try to insist on the little
accomplishments of girls were especially mocked, like the black
doll Shawna who has “just learned to stack her blocks all by
herself,” and Beautiful Dreamers, “a doll collection portraying
little girls who aspire to the fine arts.” The several “first day at
school” dolls were viewed cynically, especially one with a
product tie-in: “Smiling brightly, ‘Katie’ has every reason to be
proud. Her good work at school has earned a gold star, and
now she gets to go to her favorite place, McDonald’s!” Nor
were the students greatly impressed by attempts to make the girl
dolls look feisty, like Erin—Up at Bat (“A real winner”) or
Julie (a “mischievous girl”) or Jo, from “Little Women”
(“passionate and independent”). The boisterous behavior of
“The Little Girl With a Curl,” scowling, strutting, and
stamping her foot around the broken flowerpot, did not cut
much ice. Tantrums just reinforce the gender stereotype.
Scanning the advertisements, we find boy dolls represented as
busy, active, noisy, naughty, messy, but entirely lovable:
“Bobby can’t help but grin in his hand-tailored blue-jeans with
rainbow-colored suspenders, bright-yellow boots, and junior
Fire-Chief hat. He ‘struts’ with a garden hose in hand and a
stuffed Dalmatian pup beside him. Brown, handset eyes shine
with mischief and little-boy plans.” Some characteristically boy
words are: mischief, trouble, antics, grin, charm, decide, plan,
explore, steal, animated, rambunctious, impish, scamp,
attentive, thoughtful, earnest. However, our student critics were
quick to point out that the boy dolls were not exactly portrayed
as macho. The tendency to infantilize them is suggested by the
fact that 45 percent of them are babies or toddlers, compared
with 21 percent of the girl dolls. For all the boy talk in the
advertisements, they clamor for caring, cuddling, and
reassurance.
Dirt and the need for a motherly wipe down is a recurrent theme.
So too are references to the toilet: Stevie “holds a miniature roll
of ‘toi let paper,’ which you can unwind to display any way you
please.” Brian, absorbed in a “special moment in the life of a
little boy,” sits pensively on his potty, drawers down round his
ankles. “I’m a big boy now,” he insists:
A COMMUNITY OF DOLLS
Encouraged by the manufacturers’ designs and texts, collectors
build relationships among the dolls, much as children piece
together Lego. “I just love the little ones. I put them all together
in poses and put them with the little watering cans. And I have
one holding up a tiny basket of apples. Little baby bunnies. And
it just brings them to life. They are so beautiful.”16 Family life
is strongly implicated in these projects: “School is over and
‘Laura’ is anxious to be on her way, for she eagerly anticipates
one of Ma’s home-cooked meals. After dinner, Pa will fiddle a
few merry tunes before bedtime. It looks like another happy
night for the family that lives in the little house on the prairie!”
It’s Mommy who holds the whole community together.
However, if the object is to build a whole surrogate family, the
effect as we see it in larger displays can be bizarre: dozens of
sons and daughters in various sizes, shapes, and accouterments,
with an invisible circle of daddies, grandmas, and the occasional
aunt, hinted at by the children themselves.
Abundant motherly love can embrace the whole collection.
Although it is very much a private world, it ranges quite freely
in time and space, drawing in characters from exotic places and
from history. The neo-antiques dwell on fin de siècle Paris or
London, revisiting the workshops of Jumeau and Bru Jeune.
This is history viewed through rose-tinted spectacles—it is
startling to see “Dickens’s London” described as “a gentler
time and place” (Annie the lavender girl). Dara is from
Thailand and the series “Faraway Friends.” She comes with a
kite and a packet of pen-pal letters. To meet Serena, you are
invited to “fly off to a far-away place on the wings of your
heart.” She is “the first issue in the Passport to Friendship
collection…your introduction to life in a small village near
Nairobi, Kenya…. Her basket with several ‘fresh vegetables’ is
included.”
Native American dolls are popular exotic visitors to the PCD
range. Meadowlark is an “authentic portrayal of a young native
American toddler of the Chippewa tribe.” Although we have
only 14 Native American dolls in our sample, the distinctive
vocabulary is apparent (see appendices B-3, B-4). Proud and
134 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
dream are high on the list. The advertisements are more than
three times as likely to use the word tradition(al). Tales loom
large, and qualities like timeless, forever feature prominently.
Their homelands range from the Southwest to the Arctic: “Tulu
of the raven hair. Daughter of Teremuit. Her dark eyes gleam
like jewels in the firelight. Tonight the sun will never set. Her
people will hold a midnight feast. And Tulu will ask a great
favor of her father, holy man of the Eskimos…for she yearns to
keep an orphaned baby seal.” Their customs are likewise
charming and picturesque:
A COLLECTOR COMMUNITY
Adults who collect dolls know they are a bit odd. There are
feelings of guilt and shame about the extravagance and clutter,
about playing with toys, and about substituting things for real
people. The vice is a very private one for many collectors, its
full extent hidden even from their immediate families. Many
have dolls that they have kept since childhood, have retrieved
from their own children, or have been given.
Not all of them would welcome the label “collector,” with the
sense of purpose and obsession which that word implies. But
for those who “come out,” the experience can be liberating,
exhilarating. “I turn 40 this coming feb 23 2001. What a great
feeling to know a lot of people like playing with Barbie as much
as I do.”30 The community of doll collectors has gained impetus
from the Web. The Internet chat rooms have been busy with
people exchanging information about designs and repair,
favorite artists, and above all the relief of discovering that there
are so many like-minded people “out there,” and building a
sense of solidarity. For example, VirtualDOLLS.com is “a
DOLLIFICATION 143
auction rooms, the PCD world already has its heroes and
demons, its ideals and taboos. Celebrity collectors like
Roseanne have given the community a boost. Demi Moore is a
“serious” doll collector, with her own full-time agent, Mr.
Hinkle (in 1996 correspondents in Dolls magazine complained
of his aggressive buying). Marie Osmond collects dolls and sells
her own designs through her own company, Marian LLC, and
(since 1991) through the QVC channel.33 But the high
priestesses of the PCD world are, without a doubt, the “artists”
who design and make the original casts. They feature in the
advertisements, magazines articles, and the TV shows, and they
have graduated from shadowy craftspersons in the early days to
full-blown artist personalities today.
The Ashton-Drake Web site offers biographical details of its
regular artists. Cindy McClure was born in Southern California
and now lives in Washington. She has five daughters, loves
cookies, and has designed for Ashton-Drake since 1987. “You
Need a Hug, Pooh” was “a tremendous popular and critical
success,” nominated for an industry Doll of the Year (DOTY)
award in 1998. Cindy “taught anatomy and physiology in
college,” where she once forgot to wear a skirt to class. She
would like to be a doctor if she were not a doll artist. She
herself collects “bunnies, candle holders, thimbles, prints…
perfume bottles and juicers.”34
Yolanda Bello lives in Des Plaines, Illinois. Her first doll for
Ashton-Drake was Michael (1991). She has five children and
collects “dolls, miniatures, J.Fred Muggs items and monkeys.”
Kathy Barry-Hippensteel, designer of 15 dolls in our sample,
“has received widespread acclaim for her sculptural mastery.”
She is “one of Ashton-Drake’s most enduring and popular
artists because of her instinctive insights into the experience of
childhood. She says…‘If I can make a doll that hugs
somebody’s heart and makes them smile, then I’ve done what I
set out to do.’”35
The TV shows provide a rare opportunity to meet the artist-
stars, like Pauline Bjonness-Jacobsen, selling a batch of her
dolls on QVC with the help of the host, Kim:
Kim: Oh, we have a caller on the line, Dina. Dina welcome
and meet Pauline.
146 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
POLITICS
Because of their direct resemblance to human beings, dolls have
been recruited to political causes of all sorts. As effigies they
have been paraded, burned, and dismembered, and as symbols
of innocence and vulnerability they have become part of the
standard apparatus of public demonstration. An anti-abortion
protester outside the Supreme Court in Washington is pictured
with an armful of black and white dolls and a placard:
DOLLIFICATION 147
“President George Bush won because our lord Jesus wants the
babies to live.”
As the adult market for dolls expands, and as collectors
become more aware of each other’s identity and interests, a new
political motif is emerging. Much of the adult doll collector’s
sense of shame has been put there by the very passionate
critiques of modern femininity, of which no woman we talked
to was unaware. Modern feminists have consistently attacked
children’s dolls as embodying the worst sorts of conservative,
patriarchal ideal. Miriam Formanek-Brunel lays most of the
blame for gender stereotyping on the tendency of businessmen
to “appropriate the dolls they marketed as symbols of an
idealized feminine domesticity.”37 She complains that “scholars
have overlooked the struggle waged by women and girls for the
cultural control of dolls as representations of their gender
identity”:
Realism is the big selling line for the porcelain collector dolls.
The designers work very hard on the illusion, and the
enthusiasts are deeply complicit in breathing life into the
commodity. The starting point in the modeling of many dolls
has been a real child, from the granddaughters of Simon and
Halbig in the 1880s, through the sons and daughters who
became Sasha or the Dreamkids in the 1960s and 1970s, to the
young friends and offspring who inspire the PCD designers
today. But the result is always something that goes beyond
reality as less passionate observers would see it. How does this
life-giving process work?
As we have seen, children make dolls by imbuing almost any
object with life and personality. The younger they are, the less
demanding they seem to be about physical cues, and the more
ready to introject human qualities. To satisfy adult urges, “real
dolls” have to look more explicitly like “real children.” The
PCD owners put the power of their imaginations to work on
the artistry of the dolls, animating the inert body. The
manufacturers know this very well, and within the limits of
price and technique, they build every possible cue into the form
and appearance of the doll, seeking to lock their product into
the imagination of the purchaser. The collusion of designers
and collectors in the quest for realism is largely lost on those
who are not party to the pact. Even in adulthood, skeptical
males still pose a threat: “It’s only a doll,” growls Eileen G.’s
152 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
Picture 8: Two American Girl play dolls, and the collector doll
Gwendolyn.
Top left: American Girl Samantha.
Top right: American Girl look-alike doll, supposedly modeled on a real
child.
Bottom: Gwendolyn (Delton Collectibles).
Photos by A.F.Robertson.
MORE THAN REAL 155
many lifelike ways. Cuddle her just a little, and she’ll win your
heart forever!” (Sweet Carnation).
Two thirds of the PCDs we surveyed are designed as set
pieces, in the process of doing something (teatime, playing
baseball, visiting grandmother) or acting someone (Little Bo
Peep, Laura from “Little House on the Prairie”) rather than
simply “being” a Native American or Shirley Temple or a
sleeping infant. One advantage of this is that the doll may not
need much further manipulation to display it. Recumbent dolls,
15 percent of our sample, are obviously easiest to display, and
very much more likely to be infants. Thirty-six percent, almost
all of them children and toddlers, were either sitting or kneeling.
Fifty-one percent, including all but one of the adults, were
shown standing. Most of the fully upright dolls need supports,
usually a rod behind their backs, which can look cumbersome.
Poseability is a virtue mentioned in 16 percent of our sample,
but articulating joints convincingly is one of the designer’s
oldest challenges, especially in full-bodied porcelain dolls.
Cords, springs, and rubber bands are needed to hold the
members together and allow a little movement, but all of these
are liable to some sort of mechanical failure in childish hands.
Necks or wrists have to be set in insulating material like felt or
plastic to prevent them squeaking or grinding. Advertisers tend
to make it very clear if the doll is all porcelain, and thus more
valuable and “genuine.”
With her stiff articulated joints, a “100% porcelain” doll like
Lil’ Punkin needs a little extra massage from the copywriter. She
is “so incredibly real, you’ll want to sweep her into your arms!
For little babies, every day is full of discoveries! There are
chubby toes to explore, tiny fingers to examine, and a cute
round belly button to locate. Look…there it is! This ‘Lil’
Punkin’ is proud—she’s found her belly button for the very first
time!”
For all this body-talk, the dolls are “hyperreal” for what they
don’t do. Most obviously, of course, they don’t move. It seems
that women have never hankered after creepie-crawlie, walkie-
talkie dolls. Mechanization is an enthusiasm of male doll
designers, and doll museums testify to their ingenuity, especially
around the beginning of the twentieth century.3 But
MORE THAN REAL 157
one such pee poop doll reveals that the holes, one large and one
small, are indeed set in the base of the torso, in a shallow
boxlike structure that positively shrieks this is not an authentic
body part!
A few dolls in the PCD range emphasize the wrinkles, pouchy
eyes, and splayed legs of the newborn, and clearly respond to a
particular sort of maternal craving. In addition to its range of
weepy, wetty, drooly dolls, the Peterkin company of Leicester,
England, has an Early Moments neonate with a newly healed
belly button and chunky, uncircumcised genitals. These may
appeal to women in the “empty womb” phase, but the PCDs
are overwhelmingly children, and we know of no PCD that
possesses what we primly call “private parts.” With today’s
extreme anxieties about pedophilia, few manufacturers are
prepared to cater, however innocently, to the wrong market.
Any explicit sexuality is conveyed by the extremities of the doll,
its face and also its feet, but not the palpably sexual trunk. In
the advertising copy, many of the PCDs have “hearts,” some
have “tummies,” but none has bowels or a bladder. Our average
porcelain doll collector’s enthusiasm for “realism” does not
extend either to precision about genitals or to the excitement of
plural incontinence. The nearest we get is Brian sitting
demurely on his potty and a couple of other little lads waving
toilet rolls. If you have spent many years dealing with these
messy aspects of motherhood, this is one feature of the child
you may be happy to forgo. The PCD, immortalized in
porcelain, has triumphed over death and its Freudian analogy,
feces. The only reference to body fluids we could find in our
PCD sample is to tears, as with the “tiny teardrop” of crystal
that “rolls down” Little Bo Peep’s cheek.
The PCDs emit nothing more disturbing than pleasant odors
and tunes. Quite a few of the “angel” dolls play carols and
hymns (Angelique “doesn’t just have the voice of an angel—she
has the heart of one too!”), but very few of them actually talk.
This may be because technically this is still very difficult to “get
real.” Around the turn of the twentieth century there were
numerous attempts to give dolls voices. This usually involved
pulling and releasing a string which made the dolls croak
“mama” or more elaborate phrases. Bellows produced bleating
MORE THAN REAL 159
FACES
“The face,” says doll dealer Debbie Madrigal, “is where the
money is.” For the connoisseur, a cracked leg or loose arm is as
nothing compared to a small abrasion on the cheek. How faces
look and how they change matter a great deal to humans. Facial
expressions, along with gestures and other “body language,”
play a major part in our communications with each other. Our
features are flexible, and we are continually manipulating them
to convey a mood, an attitude, an identity. We narrow our eyes
shrewdly to look older and wiser, or widen them ingenuously to
look younger. “Human perceivers are sensitive to age-related
160 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
our mothers and now have to achieve more than three quarters
of their size outside her body. In its first year after birth the
brain doubles in weight, sopping up half the body’s available
energy, and continues to grow throughout the first two
decades of life. One effect of this is that after birth we continue
to look a lot more like fetuses than do other closely related
mammals.
We have devised some simple diagrams to show as clearly as
possible the distinctions between older and younger male and
female faces, and how different bits of these faces have been
manipulated to make the PCDs. (For an explanation of how
these diagrams are composed, please refer to appendix F.)
Between birth and early adulthood, both the shape of the head
and the layout of the features change markedly. Relative to the
size of its skull, the “facial mask” of the infant is very small (see
figures 6-a and 6-b). After a couple of years the balance shifts,
and the facial proportions increase relative to the cranium. By
about ten years of age, the cranium is nearly adult size, but the
face continues to grow and change well into adulthood.14
“Compared to a mature adult, a baby’s face has relatively large
and wide-set eyes, dainty eyebrows, small jaws, a more concave
profile, a small mouth with short lips, a relatively large and
protuberant forehead, a low nasal bridge, a smallish pug nose,
and smooth skin.”15 As growth is completed, adipose tissue is
lost, hair color and distribution change, wrinkles and bags
appear on the skin. At this stage we look back with envy at the
prettiness of youth (see figure 6-b).
Capturing the distinctive early features of growth is very
important in the design of dolls. Most basically, you can make
a head look more childlike by increasing the size of the skull,
expanding the cheeks, contracting the features toward the center
of the face, and dropping them on the vertical plane (see
figure 6-c). By contrast, shrinking the skull, emphasizing the
chin, nose, and ears, and moving the features upward makes
the face look older.16 If the intention is to make it look
aesthetically pleasing rather than “characterful,” the left and
right sides of the face should appear symmetrical. The PCDs all
play safe on this, but the expensive custom-made dolls often do
outrageous things with asymmetry to assert “personality”—a
162 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
EYES
Let us look a little more closely at the various components of
facial design. Eyes are how we fix on people—we gaze with
them, and we gaze at them. They are, we are told, the window
to the soul. They can burn, sparkle, dazzle, they can quench
and dim, and they can scare you to death. As the ladies of his
local Doll Club got to work on the skeptical Frank, plying him
with cookies and juice, he began to get a feeling for the
“reality” of the dolls clustered around the participants. “I
stared into their eyes. It was as if I was staring at another
person. Perhaps it was the ambience of the event but the eyes
sparkled, and looked very natural and real.”
The aflcionadas agree that “the eyes are the most outstanding
feature on a doll’s face.”28 They are of central importance in
the design of the doll and the imaging of reality, and are the most
MORE THAN REAL 169
us as adults, their eyes widen, and their eyelids and brows are
raised.31 “Looking up at you with his bright blue hand-set eyes,
he’s sure you’ll take him home to love” (“You Deserve a Break
Today”). Eyelashes are proportionately longer in children,
which is why adults have to exaggerate them cosmetically to
recapture this youthful appearance. Cinderella’s “enormous
172 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
blue eyes are framed with real lashes.” They are of course
synthetic, probably nylon or “Kanekalon.”32 In the antique or
high-priced dolls they are made of fine bristle or animal hair.33
On the other hand, eyebrows are much finer on small children,
thickening after puberty, so we have to pluck them later in life
to keep that innocent look. Advertising copy for the PCDs
stresses the delicacy with which they are painted, and there’s no
doubt that bushy eyebrows would look unappealing, or scary,
on a doll.
HAIR
Hair, on the other hand, is the crowning glory. On the cheaper
dolls and on infants, hair is lightly molded on the skull and
176 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
AUTHENTIFICATION
The text that accompanies the dolls—the advertising copy,
packaging, birth and adoption certificates, the guarantees of
satisfaction—works hard to authenticate them and to boost the
illusion of reality. A word that crops up frequently in the
advertisements is faux, French for “false.” This is applied to
clothes, accessories, trimmings, and even to body parts: “faux
fur,” “faux pearls,” “faux eyelashes.” Faux is a classier word
than “imitation” or such kitsch phrases as “leather-like,”
“suade-cloth,” or “pearlized.” The ambiguous reality of the
MORE THAN REAL 183
HYPERREALITY
For Baudrillard, the French philosopher who gave currency to
the term, “hyperreality” is the situation when a model of
something becomes in some respects more real than the thing it
is supposed to depict. In the past, for example, we drew maps by
looking at landscapes, but now we make landscapes by drawing
maps.51 In some respects the PCDs have become a means for
measuring-up children rather than the other way round, in the
way that we depend on maps rather than the landscape itself
MORE THAN REAL 187
MAKING FACES
The facial signals of the PCDs may at first sight seem
confusing. Some aspects are babyish, others are very adult, and
the “unnatural” mixture disturbing. Various analogies came
up: the playful incongruities of Mr. Potato Head and his
infinitely variable plastic features; police Identikit or Photo-Fit
pictures; or the “age progressions” on the missing-children cards
that accompany junk mail.
Malleability of this sort is actually important for the
development of real bodies. Our various parts (legs, guts,
noses) are genetically programmed to develop together in a
192 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
LOOKING ATTRACTIVE:
ADULTIFICATION
Studies of what people find appealing in faces have noted a
basic distinction between the “cuteness” of little children and
the “attractiveness” of adults.16 “Attractive” has more sexual
undertones than “cute”: perhaps we could say that while little
children emanate cuteness to solicit caring responses from all
parties, attractiveness draws the attentions of adults to one
another.17 From an evolutionary point of view, an implication
of this, not always pleasing to women themselves, is that
“looking attractive” is basically about pleasing men. Visible
nubility (hormonal status, fecundity) has been the key to a
“well-designed female,” says the evolutionary psychologist
Donald Symons. “That adult female sexual attractiveness
declines systematically with observable cues of increasing age is
a theme that runs through the ethnographic and historical
records, folk tales, great literature, less-than-great literature,
movies, plays, soap operas, jokes, and everyday experience.”18
Little wonder that older women should prefer to hark back to
their reproductive heyday in visualizing “good looks.”
Women also find women attractive, but how their ideas
differ from those of men is still, we have found, wide open to
happy-hour debate. The differences are not simply a matter of
cultural conditioning or personal whim; they diverge according
to age and growth. Set the experimental task of designing
“beautiful” female faces, 40 20-year-olds (20 men, 20 women)
produced a composite whose nose-chin proportions were
significantly shorter (“typical of an 11- or 12-year-old girl”)
than the composite of their own faces. The “beautiful” ideal
also had fuller lips in the vertical dimension and smaller mouth.
They looked, we might say, pretty cute. What, Symons
wonders, is the evolutionary logic of this apparent enthusiasm
of fertile males for prepubescent females? And why should their
female age-mates concur? The answer seems to be that for all
200 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
Figure 7-d: Mean and variation in the height of the nasal septum in
sample of 118 girl dolls.
her movies and publicity stills she usually drops her jaw,
suggesting her concern to emphasize her mouth and chin. Her
makeup was less of a secret: her formula for beautiful lips in
the 1950s “included three shades of lipstick, plus a gloss of wax
and Vaseline.”27 But beyond mere physical appearance there
are some affecting similarities between Marilyn and the
timeless, lifelike doll. For Gloria Steinem she is “the woman
who will not die.” In her own unfinished autobiography
Marilyn says, “I knew I belonged to the public because I had
never belonged to anything or anyone else.”28
Until we know much more about the forms and functions of
bodily appeal later in life, these observations about cuteness
and attractiveness can only be speculative. Now that we live so
much longer, the physical, social, and emotional processes of
aging have become much more interesting, raising such new
and intriguing questions as what attracts a child to a
grandparent, and vice versa. Nature—so say the biologists who
study it—is not much concerned with what happens to the
organism when its reproductive days are over. But we, as
individ ual organisms, have a personal interest in our
continuing lives that may or may not have much to do with the
survival of our species. Theories of evolutionary adaptation and
natural selection, preoccupied with the activities of nubile
women, could not readily predict the face forms that would
please a woman who has already grown up and raised a family,
or which of these she would want to see inscribed on a doll. At
this stage in her life it seems likely that her preferences are
retrospective, more concerned with how she has actually lived
than with her mating prospects. A doll that can express her
cumulative experiences as a child, a mother, and a grandparent
may be particularly gratifying. Superficially, the appearance
may be disturbing to others, but to “read” this palimpsest you
need a sympathetic understanding of the life that it inscribes.
We are ruled by time. In real life our bodies and our
experiences are inexorably arranged in sequence, connected by
the imperfect links of memory. As life proceeds we need to stem
the flow, to make some durable sense of our own identity:
“This is who I am, because this is who I have been.” We try to
make the things that matter to us tangible. Transposed to the
206 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
The fusion of self and doll is an old tradition that lives on. In
the nineteenth century, little girls were given dolls that
supposedly looked like them and with whom they could
identify directly in play. Early in the twentieth century doll
manufacturers sponsored annual “Children’s Days,” featuring
doll contests and parades in which girls dressed as dolls
competed with one another for prizes.33 A current version of
this is the American Girl series, in which the child can dress like
the doll and act out the various “historical” personalities
described in the accompanying texts. In 1993, the My Twinn
Doll Workshop of Englewood, Colorado, struck the mother
lode of matching dolls. The firm specializes in dolls
more likely to be display dolls for parents rather than play dolls
for the child. We know of at least one case where a doll was
produced to memorialize a child who had died.
The My Twinn repertoire has expanded to include matching
clothes for the child and the dolls, and a mass of other
accessories like beds and stands. Further spin-offs from the
original idea are Cuddly Sisters and Cuddly Brothers dolls for
your My Twinn doll (even dolls need dolls); and Lovable
Sisters, a pair of dolls, one on the same scale as My Twinn (20
inches) and one smaller (14-inch) Cuddly Sister. The next
development was seemingly inevitable. The firm now offers the
When She Was a Child doll, which is assembled by referring to
photos which the buyer supplies. “Now teens, mothers and
grandmothers can also have a My Twinn doll made to resemble
them when they were 3–12 years old…. Like portraits, these
beautiful dolls become personalized home decor pieces.”35 This
narcissism offers much scope for psychoanalysis. Of all toys
“the doll comes closest to imitating the child’s own body.”36
The child becomes the doll becomes the adult: at one stage it
acted out the child’s grown-up fantasies (playing parent,
teacher, doctor, shopkeeper). Resurrected later in life as a PCD
it acts out an adult’s place in the child’s world: the adult
becomes the doll becomes the child. This may involve some
subliminal auto-eroticism. One of our researchers found
evidence of this in the passionate hues (reds, purples, mauves)
and the persistent theme of consumption (peaches, cherries,
cream, candy, lollipops) that abound in the PCDs. But “it
should be noted that I never found a boy doll with a piece of
fruit.”
The nostalgia and narcissism have another dimension. “To
collect artifacts from the past is to own the past—and
sometimes to imagine a better past than the one that actually
existed.”37 If the dolls help to place the person in a life, they
also help to place that life in history, real or imagined. “Those
innocent eyes…that soft loveliness. Where have you seen such a
girl before? In the Portraits you remember—of children long
ago” (Peaches and Cream). The dolls are of course
idealizations: “That’s how I wanted to be.” Most little girls like
to look grown-up now and then, and many of the dolls are
210 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
Picture 13: Sarah with her My Twinn, and My Twinn’s own look-alike
doll.
Photo by David Lawson.
FOREVER YOUNG 211
When her much-repaired doll finally broke, one little girl had a
little funeral for her in the backyard with a cold cream jar for a
headstone. “And it broke my heart,” she later recalled.44
Mourning clothes were routinely included in the wardrobes of
more elaborate French dolls in the mid- to late-nineteenth
century. In the United States, middle-class girls were
encouraged to imitate the fashionable funeral rituals, and
“fathers constructed doll-sized coffins for their daughters’ dolls
instead of what we consider the more usual dollhouses.”45
We should remember that in those days death was a frequent
and intimate domestic fact of life, and that one of the advances
of the twentieth century was to make it much less so. People
normally died at home, and their bodies were laid out there. The
heavy toll of infant mortality made small corpses—and the
anguish, guilt, and fear they inspired—all too familiar. For
centuries, dead infants had been fetishized as cherubs, and it
seems very probable that the putti that swarm over Baroque
religious architecture influenced doll design— or possibly vice
versa. In Freudian analysis, “The angel is the idealized, pure
form of Eros prior to organic involvement and differentiation
into sexes—the archetypal image of primary narcissism. The
doll, on the other hand, embodies the victory of death and
destruction over the life of the organism—the archetypal image
of primary masochism.”46 If this is so, it makes the angel-dolls
in the PCD range (a dozen in our sample of advertisements)
doubly and dreadfully interesting (picture 14).
Part of this morbid ritualization was the assertion that the
dolls had souls. “Doll funerals probably appealed to girls in
part because the domestification of heaven (along with the
beautification of ceme teries where families found rest and
recreation) made the afterlife sound fun. For others, the staging
of doll funerals was an expression of aggressive feelings and
hostile fantasies”—dramas of resistance, according to
Formanek-Brunell.47 We could find no evidence of doll
collectors today having funerals for their dolls, but something
very evocative of burial and resurrection is apparent in the
rituals of wrapping and unwrapping, opening and closing
boxes, which are so much a part of PCD play (picture 15). The
link to the antique tradition of the “trunk doll”—one that
214 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
“Reach for the sunlight, and bring warmth into your heart
forever.” (Amber)
“You are assured of Shannon’s heirloom quality—in a
signed, hand-numbered, limited edition that you will
treasure forever.”
“A Victorian Beauty of unparalleled splendor. An
heirloom to cherish forever.” (Rose)
“Order now…To enjoy the magic forever.” (Winter
Romance)
A best friend to last forever! (Mary Elizabeth)
Rilke dreaded dolls, and in his later writing raged against them
and toys in general, mainly because they would not express the
“real live” feelings he expected of them:
suffer this immense silence. And finally, the doll lies before
us without disguise: as that gruesome alien body for which
we have wasted our purest warmth; as that superficially
painted drowned corpse, lifted and carried by the floods
of our tenderness until it dried out and we forgot it
somewhere in the bushes.50
of social and moral qualities. For example, we use our right and
left hands to make important contrasts (dextrous and sinister,
this or that political party) and we use “head” and “foot” to
signify political or economic distinctions (head of state, foot the
bill). What bothers us is when something doesn’t fit the normal
body scheme, or is not in its proper place. Saliva in my mouth
is warm, friendly, and lubricating; if I spit into a glass and let it
cool, it seems very unappetizing, even to me. By metaphoric
extension, boots on the dinner table, or a priest in a brothel, is
matter out of place—“dirty.” But what really troubles us is
when we can’t clearly categorize something, when we can’t tell
for sure if it’s in or out of place: it’s neither left nor right, good
nor bad, food nor shit. Ambiguity, says Douglas, is dangerous.
To deal with it we need special rules and procedures (rituals,
medicines, laws). The trouble is, the natural processes of
growing confront us continually with hazardous changes: the
dangerous condition of adolescence is neither childhood nor
adulthood, and around the world we humans have quite
elaborate coming-of-age ceremonies to get us safely across the
threshold.2
Dolls can be dangerous. I have already noted many of their
ambiguities: they seem poised on the threshold between life and
death, the real and unreal, persons and things; and thresholds,
according to Mary Douglas, can be the most dangerous place in
the house (neither inside nor outside). Dolls that take some
features that properly belong in one stage of bodily growth (the
nubile mouth and jaw) and add it to what is otherwise a baby
face may be more than usually dangerous.
The biologist Eibl-Eibesfeldt remarks that “in commercial art
the childish attributes of women are frequently exaggerated as
well as the sexual attributes.”3 If infantilizing is a familiar way
of enhancing adult feminine appeal, why should features of adult
attractiveness not be used to enhance the appeal of little
children? The very thought rouses indignation: “Only in a
nation of promiscuous puritans could it be a good career move
to equip a six-year-old with bedroom eyes,” laments journalist
Richard Goldstein.4 The sense of outrage is not new. Shirley
Temple—still the most favored “live” model for the current
collector dolls—was the ideal child of the Depression years.
224 LIFE LIKE DOLLS
QUALITY WORDS
RELATION WORDS
ACTION WORDS
BODY WORDS
TOUCH WORDS
REALITY WORDS
COMMODITY WORDS
TECHNICAL WORDS
(i) Quality Words: Difference between < Girl Words and Boy Words >
238 APPENDIX B-2
(ii) Action Words: Difference between < Girl Words and Boy Words >
Appendix B-3
Words which are more likely to be
used in advertisements for Native-
American and Caucasian dolls
ACTION WORDS
Native American Caucasian African American
COME COME COME
LOOK CAN CAN
BRING BRING LOOK
DREAM PLAY WANT
WONDER LOOK BRING
LOVING* MAKE MAKE
SMILE/ing WONDER WONDER
SLEEP* LOVING* SMILE/ing
NEED DISCOVER
SMILE/ing
EXPRESSI*
SLEEP
WISH
DREAM
241
QUALITY WORDS
Native American Caucasian African American
BEAUTIFUL LOV* LOV*
TIME* TIME* LOVE*
PROUD LOVE* ACTIV*
ATTRACT SWEET HEART
TALE BEAUTIFUL FOREVER
LOV* ACTIV* FAVO(u)RITE
SWEET ADOR* TIME*
ACTIV* HEART DELIGHT
FOREVER DELIGHT JOY
CHARM FOREVER INNOCEN*
REMARKABL* PRECIOUS BEAUTIFUL
BEAUTY ADORABLE IRRESISTIBLE
INSPIR* JOY GENTLE
CAPTIVAT* CHARM HAPPY
SHY REMARKABL* SWEET
ENCHANT PRECIOUS
EXQUISITE CHARM
INNOCEN* BEAUTY
IRRESISTIBLE ANGEL
SPARKL* PROUD
GENTLE DARLING
Appendix C
Doll Technicalities
“Full Socketed Head”
Here you can see the artist’s signature mark, and also the
limited edition piece at the back of the neck, the beautiful
pearlized buttons that hold this beautiful dress together,
and there’s the breast plate, OK? Quite an extensive
breast plate as well. Notice something else that’s the mark
244 APPENDIX C
PREFACE
CHAPTER 1
The epigraphs opening this and subsequent chapters are all
drawn from our sample of doll advertisements.
CHAPTER 2
1. Fleming 1996:87.
2. Fleming 1996:109.
3. Barbie is classified as a “fashion doll” by the advertising trade
(Mansfield 1983).
4. Dean 1997:118–19.
5. Dean 1997:130, 131.
6. Dean 1997:104–107.
7. Fleming 1996:87.
8. Hall and Ellis 1896:134.
9. Dean 1997:178.
10. Postman 1994:67.
11. Hall and Ellis 1896.
12. Formanek-Brunell 1998:371.
13. Formanek-Brunell 1993:186.
14. Dean 1997:189.
15. Postman 1994:123.
16. Mansfield 1983.
17. Taylor 1999.
18. Appadurai 1986:41.
19. Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 1979:325.
20. Appadurai 1986:41.
21. Appadurai 1986.
22. Loro 1995a.
23. Loro 1995a.
24. The remaining 26 advertisements in our final selection included
dolls manufactured by several smaller producers, including Gorham
and Paradise Galleries. The list is a selection, based on what
appeared during the 1990s in the print media. It is far from
comprehensive—for example, Harper’s Bazaar established its own
range of porcelain dolls in the mid-1990s (Underwood 1996).
25. Loro 1995.
26. Berman 1992:54–5.
27. Berman 1992.
28. Ashton-Drake: http://www.collectiblestoday.com (October 15,
2000).
29. Loro 1995a.
30. Moody’s Company Data Report, 1998, Moody’s Investors Service.
31. Dean 1997:132.
32. Loro 1995b.
33. Shiffrin 1995.
254 NOTES
CHAPTER 3
will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning
corporation called the USA.” (Applause).
56. Ehrenfeld 1993:97.
57. Ehrenfeld 1993:96.
58. Letter from Sherrie H. of Wheaton, Maryland, in Dolls—The
Collector’s Magazine, August 22, 1996 (responding to the editor’s
question “What is a doll?”).
59. “Heirloom” occurs in 23 percent of our sample of advertisements
(Polly— “Heirloom quality at only $78”) and is a generic label for
several manufacturers (“Franklin Heirloom Dolls”).
60. Pearce 1995:251.
61. See, for example, Goody 1976.
62. Pearce 1995:211.
63. Pearce 1995:248.
64. Pearce 1995:176, 235, 272.
65. Ehrenfeld 1993:96.
66. Times (London), March 7, 1998.
67. Roha 1992.
68. Harrison 1996.
69. Home Shopping Network, Collectors Day (hosts Tina Berry and
Tim Luke) April 13, 2001, 4–5 A.M. Pacific time.
70. Woman caller on Home Shopping Network, Collectors Day (hosts
Tina Berry and Tim Luke) April 13, 2001, 4–5 A.M. Pacific time.
71. Berman 1992.
72. Fulkerson 1995:17.
73. Fulkerson 1995:17–18.
74. Fulkerson 1995:17–18. “The average doll collector is willing to
spend more than $600 annually and may have 200 to 400 dolls,”
according to one firm’s product planning director” (Mansfield 1983).
75. Seiter 1993:202.
76. My grandmother was a slave to the Indian Tree pattern of crockery,
my mother a devotee of the Regency pattern. Each of these was
collected diligently over many years. My wife and I fell heir to the
Indian Tree.
77. Berman 1992.
78. Woman’s Realm (UK), April 1998.
79. QVC-TV, Dolls by Pauline—7th Anniversary Show. November 4,
2001, 10–11 P.M. Pacific time.
80. Ehrenfeld 1993:98.
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
1. Hall and Ellis 1896:159. After more than a century there is still no
parallel for Stanley Hall and Caswell Ellis’s remarkable Study of
Dolls. A pioneer psychologist, sociologist, and educator, Hall
started the Pedagogical Seminary as a forum in the psychology of
teaching, to which schoolteachers around the United States and in
the United Kingdom contributed. Hall and his colleagues typically
issued a list of queries or test stimuli, which were then administered
voluntarily by interested teachers. The results were collected,
computed, and analyzed by Hall. In this way, hundreds, sometimes
thousands of “cases” could be drawn into the study framework.
Topics in Vol. 4 of the Pedagogical Seminary include children’s
capacity to remember details of a story; analysis of their drawings;
“suggestibility”; “youthful degeneracy”; teasing and bullying; and
notes on “peculiar and exceptional children.”
2. Hall and Ellis 1896:135.
3. Baudelaire 1994 [1853]: 24.
4. Hall and Ellis 1896:132–34, 159.
5. Hall and Ellis 1896:134.
6. Webster’s New World Dictionary.
7. Mead 1967 [1932].
8. Pearce 1995:251.
9. “Mattel introduced Magic Nursery Babies in 1990 (the ‘magic’
being that the doll had to be brought home and a special packet
immersed in water before discerning the doll’s sex)” (Seiter 1993:
203).
10. Baudelaire 1994 [1853]: 16.
11. See, for example, Woodward 1995.
12. QVC-TV, Dolls by Pauline-7th Anniversary Show, November 4,
2001, 10–11 P.M. Pacific time.
13. Internet chat room: http://www.suite101.com/print_article.cfm/
1973/42795.
14. http://www.collectiblestoday.com (November 15, 2000).
15. See Clausen 1993:431, 451.
16. QVC-TV, Dolls by Pauline—7th Anniversary Show. November 4,
2001, 10–11 P.M. Pacific time.
17. This is very evocative of the Barbie experience: “Just as the Native
American Barbie does not copy the uniform of a specific tribe but
reflects an outsider’s interpretation of Native American identity, the
upper-class Barbies reproduce not real upper-class clothing, but an
outsider’s fantasy of it.” They are “a proletarian daydream of how a
rich person would dress” (Lord 1994:186).
18. Formanek-Brunell 1998:373.
NOTES 261
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
23. Although the differences were not large, the septum height of two
thirds of the African American dolls was below average, whereas
three quarters of the Native American dolls were above average.
24. See Landau 1989:34.
25. Wagenknecht 1969.
26. BBC-TV program Hollywood Knives broadcast May 2, 2001.
27. Landau 1989:222.
28. Steinem and Barris 1986:9.
29. http://www.barbie.com (February 12, 2002).
30. Advertisement for Promenade in the Park Barbie. Homes and
Gardens, November 1998.
31. Ivy 1995:98.
32. Letter from Coleen E. of Virginia, in Dolls—The Collector’s
Magazine, August 22, 1996.
33. Formanek-Brunell 1993:178.
34. My Twinn catalog, August 1998.
35. My Twinn catalog, August 1998.
36. Simms 1996:672.
37. Lord 1994:283.
38. Letter from Kelly L. of Truckee, California, in Dolls—The
Collector’s Magazine, August 22, 1996.
39. Los Angeles Times, December 20, 1996.
40. Hall and Ellis 1896:148–49.
41. Dean 1997:200.
42. See Simms 1996:664.
43. Reported in Hall and Ellis 1896:139. Thirty children in Hall and
Ellis’s survey reported digging up their buried dolls “to see if they
had gone to Heaven, or simply to get them back.”
44. Formanek-Brunell 1993:163.
45. Formanek-Brunell 1998:370.
46. Simms 1996:676.
47. Formanek-Brunell 1998:374–75.
48. Fleming 1996:88.
49. Rilke 1994 [1913]: 26–27.
50. Rilke, “Dolls” in Werke, Vol 3, pp. 357–58, 535–36, translated
here by Simms (1996:670).
51. Eva-Maria Simms subjects Rilke to some stern Freudian
psychoanalysis, focusing on his macabre story about Frau Blaha’s
maid, who gives birth to a child which she strangles, wraps in a blue
apron, and keeps as a doll in her trunk. When he was little, Rilke’s
mother dressed him as a girl and for a while called him Sophie.
Simms says “I think that a large part of the rage, hatred, and
aggression against the doll is a memory of the lost union with the
mother, for which the doll is merely a poor substitute.” The child
NOTES 265
has to work hard to imbue the object with “life,” and “part of the
terror the doll inspires in Rilke comes from her lifelessness and her
indifference and unresponsiveness to the child’s emotions.” “The
toy would not absorb the narcissistic urges as would a mother—
hence its transitional function in the child’s discovery of self-
consciousness, and the doll’s eventual ‘death.’” How, we may
wonder, could loving parents inflict such a “thickly forgetful, hate-
inspiring body” on their child? (Simms 1996:663, 670–71.)
52. Uncanny: “weird: unearthly: savouring of the supernatural:
ungentle: formidable” (Chambers Dictionary). “An uncanny
experience” says Freud, “occurs when either infantile complexes
which have been repressed are once more revived by some
impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted
seem once more to be confirmed” (quoted by Simms 1996:674).
CHAPTER 8
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Hodges, Jane, and Laura Loro. 1995. Collectibles cut budgets. Advertising
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Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. 1999. Mother nature: Maternal instincts and how
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Hwang, C.Philip, Michael E.Lamb, and Irving E.Sigel (eds.). 1996. Images
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Ivy, Marilyn. 1995. Have you seen me? Recovering the inner child in late
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104.
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272 BIBLIOGRAPHY
abortion, 96, 109, 110, 146 American Girl dolls, 45, 50, 140,
abuse: 152, 153, 207, 208
of children, 207, 211, 225 angels, 212, 213, 218, 219
of dolls, 4, 79, 117, 211 anthropology, xi, xi, 10, 15, 17,
accessories, 23, 52, 71, 152, 182 85, 135, 226–29
acrylic, 169 antique dolls, 6, 17, 20–23, 27, 63,
Action Man, 27, 70 83, 84, 89, 102, 144, 160.
adolescence, 77, 78, 104–5, 131– See also neo-antiques
33, 147, 167, 189, 198 artists, 29, 40, 43–46, 53, 58, 108,
adoption, 96, 110, 121 144–47, 147–49, 166, 183–86,
adultification, 25, 192, 198–205, 254
222, 225 Ashton Drake Galleries, 36, 38, 43,
advertisements: 47, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 71,
of porcelain collector dolls, 18– 89, 119, 121, 144, 145, 152,
19, 29, 30, 54, 58, 128, 152 184, 185, 192
vocabulary of, 19, 40, 58, 93, attractiveness, 160, 168, 198–205,
96, 98, 122, 128–33, 149, 154, 224
181, 182–83, 187, 219, 224– authenticity, 54, 182–83, 186
25, 230–42, 244–48
advertising, 23, 28, 33–35, 36, 46– baby boom, 109
48, 94–95 baby shows, 224–25
African American dolls, 52, 53, Barbie, 6, 19, 22, 27, 45, 67, 69,
134–37 70, 76, 85, 89, 114, 132, 135,
ages: 140, 142, 146–48, 152, 176–79,
of dolls, 131 190, 206, 210, 259, 260
of doll collectors, 88–89 Barry-Hippensteel, Kathy, 145,
akuaba, 8 184
Alexander, Madame, (Beatrice Baudelaire, Charles, 70, 117, 122
Alexander Behrman), 28, 69, beanbag bodies, 29, 154
148 bébé dolls, 6, 23, 25, 29, 99, 210
alloparenting, 193–96, 199, 225 Bello, Yolanda, 43, 54, 91, 144–46
277
278 INDEX
guilt, 1, 7, 79, 96, 141, 148, 211, Internet, 19, 43, 72, 78, 115, 142,
212, 229 184
gum tragacanth, 26 investment values, xiv–1, 54–55,
gutta percha, 26, 154 71, 93
in-vitro fertilization (IVF), 110,
hair, 175–79 111
Hamilton Collection, 36, 48, 50, isolation of older people, 101, 107,
122, 149 108–9, 110, 229
handcraft, 38–40
Handler, Ruth. See Barbie Japan, 6, 8–9
hands of dolls, 160, 180 jizò (mizuko-jizò) 8–9
heads of dolls, 22, 160–63 Jumeau, Pierre François, 6, 23, 25,
Heath, Phillip, 186 133, 210
heirlooms, 33, 55, 65, 83, 84–86,
139 kachina, 8, 210
heterochrony, 191 Kellie, Angela, 77, 85
hina (Japan), 6 Kestner, Johann Daniel, 22
history, ix, 11, 12, 13–14, 16, 17, Kewpie dolls, 9, 26, 27, 166, 210
76, 87, 94, 97–98, 101, 211, kitsch, 62, 182
220–22, 225, 227–9 Knickerbocker, L.L. See
Home Shopping Network (HSN), Georgetown Collection
TV shopping channel, 48–49, Konig di Scavini, Elena. See Lenci,
57, 87, 138–40, 45, 184, 241–45 Madame
Hutchens, Elke, 184
hyperreality, vii–viii, 150–87, 217, Latino dolls, 136
262. legs of dolls, 179
See also realism Lenci, Madame, (Elena Konig di
Scavini), 45, 96, 257
identity of doll collectors, 136–38 Lenox Collections, 36, 37, 47, 50,
idols, 7 59, 71, 200
immortality, ix, 18, 86, 87, 96, life expectancy, 11, 83, 204, 229
188, 190, 204, 211–20, 224 lifelike, See realism;
individualism, 10, 61–62, 82, 83, hyperreality
86 line extension. See series of dolls
Indonesia, 45 lips, 173
infant dolls, 52, 112, 121, 131, loneliness, 69, 83, 84, 96, 101,
155, 158, 160–66, 171 107, 108, 229
infant mortality, 113, 114 longevity. See life expectancy
infanticide, 96 look-alike dolls, 153, 207–11, 209
infantilization, 129–31, 131, 164– Lorenz, Konrad, 162–65
66, 192–99, 222 lust, 65, 81, 86, 98
innocence, 146, 220, 224, 244–48
instructional uses of dolls, 113–15, MacArthur, J.Roderick. See
139–42, 146, 186 Bradford Exchange
INDEX 281
magazines, 34, 47, 48, 55, 61, 142, museums, 63, 77, 85, 86, 111, 210
184 My Twinn dolls, 207–9, 209
magic, 43, 183, 187
maintenance of dolls, 71–75 names of dolls, 119–23, 137
mannequin, 3, 21–22, 186, 190, narcissism. See self-image
217 nasal septum, 200–4, 249–53, 263
manufacture of dolls, 38–46, 241– Native American dolls, 53, 133–35
45 needs, 94–96, 97–99
manufacturers of dolls, 19, 35–38, neo-antiques, 28–29, 40, 53, 63,
88, 116, 119, 135–37, 147, 184 68, 84, 86, 210
marketing, 46–50, 88, 91–93, 95– noses, 175, 200
97, 123 nostalgia, ix, 84, 133, 205–12
marriage, 106, 109
Marx, Karl, 32 Oakland, California, 102–7, 127
Mason, Linda, xiii, 197 old age, 4, 17
mass production, 39, 40, 46 O’Neill, Rose, 166–67;
Mattel. See Barbie See also Kewpie dolls
McCarthy, Charlie (ventriloquist’s Osmond, Marie, 38, 144
doll), 218 outsourcing of production, 32–33,
McClure, Cindy, 144 45–43, 184
meanings, 9–17, 115–18, 221, 227–
28 packaging, 32, 46, 53, 69, 121,
mechanical dolls, 6, 155–57, 158, 214, 215
169–71 papier mâché, 26
memory, 13, 107–8, 205–12 passion. See feelings
men and dolls, x–xi, 6, 72, 82–83, pedophilia, 6, 158, 222–26
114, 125–27, 148, 212, 216 personality of dolls, 33, 115–149,
as collectors, 65–67, 75, 81, 82, 128–32, 150, 167
143 Phillips, Pamela, xiii, 30, 128, 184
as designers, 6, 185–86 physiology, ix, 187
Messenger Doll, 138–40 Pinkul, Rose, 184
Mexico, 32, 45 play, 13, 17, 23–27, 29, 34, 55,
Mickey Mouse, 165 67–75, 76, 104–5, 138, 152,
millennium, 87 154, 157, 179, 181, 193, 195,
mind-body split, 16, 97–99 208, 255
miscarriage. See infant mortality Pleasant Company. See American
mizuko-jizò (Japan), 8–9 Girl dolls
modernity, 62, 82 politics, 146–50
Monroe, Marilyn, 204 polymer resins (synthetic clays), 46
mortality. See death porcelain, 22, 26, 28, 29, 32, 39,
mothering, 11–12, 85, 105, 112, 46, 53, 55, 70, 154, 155, 206
122–24, 124–27, 127, 129–31, posability of dolls, 132, 154–57
132–34, 136–38, 139, 193, 206 poupées de luxe, 23
mouths, 172–75, 199, 200, 204 poverty, 104
282 INDEX
Precious Moments dolls, 9, 38, 61, sales of dolls, 46–50, 88, 91–93,
93, 166 95–97, 123
pricing of dolls, vii, 47–48, 50–53, Sanitary Dolls, 114
58–59, 119, 134 Sasha dolls, 27, 150, 152
primitive, 7 science, 15, 16, 166
Pritzel, Lotte, 216–18 self-image, ix, 70, 127, 186, 188,
prostitution, 3 191, 205–12
psychology, 3–4, 65–67, 68, 79, senility, 1, 68, 69, 81, 84, 118
80, 92, 104, 113, 117, 123, 168, septum, 200–4, 249–53, 263
189, 195, 198–199, 217, 226, serial numbers, 54–55
229 series of dolls, 89–92, 152
puberty. See adolescence shame, 1, 7, 9, 12, 79, 117, 118,
puppets, 3, 4, 118, 261 141, 146, 224
Putnam, Grace Storey, 114 Shirley Temple, 27, 54, 181, 222–
putti (cherubs) 8, 212 24
shoes, 180–81
Quality Value Convenience (QVC) shops, 49–50, 144
TV shopping channel, 37, 92, sibling relationships, 126, 193,
142, 144, 145 194, 199, 225
queering, 148 Simon & Halbig, 37, 150, 169
size of dolls, 151, 160, 189
rag dolls, 21 smells, 158–59
Raggedy Ann, 26 social status, 64–67, 80, 86, 105,
Ramsey, JonBenet, 1, 224–25 210
realism, vii–viii, 1, 22, 23, 29, 43, Société Française de Fabrication
53, 71, 94, 114, 116–21, 131, des Bébés et Jouets (SFBJ), 23
186, 188, 216–18. spending on dolls, 89, 257
See also hyperreality stamp collecting, 60, 63–64, 75,
relations between doll collectors, 83, 91
136–38, 141–47 Stanhome Inc., 37–38, 48
relations between dolls, 132–37 Stieff, Margaret, 45
religion, 8, 9, 218–20 stillbirth. See infant mortality
reproduction. See growth student researchers, xi–xiii, 18–19,
resurrection, 211–13, 218–20 102, 128, 131, 132, 135, 136,
retirement, 78, 83 137, 148
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 159, 216–18, stuffed toy animals, 36, 76, 165,
263–66 190
role models, dolls as, 21, 137, 207 Symons, Donald, xiii, 198–199
role-playing of dolls, 121–28, 128–
32, 155 teddybear, 165, 190
Rowland, Pleasant, 140; teeth, 173–75
See also American Girl dolls Thailand, 32, 45
Royal House of Dolls, 28 therapeutic uses of dolls, 96, 113–
15, 207
INDEX 283
thimbles, 92
Timmerman, Ann, 183, 184
toes, 180
Tomescu, Titus, 57, 185
touch, 154–56, 181
transitional object, doll as, 189–91,
210, 211, 222
TV sales of dolls, 28, 37, 43, 46,
47, 48–49, 57, 142–44, 148,
184, 241–45
Walterhausen Puppenmanufaktur,
22, 37, 135
Wambach, Laura Lee, 45
wants, 97–99
wax dolls, 26, 175, 216
West Africa, 8, 99–1
widows, 101, 106
witches, 8, 80, 81
World War II, 101
World Wide Web (WWW). See
Internet