One of Charlotte’s special things for her birthday this year was a day-long trip to the American Girl store that has opened at the Natick Collection (previously better known as the Natick Mall). She brought two of her three dolls and had their ears “pierced”, got their hair done, and then she and Bridget enjoyed lunch in their bistro. Even though the Natick store might lack some of the caché of the 5th Avenue store in New York, it certainly does not lack for the myriad ways to separate parents from their cash. (And, no, I did not go along; it was a mother-daughter thing, which was perfectly fine with me)
I only recently learned that the American Girl franchise is owned by the toy juggernaut Mattel. I guess it’s not really a secret, since it’s right there on the website, but they don’t exactly play up the connection all that much. They’ve spent an awful lot of time carefully massaging the American Girl brand, and I suppose they figure that the “wholesome”, “traditional”, even “educational” feel they’ve imbued the dolls with might be tarnished if it were widely known that they were just another mass-produced product from the makers of Barbie, Hot Wheels, and a bazillion other toys.
Part of the careful treatment of American Girl has been the gentle-but-pointed introduction of “ethnic” characters, since the original set of dolls were uniformly WASPy. The lineup now includes a black character named “Addy”, a Hispanic girl named “Josefina” and a Native American girl named “Kaya”. Adding racial variations of popular dolls is nothing new for Mattel — Barbie also comes in African and Hispanic flavors — but the American Girl dolls have done a better job of making the characters part of the narrative flow of the brand. Addy is a freed slave who lives in the 1860s, Josefina lives in Spanish New Mexico in the 1820s, and Kaya is a pre-European Nez Perce from the 1760s. By contrast, black Barbie and Hispanic Barbie are still Barbie and are niche marketed in stores that have those minorities as their customer base.
The latest American Girl continues the trend, but not without some problems in doing so. Rebecca is a Russian-Jewish immigrant girl living in New York’s famed Lower East Side Jewish ghetto in the 1910s. Earlier this week, the New York Times ran a feature about the new doll and the minefield the American Girl people found themselves walking through to bring this doll to market. Their desire to represent this particular ethnic group had to be very carefully weighed against the sensibilities of Jewish interest groups and Jewish customers, who are all too familiar with negative stereotyping in mass-market culture.
The resulting doll is actually as non-descript as most of the American Girl dolls. A soft-cheeked, wide-eyed face with light-brown hair in loose curls, she could just as easily be Felicity, the Revolutionary War-era girl or Samantha the poor-little-rich girl. There’s no clue to her cultural heritage in the doll itself, one needs to delve into the series of books featuring her character to discover her unique story. Her story, like all the other American Girl stories, is a reality-free light adventure featuring just enough period details to qualify as vaguely “educational”, and (needless to say) was also subjected to serious vetting prior to release to make sure nothing offensive was included. With past dolls, says the NYT, there were complaints about the books: why did Addy have to be a slave, etc.
And yet, somehow all the focus groups and all the marketeers and the undoubtedly vast sea of attorneys who went over everything prior to the reveal of Rebecca managed to miss one embarrasing detail. Rebecca the doll was given the last name of “Rubin”, since the research said that would be a last name consistent with the Russian-Jewish immigration wave of the early 1900s and at the same time not “too Jewish”. But Heeb Magazine has managed to point out that “Rebecca Rubin” is also the name of a woman on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, accused of various acts of arson against U.S. government facilities in Oregon. Always deft with PR spin, the Mattel folks have said that they hope the doll will help the FBI find the bad Rebecca Rubin by bringing her name to public attention, but you just know some product line manager’s head is going to roll for this faux pas.
Maybe next year they can bring out their Annamaria Sacco and Sophia Vanzetti dolls.
