Dolls and Dolls, Guys!

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0:15Hey, and well, I should say Merry Christmas and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And we bid you good tidings. We're decking your halls and giving you lots of joy on this festive day. Yeah. Yeah. We're decking your halls if you give us consent, of course, to do so. Sure. We would never deck halls just willy-nilly. No. I mean, no. We're good guys. That's right. Wow. This got odd very quickly. This is our annual sort of toy episode, and we've covered some specific dolls in the past, notably Cabbage Patch Kids. And you had the brainstorm, like, what about just dolls?

1:01What the heck is up with those weird little things? I sat up in the middle of the night one night and went, dolls! And you were like, what happened? And she was holding a chatty Cathy. That's right. Oh, I can't wait to get to that part. Oh my gosh. Yeah, we're talking about dolls themselves and it is a pretty broad category, but actually it's a little more specific than I realized, Chuck. And one of the things that right off the bat that I had no idea about is that there's almost no specific definition of dolls. No one can make an actual set definition. The reason why is because you're like, well, what about this?

1:41Well, what about that? Anytime you try to alter the definition to please everybody, it's the best example of how you can please some people, some of the time, but not everybody ever. That old saying. Yeah, that old saying. The definition that we agreed on was that a doll is a toy. And we all know what a doll looks like. It's like a model of usually a human type figure. I saw that it has to be human to be considered a doll. Sometimes it's a baby. Sometimes it's a grown up. It's not an action figure. We kind of covered that difference in our G.I. Joe episode. but what a doll specifically is beyond just looking like a human is it aids in kids development because there have been plenty and plenty of studies over the years that have reinforced the fact that dolls teach kids a lot of things a lot of great things uh empathy and and patience and recognizing emotions among many other things yes so just real quick that excludes that definition excludes things like puppets, like you said, action figures, statuettes, but it also, I think very weirdly, excludes animal dolls, like stuffed animals.

2:54Okay. Okay. And then one other thing I would add to the definition is that they have to be in some way, shape, or form, huggable. Okay. And that's it. So recognizing emotions is a big one for kids as long as holding onto dolls. Because a lot of times the kid will be like, the surrogate for what the kid might be feeling. You know, Chatty Cathy is feeling bored or angry. And that means the kid's not comfortable saying that to the parent. So they talk through the doll, but not in a creepy way. Is Chatty Cathy your go-to doll? So far. I'll move on to Betsy Wetsy soon enough. Chatty Cathy is pretty fun to say.

3:35Yeah. Another thing, this is also, I think, Playroom Collective laid out some good examples. And these are some of the ones that they said. Another one is practicing caregiving, where it can be anything from changing the doll's diapers to comforting the doll when it's sad or scared. And that teaches emotional availability, teaches problem solving. And then it also requires perspective taking, because just because the doll is scared or sad doesn't mean the kid feels that way right then. So that means that the kid is learning how to put themselves in other people's shoes and understand how other people can feel differently than how you can at the time.

4:15And it helps with empathy. Yeah, they can put themselves in their tiny little one inch shiny patent leather shoe. That's right. That Chatty Cathy has. Right. Right. If you want to talk about traditional gender roles, we're going to talk a lot about that because dolls have long been associated with girlhood. That wasn't always the case. It started by like the 1940s. By the turn of the century, toys were kind of marketed to boys and girls equally. But in the 1940s, they were like, hey, we can probably sell a lot more stuff if we really market one thing to girls and one thing to boys. and then all of a sudden we're buying twice as much stuff.

4:57Isn't that nuts? That's apparently where gendered toys came from. Totally. Around that same time, too, pink became the color for girls and blue for boys. And it didn't come from nowhere. We've talked about it before, but it used to be the opposite, where pink was for boys and blue for girls because pink was a red tone and red tones were considered too harsh for girls at the time. That's right. I never thought of pink being a red tone, but it totally is. Yeah, for sure. You can't deny it, Chuck. There was a study in 2017 that more than, this is interesting, more than three quarters of the people that were surveyed said it was really good to encourage girls to play with like boys toys or do boy things.

5:40And it went up to 80 % for women and millennials saying that. But when it came to boys, only 64%. So there are far fewer families saying, you know, William, you should play with your doll. Reference to Free to Be You and Me, the great song William Wants a Doll. And there are way, way more families telling their girls like you should go play with trucks or roughhouse. Yeah, go jump off that dirt pile. Yeah. So, yeah, that clearly means we have a long way to go still. But, you know, there are a lot of dolls that have made headway in empowering girls, showing that women can take jobs in male-dominated fields.

6:22Like Barbie has a million different careers, a lot of them like engineering and science and technology. She's been to space, for God's sake. and I think American Girl dolls. There's one girl at least who has a backstory where she has lesbian aunts who live in Australia randomly enough. And then of course, Chuck, we couldn't possibly talk about how Earring Magic Ken wasn't a groundbreaking doll. Yeah, I mean, Earring Magic Ken came out in 1993. You take one look at Earring Magic Ken and it's pretty clear that it's a queer coated doll. He has his diamond stud earring in one ear. He's wearing a purple mesh crop top.

7:03There was some controversy surrounding the necklace he wore that I won't even get into because this is a Christmas episode. But you can look it up if you want. I saw that too. And, of course, Mattel was like, that's preposterous. This is a kid's toy. But it was very hot in the gay community, selling out all over the place. maybe the hottest selling, well, definitely the hottest selling Ken doll of all time, maybe the best selling of all time, Mattel won't say, but it sold for six months like any ordinary sort of special release Barbie and evidently sold like hotcakes. Yeah, and one other feature that was often overlooked, he had a pull cord that made him talk and the only thing he said is, the boys are out tonight.

7:46So Chuck, I say we move on to the history of dolls. You want to talk about that or even where the word doll came from? Yeah, this is something I didn't know. It's a doll was a nickname for Dorothy. I always thought Dot was the only nickname for Dorothy. But apparently dating back to like at least the 16th century, there was a weird thing happening where people would substitute L's for R's. So Harold could be Hal, Mary could be Mal or Molly, and Dorothy could be doll. Yeah, it was a bigger trend than slap bracelets is today. Oh, wow. So the earliest use of the word doll goes back to the 1500s. And it was a pet name for a girlfriend or spouse, right?

8:26You didn't just have to be named Dorothy and that be your nickname. It was extended. Give me a doll. Yeah. Doll face. Yeah, exactly. Right. So it's a term of endearment for a girlfriend or a spouse. A century later, it became an insult for a loose woman. So everybody got dumped, apparently. And then by around 1700, it was finally used to describe a child's toy, to say, this is a doll. And people are like, well, wait a minute. What about stuffed animals? What about marionettes? And someone said, you think a puppet is a doll? Yeah. What kind of psycho are you? So many people think that they're going to have to explain that on a podcast one day.

9:05Right. They're like, you think a hot dog is a sandwich? Why has that doll got strings coming out of it? uh well speaking of strings uh yeah there's some strings in these dolls ancient dolls egyptian paddle dolls that date back to the middle kingdom like 2 ,000 to 1 ,800 bce they were a flat piece of wood so they weren't you know uh human shaped as far as three dimension three dimensionality goes but uh they were cut like a woman's torso and they had tattoo-like designs and hair made out of bead strings. But archaeologists were like, this isn't really a doll doll. I think it was more like a percussion instrument for like religious rituals.

9:48You could shake that thing. They do think in the ancient world that dolls played dual roles. One was for rituals like you were just describing, and then also that they were for play in the same way that dolls can develop children today. They were used to kind of indoctrinate kids into culture and society. And they're basing that in part on how there's still dolls like that around today, like the Akua Ba of the Fante and Akan people of Ghana. They have ritual dolls that kids also play with at the same time. Yeah, well, the dolls in ancient Rome were definitely sort of the early Barbies because they were not baby dolls.

10:25They were dolls that looked like grown-up Roman women. And the girls who played with them were like, it was just like having a Barbie. It was like, here is what we think the idealized image of a Roman woman is, a wife and a mother. And here, go play with this thing and try and look like that one day. So even before the Romans, they found dolls in Greek burials. And the reason why they found them is because girls would play with dolls. When they got married, they would consecrate, they would sacrifice essentially the dolls to Artemis in exchange for fertility in their marriage. and then if they never got married, they were buried with their dolls.

11:07Isn't that bittersweet? Kind of just bitter. Oh, okay. I'm looking for the sweet. I guess you're buried with your toy that you love. Yeah, that's the sweet part for sure. It's like the nougat of that situation. All right, I'll take it. All right, we promised talk of Aerosmith and their great, great, great song Ragdoll. I thought the same thing too. Come on up and see me. New version of an old scene. Oh, I guess that song's okay. That was late Aerosmith. They put out a bunch of songs like that for a while. Oh, I can't imagine how bad the subtext is, though. Oh, sure. I never really thought about that, but you're right.

11:50I don't know if there is an Aerosmith song where there wasn't a sexual subtext. I don't think so either. They were really into sex. Oh, no, that Love in an Elevator song. That was just talking about elevators going up and down. That's right. Sponsored by the Otis Corporation. That's right. Oh, man, I'm glad you could call that up. Rag dolls, not Aerosmith, but, you know, the little floppy dolls made out of fabric and not, you know, hard dolls that you can bang against the wall. They have been around for a long, long time since the ancient world. But because they were made out of things like, you know, cloth and linen and cotton and things like that, they would disappear before our very eyes over thousands of years.

12:32So there's not a ton of examples of those, but there are some, right? Yeah, but it also raises the question, like, how long have humans been playing with dolls? We have no idea for that very reason, because almost certainly dolls would have been made out of perishable materials very early on. But yeah, the oldest we found is 2 ,000 years old, Chuck. It was found in a trash pile in Egypt, and it was linen stuffed with some papyrus. It had some paint on it at one point, but now all that's left, there's a single bead that was once attached to its hair. But it's 2 ,000 years old, so give it a break, you know?

13:10Yeah, sure, of course. But what about in North America? There's a doll that says, I'm the oldest, and everyone says, yes, you are. Yes, that's right. There is a rag doll, the oldest rag doll in North America. It belonged to a little girl who was blind named Clarissa Field from Massachusetts. And the girl, the actual girl, was born in 1765. And I think this is a great deep cut band name. She named her doll Bangwell Putt. Yeah, that is a great band name for sure. Because no one will know what it is except for the rare stuff you should know, Lister. And they'd be like, bruh, you named your band Bangwell Putt after the oldest rag doll.

13:45Right. Or visitors to the Paco Madoc Valley Memorial Association in Deerfield, Mass., which is where it's kept now. Yeah, I guess they would know that. But I guess you could call it creepy looking. I didn't find it that creepy. But this dog, this doll has no facial features. There's just a blank face. But there are 10 individually sewn fingers and thumbs, which might be a reason that young Clarissa, like I mentioned, she was blind. And it might have sort of indicated the importance of touch for her. Yeah, I saw that the no-face ragdoll may have actually evolved out of the tradition from corn husk dolls, which didn't have faces because some of the Northeastern North America tribes had legends about why the corn goddess removed the face of the corn husk doll because she was getting too vain.

14:46That's why Cornhusk dolls don't have a face. And that's possibly why Ragdoll dolls don't have a face either. Like Bangwell Putt. Like Bangwell Putt. And to be clear, no facial features. There's a face, but there's no eyes, nose, or mouth, or, you know, eyebrows. All the things that make a face. What about eyelashes? No eyelashes, no pimples, no freckles. Pores? No wrinkles, no wrinkles, no pores. What else is on the face? I'm looking at my face. Nose hair? Beard, nose hair, mustache. All right. I think we covered it. Okay. I know for a fact we left something like the mouth out, something super glaring.

15:26Oh, I said mouth, and inside the mouth, everything counts as mouth. So don't come at me with teeth and tongue. Exactly. I'm glad you said that, Chuck. That should be on the shirt. Don't come at me with teeth and tongue. It's the stuff you should know way. Yeah. What about Victorian dolls? Well, this is really where doll obsessions, I think, kind of start to take off. Because up to this point, rag dolls, like, you got to be a pretty niche collector to be collecting like 18th century rag dolls. Victorian dolls is where people are like, give me all of these. And one of the reasons why is because doll making became a real art by the 15th century.

16:08And the seed of it originally was Germany. They had Dakenmachers, which are doll makers. And they were for aristocratic families who were the only ones that could afford these things because they were works of art. Yeah, works of art that very keyly looked like them. They really showed their sort of obsession with their own selves and their own class. They were made from porcelain and not because that was just some superior material. they were literally made from porcelain because they thought that represented the ideal skin tone, that porcelain white. They were dressed very fashionably, obviously.

16:47They had human hair wigs, apparently from the hair of working class girls. And they were true status symbols. Yeah, like you would be painted with them, a portrait. That's a pretty big status symbol at the time, right? Yeah, for sure. So one of my favorite things, so Dave helped us with this. Thank big head tip to Dave and Merry Christmas, Dave. And apparently around the time of Prince Albert's death, he was trapped in a can. He died in 1861. It's Queen Victoria's husband, by the way. Like funerals and mourning like became all the rage. We often associate like mourning and death stuff and memento mori with Victorians.

17:31And this is why. And so dolls were not immune to this trend. And little girls were given death kits to use with their dolls. Yeah. So, like, here's your doll and here's your little baby coffin and your little outfit that you should wear. And they would, you know, when you play doll, you play all kinds of facets of life. And that's one of the things about dolls that you'll see over and over is, you know, whether you're pretending to be, you know, cooking dinner in your home or you're doing other household things or you're, you know, now you're mourning because somebody has died. So you're sort of acting out and these things that you would do later as adults, which, again, is another sort of important facet of dolls.

18:13But today it's like if your kid is acting out a funeral with their doll, it would be eye-catching. Attention grabbing, I think. Yeah. I mean, you might sign them up for therapy or something when, in fact, I think it's a pretty normal thing. I think it is, too. But it would definitely make you stop and say, like, hey, what you doing with your doll right now? Yeah, for sure. Like, you wouldn't just pass the room and see it and just walk off shaking your head and laughing and be like my kid. Yeah. You do the darndest things. I want to hear, though, if anybody has a kid and they've ever found their kid performing a funeral for their doll, I want to hear about it.

18:49Yeah. That'd be a good listener mail. So dollhouses also really kind of came around at this time too, like the dollhouse as we think about it. Yeah. And that was thanks to the Victorians. And that's why dollhouses are always very nice and big because they were basically what the Victorian aristocracy thought that houses should look like at the time. And again, remember, you said that Victorian girls were being trained to how to behave in society through their dolls. Same thing with the dollhouse too. It's like, here's the scullery. Here's the bathroom with indoor plumbing. Like these are all the things you need to demand and expect when you grow up and get married.

19:28Yeah. Ring this bell if you're hungry. So, you know, we talked a little bit about the complicated history of race and facial features when it comes to race and skin tone and stuff like that with dolls. And so we have a whole kind of robust section here on the history of black dolls because it's a pretty complex story. Yeah. As far as race and self-image goes. And the first one we're going to talk about is called the Topsy-Turvy doll. It's a really good example because it was a doll that had two heads. It had a long skirt to conceal sort of one side. One head was white. One head was black. And, you know, depending on which way you held the doll, you were playing with a white doll or a black doll.

20:11And people, you know, there isn't text that says exactly why this thing was invented, but everyone pretty much agrees that like scholars that have studied this thing is that it originated in the antebellum South. They were made by enslaved black women as dolls for their daughters. And the idea is, hey, we have to take care of the white kids during the day and then we have to take care of our own children at night. and if dolls are to represent what you are to be doing when you grow up or maybe, you know, later on in your life, then you need a two-headed doll to care for the white doll in the day and the black doll at night.

20:50Yeah. That's not the worst of how the whole thing started. The Jim Crow South, the Jim Crow era, saw the rise of a lot of very racist dolls that were available. You could buy from catalogs like Montgomery Ward, which is not surprising. But the thing to understand about that is that this helped lay the groundwork for reinforcing social norms about the inferiority of black people in America and the superiority of white people in America. And it wasn't like, hey, kid, don't forget, black people are inferior, white people superior. It was much more subtle and much more pervasive than that through dolls.

21:36Like the black dolls were not particularly cute. They were sometimes ugly. They certainly weren't accurate representations of black people or black kids. White dolls were. They were very pretty. They were collector's items. They were gorgeous in a lot of cases. They were the doll that you wanted. And that sent the signal to black kids being raised in America at the time. Like if you're black, you should feel pretty much about yourself, how you feel about this doll, and you should feel about white people how you feel about this doll. Very pretty, huh? Yeah, exactly. I mean, it makes it all the more nefarious, I think, because these are children.

22:11Right. Like, the more subtle it is, the more nefarious it is. And this culminated in the 1940s with what was called the doll tests from Mamie and Kenneth Clark. It was pretty groundbreaking experiments where they traveled all over America, and they would give little black kids two dolls that were identical to one another, except for the skin tone. And then they would ask him a lot of questions like give me the doll that's a nice doll. Give me the doll that you think is a nice color. And overwhelmingly the positive traits from these little black kids were assigned to white dolls and the negative traits were assigned to black dolls.

22:47And the saddest part about all this is when they ask kids, give me the doll that looks like you, a lot of these little kids were ashamed to admit that they look like the black doll and they would like start crying and run from the room because they couldn't even admit it. Yeah. So this was brutal. It is brutal. But it also was just groundbreaking research that the Clarks created. Yeah, for sure. And it was so groundbreaking and so convincing that the NAACP came to them and said, hey, can we use this in these cases? They had five cases going on that eventually got attached into the Brown versus Board of Education case that the Supreme Court eventually heard that was successful with the 9-0 decision to overturn segregation in public schools.

23:37That's how convincing these doll tests were, that they were cited in some of these cases. And Kenneth Clark testified at some of the cases as well and wrote up the social science testimony that the Supreme Court considered in the case. Yeah. Pretty amazing result from that study. Sarah Lee Creech was a doll maker, I guess, who created the Sarah Lee doll in 1951. And that was the very first realistic black baby doll produced in the U.S. But not to be outdone during the black power movement, Baby Nancy came along. And that was kind of in the middle of the 65 Watts riots. It was a black-owned company called Shindana Toys.

24:18And it was the very first doll with realistic Afrocentric features. It was not like, hey, let's run a run of white dolls and then just changed the skin tone and color them brown. This Baby Nancy was a little black baby doll, and it was a really hot-selling doll in L.A. and beyond. I think the production couldn't keep up that year because they were such a hot seller. Yeah, it was a great success for sure. And the Sarah Lee doll, again, this was the first semi-accurate doll, but there was still a lot of features that weren't quite what black children look like. Like the Baby Nancy was like unmistakably had cute, tight little curls.

25:00And it was like, this is the first like legitimate African-American doll anyone's ever made. Yeah. I thought that was pretty cool. Yeah. It's amazing. Very cute doll, actually. So, um. I mean, I'm not into dolls because, you know, I play with trucks. Okay. But if I played with dolls, Baby Nancy might be my doll. I can't remember. Did you have a cabbage patch? Uh, I did. Uh, sort of. We bought a bunch of them when they were handmade by the original Xavier Roberts guy. Creepy pantyhose dolls, right? And they assigned a couple of them to me as mine, but they were never in my room. And it's not like it was like, oh, don't put that in my room.

25:43I don't know why they did that. It was weird. They were like, here's Scott's too, and you're too, and here's Michelle's. And don't touch them. I know. I think they're worth a little bit of money. Oh, I'm sure. I do remember mine as a little boy and a girl, and it's their shirts. And I guess the doll, whatever they were, was My Little TV Star or something like that. Hmm. I don't even know what that means. Let's say, hey, let's move along to paper dolls, or do you want to take a break now? Let's take a break, and I'm going to look up and see how much those Xavier Roberts dolls are worth of mine, and I'll see if I can list them on eBay.

26:18And I'll be right back.

26:44Okay, we promised to talk about paper dolls and what kind of Grinch Scrooges would we be if we just didn't deliver on that. That's right. So, yeah, paper dolls were this trend from, like the apex was from 1890 to 1920. But, I mean, you could find them pretty easily into the 1970s. And they're still around today in different forms. But they were, like, think about this. What trend can you think of, Chuck, that lasted for 30 years? This is a huge, huge trend. Grunge. No. Grunge, I will say, was 10 years tops. Pet Rocks? Pet Rocks is maybe two. That's it. I got nothing else. Okay. That's what I'm saying.