In an American Studies Junior Seminar, I performed original research on the American Girl series. For this assignment, I looked at scholarly resources while also studying the differences between the original books I grew up with and looking at the newly released BeForever Collection. The differences between the two were jarring. (2018)
American Girl was a big part of my childhood. Almost everyone I knew had the dolls;
some had more than one. Every night, my parents would read me and my sister the American Girl books, starting with Kaya and reading until Molly. One Christmas morning, my sister and I walked down our carpeted stairs to find two identical rectangular boxes beneath the tree. When we ripped off the seasonal wrapping paper, we were met with the iconic American Girl maroon boxes. Together, we cradled our dolls – I had Samantha and my sister had Felicity. I always felt like I got my first exposure to American history from the American Girl books.
This doll phenomenon all started with a “former teacher and textbook writer,” Pleasant
Rowland (Schalk 165). She had recently visited Colonial Williamsburg and was “reflecting on
what a poor job schools do of teaching history, and how sad it was that more kids couldn’t visit this fabulous classroom of living history” (Perez 17). Therefore, because of this trip and “her dissatis[faction] [from] choosing a doll for her nieces when the options were either a sexualized Barbie doll or a Cabbage Patch baby doll,” she decided to start American Girl in 1986 (Schalk 165). Her goal was to make a doll that brought history to life and create dolls that would have a good influence on girls all over the country. Rowland ran the company for years until she “sold her company to Mattel... for $700 million,” selling to the exact company she had expressed hatred over, saying that Barbie was too sexualized (Nielsen 86). Mattel has switched the focus of the brand to contemporary dolls and began to “’archiv[e]’ certain historical characters, meaning that [American Girl] no longer produce[d] those characters’ books, dolls, or accessories” (Schalk 165). It was not until 2014 that the BeForever line was reintroduced, bringing back many of these retired historical characters (Schalk 165). Although the idea shifted, Pleasant Rowland’s original idea was to bring history to life through historical fiction.
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