Cinderella Ate My Daughter (4 page)

Unlike animated royalty, however, Shirley Temple was a flesh-and-blood girl, whose reign could not go on indefinitely—she had no choice but to relinquish the crown once she entered puberty. What’s more, unlike much of today’s princess schlock, Shirley Temple dolls were synonymous with quality: they ran a whopping $4.49, which was almost quadruple the price of competing dolls. In that way, they were less like the Disney Princesses and closer to what seems—at least at first glance—like the princess antidote: the upscale, down-to-earth American Girl collection.

Ten-year-old Sophie is no longer into American Girl. That’s what her mother, my friend Karen, reported apologetically when I invited them to join me for a jaunt to American Girl Place, the brand’s Mecca-like store in Manhattan. Eventually Sophie agreed to go, if reluctantly. For research. Because, as I said, she was no longer into American Girl. She was no longer into it—until she got there.

American Girl Place, which sits on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 49th Street, across from Saks, contains three stories of dolls, dresses, books, and the most cunning miniature furniture you have ever seen. It houses a doll hospital (where, after “treatment,” repaired dolls are returned with a hospital gown, an identification bracelet, a “Get Well Soon” balloon, and a certificate of good health) and a hair salon (where stylists strap dolls into tiny barber’s chairs for facials and new ’dos). There is also a café, where I had cadged a coveted reservation for the three of us plus Sophie’s doll Kaya.

There was no line around the block when we arrived, as there routinely had been several years before when the store first opened, but, on a dreary winter afternoon, there were still throngs of little girls streaming in, most of them already clutching dolls or toting them in specially designed backpacks.

“Mama,
look
!” Sophie cried, pointing to a blue wrought-iron daybed with butterfly-themed linen and its own trundle.

“Sophie,
look
!” Karen replied half jokingly, pointing at a book with a pink-and-turquoise cover titled
Clutter Control
.

Sophie ignored her, looking eagerly around. “Can I get
two
things?” she asked.

“Let’s see what you choose,” Karen said firmly. But Sophie was already running toward the escalator to check out the second floor.

American Girl was born in 1986, started by a former teacher, TV reporter, and textbook editor named—I kid you not—Pleasant Rowland. Pleasant conceived of her dolls one holiday season while shopping for presents for her nieces. Every doll she saw seemed to be either cheaply made, unattractive, or fashion-obsessed. And nothing, she felt, communicated “anything about what it meant to be a girl growing up in America.” Rather than a bucket of Barbies, Rowland dreamed of offering girls a doll they would treasure, that would forge a bond between mothers and daughters, that could even become an heirloom, passed from generation to generation. She wanted her dolls to offer an alternative, morally inspiring vision of girlhood, one that would, in the process, express her own passion for history. The American Girl dolls in the historical line, then, represented different eras in the country’s past: among them were Kirsten, “a pioneer girl of strength and spirit”; Felicity, “a spunky Colonial girl”; Addy, a “courageous girl” who escapes slavery (who is still the
only
black girl in the historical line); and Kaya, Sophie’s doll, a Nez Percé Indian from the mid–eighteenth century. The dolls are eighteen inches high with notably realistic, childlike proportions—no Barbie bosoms here, though at a hefty $110 per doll, they are also up to twenty times as expensive. Six books (purchased separately) tell each doll’s story. Their worlds can be re-created with astonishingly detailed period clothing, furniture, and other paraphernalia. The kit for Kit, a Depression-era girl who dreams of being a journalist, includes a miniature “reporter’s set” with an authentic-looking leather-bound notebook, tiny pencil, and eraser; a period camera (complete with box of Kodak film and five preshot photos); and a stack of newspapers, tied with twine, showing her byline splashed across the front page.

Be still, my heart! I thought, leaning in to get a closer look.

Eavesdropping as we strolled through the store, I noticed that, like me, the mothers were captivated by the tiny jars of canned peaches, the realistic 1930s cookstove, the wee 1940s-style chifforobe with its faux cut-glass mirrors and hanging quilted dress bag.

The girls, on the other hand, were into the clothes.

“I want the pink dress!”
a blond four-year-old screeched twenty-four times in the space of thirty seconds. Her mother finally grabbed it off the rack.

The formula was brilliant: moms were hooked by the patina of homespun values and the
Antique Road Show
aesthetic of the accessories; then the girls angled for fashions. Most walked out laden with some of each.

By 1998, the Pleasant Company was pulling down more than $300 million in annual sales. That year brought two changes: the first American Girl Place opened (the dolls had previously been sold exclusively through mail order), and Pleasant sold her empire to Mattel—the maker of the same disposable doll she had been trying to combat. You can’t really blame the woman, though: who wouldn’t compromise an ideal or two for a $700 million payday? Mattel has since added the Just Like You line, which jettisons the historical format, letting girls customize dolls with hair, eye color, and skin tone that matches their own (outfits and furnishings to bring the dolls’ “stories” alive sold separately). They also partnered with Bath & Body Works to produce a Real Beauty product line, though that did not last: maybe even Mattel recognized the contradiction in telling an eight-year-old that a perfume called “Truly Me” would help her feel good about “just being yourself.”

Before my visit, I was familiar with American Girl only through the books, which I had flipped through at the public library. The titles in each series are identical:
Meet
[doll’s name]; [doll’s name]
Learns a Lesson
; [doll’s name]
’s Surprise
;
Happy Birthday,
[doll’s name]; [doll’s name]
Saves the Day
; and
Changes for
[doll’s name]. In one typical story, Molly, a “loveable, patriotic girl growing up on the home front during World War II” whose father is fighting in Europe, plays a series of pranks on her pesky brother. Eventually the stakes escalate, and she learns that peace can be harder than war. Our heroines may confront a smidgen of sexism, racism, or even, on occasion, tragedy, but nothing a little pluck and ingenuity can’t conquer. Which is fine with me: it’s not as though I would want my seven-year-old exposed to the details of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Reading the books, though, I was struck by their presentation of the past as a time not only in which girls were improbably independent, feisty, and apparently without constraint but, in a certain way, in which they were
more
free than they are today: a time when their character mattered more than their clothing, when a girl’s actions were more important than how she looked or what she owned—a time before girlhood was consumed and defined by consumerism. I found myself comparing Kit, the courageous, impoverished Depression-era girl who is committed to becoming a muckraking reporter, to Yasmin, a character from Bratz.com, which competes for the same six- to eleven-year-old demographic: Yasmin has “got a lot of strong opinions and loves to share them,” “enjoys curling up with a cool autobiography about celebs she admires,” and blogs about “staying involved with your community while still doing fun things like getting makeovers.”

Suddenly American Girl’s price tag didn’t look so bad.

And maybe it wouldn’t be, if the doll and books were the end of it. But that little cookstove would set you back $68 and the chifforobe another $175. For
doll
furniture. Therein lies the paradox of American Girl: the books preach against materialism, but you could blow the college fund on the gear. In fact, Kit, Addy, Molly, and their friends could never afford the dolls that represent them—an irony that became particularly piquant in fall 2009 with the introduction of Gwen, a $95 limited-edition doll who was supposed to be
homeless
. The truth is, I asked Sophie and Karen to join me on this outing because Daisy had not yet heard about American Girl, and I was not eager to hasten her discovery. It’s not that I object to the dolls, exactly, and I surely understand supporting a girl’s interest in the line, but I would prefer to stave it off, if not avoid it entirely: there has to be a less expensive way to encourage old-fashioned values.

We headed up the escalator to the café, a black-and-white-striped confection iced with pink daisies and whimsical mirrors. Inside, dolls were seated in clip-on “treat seats” and given their own striped cups and saucers.
Everything
was for sale: the doll seat ($24), the tea set ($16), the pot that held the daisies ($8). All around us mothers were smiling, nibbling their quiche, reveling in this New York reprieve from the pressures of Paris (Hilton, that is). While my gaze was elsewhere, Sophie took a bite of a cucumber slice and slipped it onto Kaya’s plate, then pretended the doll had eaten it. She was ten years old but, swept away by the moment, was willing to believe in the kind of magic she already knew was not real. They might as well have put up a sign: check your cynicism at the door. I was happy to comply.

Almost. It turned out that Kaya, like Disney’s Pocahontas, did not inspire a lot in the way of outfits or accessories. Not fun. Sophie asked if she could buy a new doll using money she had been saving from her birthday and allowance. Karen hesitated—this was the child who wasn’t “into” American Girl anymore—but then agreed. She even sprang for matching girl-doll outfits ($107) as well as a $20 salon appointment for Kaya. Then she bought the daybed and trundle ($68) because, well… even Karen didn’t know why. “I can’t believe I’m succumbing!” she moaned. When we got to the cash register, she was told the butterfly bedding was sold separately—for another $26. Karen sighed in disgust. “Are you writing this down?” she said to me. She turned to the salesclerk. “Okay, I’ll get the bedding.”

She slapped down her AmEx. “My husband is going to think I’ve lost my mind,” she muttered.

I glanced across the street to the window display at Saks Fifth Avenue. It held a hypnotically spinning red-and-white-striped disc with two words in the center in tall black letters:
WANT IT
. The same phrase ran endlessly around the window’s edge. At least, I thought, that store was up front about its agenda.

Pleasant Rowland herself has called the dolls something mothers can “do” for their girls. But as Sophie, Karen, and I trudged eastward on 49th Street, our arms weighted down by giant shopping bags, it occurred to me that you don’t “do” $500 worth of merchandise. You buy it. It is a peculiar inversion: the simplicity of American Girl is expensive, while the finery of Princess comes cheap. In the end, though, the appeal to parents is the same: both lines tacitly promise to keep girls young and “safe” from sexualization. Yet they also introduce them to a consumer culture that will ultimately encourage the opposite—one in which Mattel and Disney (the parent companies, respectively, of the two brands) play a major role. Both Princess and American Girl promote shopping as the path to intimacy between mothers and daughters; as an expression, even for five-year-olds, of female identity. Both, above all, are selling innocence. And nothing illustrates the gold mine it has become—or the contradictions it represents—better than the color pink.

Chapter Three
-
Pinked!

T
he annual Toy Fair at New York’s Javits Center is the industry’s largest trade show, with 100,000 products spread over 350,000 feet of exhibition space. And I swear, at
least
75,000 of those items were pink. I lost count of the myriad pink wands and crowns (feathered, sequined, and otherwise bedazzled) and infinite permutations of pink poodles in purses (with names like Pucci Pups, Fancy Schmancy, Sassy Pets, Pawparazzi… ). The Disney Princesses reigned over a new pink Royal Interactive Kitchen with accompanying pink Royal Appliances and pink Royal Pots and Pans set (though I would have thought one of the perks of monarchy would be that someone else did the cooking). There were pink dinnerware sets emblazoned with the word
PRINCESS
; pink fun fur stoles and boas; pink princess beds; pink diaries (embossed with
PRINCESS
,
BALLERINA
, or butterflies); pink jewelry boxes; pink vanity mirrors, pink brushes, and toy pink blow-dryers; pink telephones; pink bunny ears; pink gowns; pink height charts; a pink Princess and the Pea board game (one square instructed, “Wave like a princess, pretty as you can be”); My Little Pink Book Board Game (“a cool game for girls in which they secretly choose a dream date from their Little Pink Book of guys and then try to be the first to guess who everyone else is dating”); and a pink toy washing machine. All of those, however, were perhaps to be expected. Less explicable were the pink spy kits; pink roll-aboard suitcases; pink cameras; a giant pink plush squid (which, from behind, looked exactly like a giant penis); a pink plush boa constrictor; a pink plush beanstalk (or really
any
plush beanstalk); pink rocking horses; pink cowgirl hats (“There’s something wrong here,” I heard one toy store buyer comment, “it needs rhinestones or glitter or something to sell”); pink gardening gloves; pink electric pianos; pink punching balls; pink gumball machines (with pink gumballs); pink kites; pink pool toys; pink golf clubs, sleds, tricycles, bicycles, scooters, and motorcycles, and even a pink tractor. Oh, and one pink neon bar sign flashing
LIVE NUDES
.

It’s not that pink is intrinsically bad, but it is such a tiny slice of the rainbow, and, though it may celebrate girlhood in one way, it also repeatedly and firmly fuses girls’ identity to appearance. Then it presents that connection, even among two-year-olds, not only as innocent but as
evidence
of innocence. Looking around, I despaired at the singular lack of imagination about girls’ lives and interests, at the rows and rows of make-your-own jewelry/lip gloss/nail polish/fashion show craft kits at the drumbeat of the consumer feminine.

“Is all this pink really necessary?” I asked a bored-looking sales rep hawking something called Cast and Paint Princess Party.

“Only if you want to make money,” he said, chuckling. Then he shrugged. “I guess girls are born loving pink.”

Are they? Judging by today’s girls, that would seem to be true—the color draws them like heat-seeking missiles. Yet adult women I have asked do not remember being so obsessed with pink as children, nor do they recall it being so pervasively pimped to them. I remember thinking my fuchsia-and-white-striped Danskin shirt with its matching stirrup pants was totally bitchin’, but I also loved the same outfit in purple, navy, green, and red (yes, I had them all—there must have been a sale at Sears). My toys spanned the color spectrum, as did my hair ribbons, school notebooks, and lunchboxes. The original Easy-Bake oven, which I begged for (and, dang it, never got), was turquoise, and the Suzy Homemaker line—I had the iron, which really worked!—was teal. I can’t imagine you would see that today. What happened? Why has girlhood become so monochromatic?

Girls’ attraction to pink may seem unavoidable, somehow encoded in their DNA, but according to Jo Paoletti, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, it’s not. Children weren’t color-coded at all until the early twentieth century: in the era before Maytag, all babies wore white as a practical matter, since the only way of getting clothes clean was to boil them. What’s more, both boys and girls wore what were thought of as gender-neutral dresses. When nursery colors were introduced, pink was actually considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red, which was associated with strength. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy, and faithfulness, symbolized femininity. (That may explain a portrait that has always befuddled me, of my father as an infant in 1926 wearing a pink dress.) Why or when that switched is not clear, but as late as the 1930s, in a poll of its customers conducted by the New York City department store Lord & Taylor, a solid quarter of adults still held to that split. I doubt anyone would get it “wrong” today. Perhaps that is why so many of the early Disney heroines—Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Wendy, Alice in Wonderland,
Mary Poppins
’s Jane Banks—were dressed in various shades of azure. (When the company introduced the Princess line, it deliberately changed Sleeping Beauty’s gown to pink, supposedly to distinguish her from Cinderella.) It was not until the mid-1980s, when amplifying age and sex differences became a dominant children’s marketing strategy, that pink fully came into its own, when it began to seem innately attractive to girls, part of what defined them as female, at least for the first few critical years.

I hadn’t realized how profoundly marketing trends dictated our perception of what is natural to kids, including our core beliefs about their psychological development. Take the toddler. I assumed that phase was something experts—people with PhDs at the very least—developed after years of research into children’s behavior: wrong-o. Turns out, according to Daniel Cook, a historian of childhood consumerism, it was popularized as a marketing gimmick by clothing manufacturers in the 1930s. Trade publications counseled department stores that, in order to increase sales, they should create a “third stepping-stone” between infant wear and older kids’ clothes. They also advised segregating girls’ and boys’ clothing no later than age two: parents whose sons were “treated like a little man” were thought to be looser with their purse strings. It was only
after
“toddler” became common shoppers’ parlance that it evolved into a broadly accepted developmental stage. If that seems impossible to believe, consider the trajectory of “tween,” which was also coined, in the mid-1980s, as a marketing contrivance (originally describing children aged eight to fifteen). Within ten years, it was considered a full-blown psychological, physical, and emotional phase, abetted, in no small part, by the classic marketing bible
What Kids Buy and Why
. Its author confidently embedded “tween” in biology and evolution, marked by a child’s “shift from right brain focus to left brain focus” and ending with a “neural ‘housecleaning’ ” in which “millions of unmyelinated neurons are literally swept out of existence.” Whatever
that
means. Scientifically proven or not, as phases go, “tween” is a conveniently elastic one: depending on who is talking, it now stretches from children as young as seven (when, according to the cosmetic company Bonne Bell, girls become “adept at using a lip gloss wand”) to as old as twelve. That is hardly a span that has much common ground—nor, I would argue as a parent,
should
it have.

Splitting kids, or adults, or for that matter penguins, into ever-tinier categories has proved a surefire way to boost profits. So, where there was once a big group that was simply called “kids,” we now have toddlers, preschoolers, tweens, young adolescents, and older adolescents, each with their own developmental/marketing profile. For instance, because of their new “perceptual filters,”
What Kids Buy and Why
counsels, thirteen- to fifteen-year-olds may still appreciate the wisecracks of Bugs Bunny, but a new passion for “realism” draws them to sports figures such as Michael Jordan; no accident, then, that those two were teamed up to shill for Nike in the mid-1990s. Even children one year old and under are being hailed as “a more informed, influential and compelling audience than ever before.”
Informed?
An article published by the Advertising Educational Foundation stated, “Computer interaction and television viewing make this kid segment very savvy, and has led to dramatic changes in today’s American families.” Children as young as twelve to eighteen months can recognize brands, it went on, and are “strongly influenced” by advertising and marketing.
Yikes!
Meanwhile, I have seen the improbable term “pre-tween” (“pre”-between
what
, exactly?) floated to describe—and target—the five-year-old girl who has a discerning fashion sense and her own Lip Smackers collection.

One of the easiest ways to segment a market is to magnify gender differences—or invent them where they did not previously exist. That explained the token pink or lavender building sets, skateboards, tool belts, and science kits scattered throughout the Toy Fair. (The exception was Tonka, which had given up on girls altogether with its slogan “Boys: They’re Just Built Different.”) That pinkification could, I suppose, be read as a good-faith attempt at progress. The advent of pink TinkerToys, “designed especially for girls” (who can construct “a flower garden, a butterfly, a microphone and more”), might encourage preschool girls to use mechanical and spatial skills that might otherwise lie fallow. Or it might reinforce the idea that the “real” toy is for boys while that one measly pink Lego kit
in the whole darned store
is girls’ consolation prize. It could even remind girls to shun anything that
isn’t
pink and pretty as not for them, a mind-set that could eventually prove limiting. And what about the girl who chooses something else? I recalled taking Daisy to the park one day with a friend who had a pink Hello Kitty scooter and matching helmet. Daisy’s scooter was silver; her helmet sported a green fire-breathing dragon.

“How come your helmet’s not pink?” her friend asked. “It’s not a girls’ one.”

Daisy furrowed her brow, considering, then said, “It’s for girls
or
boys.” Her friend looked skeptical. Even though I was relieved by Daisy’s answer, I found the question itself disturbing. Would other girls view her with suspicion—even exclude her—if she did not display the proper colors? I hoped her friend would get the message and broaden her repertoire. I hoped Daisy would resist the pressure to narrow hers.

I took a break from the Toy Fair and strolled uptown to Times Square, home of the international flagship Toys “R” Us store. Part emporium, part amusement park, the post–FAO Schwarz monolith (Toys “R” Us swallowed up that venerable vendor in 2009) features a three-story neon-lit Ferris wheel at the entrance. Each car has a different theme:
Toy Story
, Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, Monopoly, a fire truck. There are also a five-ton animatronics T. rex (which scared the bejeezus out of several toddlers during my brief visit), the New York skyline constructed entirely from Legos, and a two-story “Barbie Mansion” painted the iconic Pantone 219, often referred to as “Barbie Pink.”

I paused in front of a display of plush Abby Cadabby dolls: throughout the store, I had noted Abby bath sets, costumes, books, party packs, sing-along CDs, backpacks—the typical array of licensed gimcracks. A resident of
Sesame Street
, Abby is a three-year-old “fairy in training” with cotton-candy-colored skin, a button nose, sparkly purple pigtails, pink wings, and a wand. She was launched in 2006; her presence in the neighborhood brought the grand total of female Muppets, after thirty-seven seasons, to five (Miss Piggy was on
The Muppet Show
, not
Sesame Street
, and, by the way, was voiced by Frank Oz, a man). That in itself is astonishing—
Sesame Street
, which has skillfully tackled differences involving race, language, disability, and culture, can’t figure out gender?

Not that it hasn’t tried. The show has introduced a new female Muppet nearly every year, only to see them fizzle. Just as with real women, audiences seem to judge them by different standards than the males. “If Cookie Monster was a female character, she’d be accused of being anorexic or bulimic,” the show’s executive producer, Carol-Lynn Parente, has quipped. And, she added, were he a girl, Elmo’s “whimsy” might be misread as “ditziness.” But the real fur ceiling has to do with appearance. Lulu, a shy, scruffy-looking monster introduced in 2000, was a flat-out flop—mainly because “she wasn’t that attractive” (unlike that dreamboat Grover?). The most successful female Muppet has been Zoe, who was the first character entirely conceived of by Sesame Workshop executives rather than the creative team, as well as the first one intentionally designed to be good-looking. Apparently, though, they did not go far enough. While Zoe is cute, in a radioactive orange kind of way, her release fell short of expectations, the—
ka-ching!
—hope of creating a female Elmo. Even slapping a tutu on her did not help. Perhaps, one of her creators later mused, the problem was that she wasn’t pink. The Workshop was not going to make that mistake again. With Abby, every detail was researched, scrutinized, and tested. Designers labored over the size of her nose (large may be funny, but it’s not
pretty
) as well as its shape (too snoutlike in one version). Her eyelids were an issue, too—how much should show? In the end, they cover only the outermost part of her exaggerated, circular whites, giving the character a vulnerable, slightly cross-eyed appearance. Her lashes are long and dreamy. Her voice is sibilant, babyish in its pitch, and her catchphrase is “That’s so magic!” She practically begs to be hugged.