When I was five years old, my family took a trip to Colonial Williamsburg. While exploring a blacksmith’s shop and the once-governor’s palace might not entice most kindergarteners, for me, the place might as well have been Disney World. Clad in a tricorn hat, I bounded through the cobblestone streets as if I lived there, just a girl in a petticoat on the edge of the Revolution. I was no longer Caroline but, instead, Felicity Merriman, the copper-headed, horse-loving American Girl whose books my mother would read to me at bedtime.
As a nineties-born Millennial, I dabbled in other doll brands—Polly Pocket, Barbie, Groovy Girls, Betty Spaghetty—but American Girl and its heartfelt, daring, and lesson-laden stories were my white whale. Created by Pleasant Company in 1986 (and sold to Mattel in 1998), American Girl produced dolls, books, magazines, and other pre-adolescent girl paraphernalia, all of which my friends and I consumed religiously. My best friend and I staged the “Actions Speak Louder Than Words” play about Samantha, a wealthy girl learning about labor laws in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York, on repeat in her basement. I recently found a home video of another friend and me doing an interpretive dance to the book on tape about Josefina, a girl growing up in Colonial New Mexico in the 1820s. I dragged my family to the American Girl Place in Chicago on our summer vacation and themed my eighth birthday party around all things AG.
I was hardly alone in my obsession. In the late nineties, sales of the eighteen-inch plastic dolls raked in around $300 million a year (half a billion in today’s money). And today the brand is in the midst of a resurgence. Doll-themed social media accounts have popped up in the last few years, posting tongue-in-cheek memes about the characters in modern society. Podcasts like Dolls of Our Lives and American Girl Women dissect the books and the brand. A bevy of influencers reignited childhood memories from their brunch tables at American Girl cafes across the country.
“We saw an uptick right around the pandemic, with people going back to their family homes and finding their American Girl dolls in their closets,” says KC Hysmith, a North Carolina food writer who, with her colleague Justine Orlovsky-Schnitzler, edited a recently released book of essays, An American Girl Anthology: Finding Ourselves in the Pleasant Company Universe (University Press of Mississippi). “You also have a lot of millennials entering parenthood, and they’re passing these kinds of things onto their kids. Or maybe they don’t have kids, but they now have disposable income and are spending it on things that bring them joy—maybe things they didn’t get to have as a child.”
When the duo put out a call for papers—through an Instagram meme, naturally—“the enthusiasm was genuinely palpable,” Orlovsky-Schnitzler says. They fielded academic and pop culture essays on topics such as diversity (or lack thereof) in the historical lineup, identity (who really gets to call themselves an American Girl?), the inherent capitalism packed into every dog-eared catalogue, food history evident in the stories and cookbooks (lemon ice, anyone?), and how perhaps the most important aspect of the brand was what happened when a child made the stories their own.
“Whether it’s someone taking their identity and grafting it onto the doll—regardless of the original story—or saying, I’m going to create a completely new character that speaks to my experiences, it was heartening to see that we’re not alone in this,” Orlovsky-Schnitzler says.
As much as it holds the brand up to the light to examine its imperfections, the book also celebrates why a generation of now-adults like me still harbors such a vibrant enthusiasm. “The anthology justifies long-held—or new-held—obsessions with American Girl,” Hysmith says. “It’s the reason so many of us love the things we started loving as a child. American Girl is at that base.”
An American Girl Anthology: Finding Ourselves in the Pleasant Company Universe is available now from the University Press of Mississippi.
