Friends From Foreign Lands, or Doll Diplomacy: Learning How to Get Along with International Dolls

This paper explores the international doll series phenomenon that began in the 1890s and has been consistently revived throughout the twentieth century. International doll series participate in the creation of “international tableaux” in which the subjects’ relationships to each other and to the larger social structure are revealed. As toys they pass that information on to children, raising questions about how children learn to locate and identify themselves and others. Dolls designed to represent people from around the world have been a toy industry standard since they were popularized by the 1893 Columbia World’s Fair in the form of cheap paper dolls. Whereas those dolls reflected many of the same imperial visions expressed in the fair, the international dolls introduced by the Madame Alexander Doll Company in 1935 represented an ideological shift in the genre, promoting cosmopolitan visions. Madame Alexander was the daughter of Russian Jews who escaped the pogroms. As a successful and socially active Jewish businesswoman with a doll factory in New York, she was moved by the global events of the 1930s to reinvent the international doll series as a way to foster international understanding. Madame frequently proclaimed, “Dolls should contribute to a child’s understanding of people, other times, and other places […] A doll can undoubtedly become a child’s best friend.” These international dolls became friends to American girls, teaching them that any differences were minor. The series continued through the war and was revived in the turbulent 1960s. While in 1965 Hasbro introduced a GI Joe “Soldiers of the World” line with good guys and bad guys, Madame resisted such categories and even introduced a Vietnamese doll to the line in 1968. These different international doll series represent shifts in ways children have been taught about foreigners through their playthings.