A Doll Embodies What It Means to Be an American Woman

If we asked a woman to name the most significant experiences in the construction of her gender identity, we wouldn't be surprised if she replied with emotional and cognitive recollections involving mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and girl-friends. She would probably paint a world made of intense emotions, unexpected discoveries, celebrations of daily gestures. A world of feelings, beauty, sense of duty, motherhood, peer rivalry, and standing up to the other gender, evoking shared stories and common plots.

  Here we want to talk about a different way of expressing the female self, through the mythical constructions and associations build around a brand of books and dolls sold via today's cathedrals of consumption. In fact, a society of consumers is turning to the market for the cultural and symbolic resources needed to build one's identity and live one's life.

  American girls aged seven to twelve have learned faster than their predecessors how to move with ease across this symbolic terrain. They have chosen as their icon a fictional doll and her world made of personal stories, heroic exploits, ideals and values, condensed in an infinite constellation of accessories and products, made and sold under the American Girl brand. For the first time, millions of young girls have chosen an actor with high cultural and social power, in order to decree the centrality of their role in the family and society, in gender relations and affirmation of the self. After decades of struggles about redefining gender roles in society, a doll is bringing together women of various generations on a shared vision of femininity.

  Established in 1986 by a retired teacher named Pleasant T. Rowland, American Girl started as an educational project aiming to recount American history and values through the fictional adventures of little girls of different ethnic backgrounds in crucial periods in the historical development of the country. The books portray heroines who have to face difficulties with courage and success, providing credible role models for a female audience, in a children's world typically dominated by male heroes. The incredible success of the book series was turned into huge sales of (expensive) dolls embodying the protagonists of the book, each equipped with a growing portfolio of accessories feeding the need to collect all items of the brand.

  Today, American Girl is a commercial empire that pushes a powerful cultural platform, which seduces female consumers by offering a wealth of symbols tied to femininity, to the centrality of women in the family and society, by celebrating the historical past and enriching the consumerist present with hedonistic products. In the vast product and service universe revolving around the dolls, girls are able to put themselves in relation with the whole female universe (from their peers' to their mothers' and grandmothers'), and imagine a future where they can be protagonists.

  The market is increasingly supplanting other domains of collective life, such as the family and school, in socialization processes. Little girls find in moms and grandmas alike allies in this role-playing game of consumption, since the book stories highlight the importance of their tacit knowledge of the world as it is and as it was, which they wouldn't be otherwise able to share as effectively. One could frown at this trend or be stunned by how deeply the market is now involved in the cultural transmission among generations of women. Yet, young female consumers are pointing to a world where corporations could take on a responsible and constructive role, by devoting themselves to creating areas of free, and especially liberating, appropriation.