Illustration: © 2008 Stuart Carlson | Reprinted with permission of Univeral Press Syndicate
Elizabeth Marshall's excellent article, "Marketing an American Girlhood" (Vol. 23, No. 2) should be read by every parent, teacher, and librarian as an example of caveat emptor. Sharon Lamb and I wrote about American Girl dolls in our book Packaging Girlhood ("A Series to Buy For") as an example of the clever marketing of girl power. Marshall's analysis of race as a commodity is especially important because we're seeing this marketing approach in lots of products of late.
Just because a doll, book series, or a website promoting a product offers up girls of different races does not mean they promote diversity. It means they're smartly casting a wide net?presenting different girls who are actually all the same in their love for a product. But American Girl promises something more than this pseudo-multiculturalism. Their history books invite girls both to imagine the challenges and struggles of different girls in different times and cultures and to identify with the inner girl?her strength, tenacity, and courage. Maybe that's why it's so disappointing to know that such inclusion is, as Marshall says, superficial (and even historically inaccurate), and to see these wonderful qualities tied closely to expensive products and interwoven with tired themes about female restraint and accommodation.
Pay attention to what mothers teach their daughters, to the representation of boys in these books, and to who gets called "pretty" or "beautiful" over and over (hint: it's not African American Addy). As psychologists studying and working with girls, perhaps what bothers us most is the way American Girl, by price alone, pits girls who have against girls who have not. So much for the inner girl.
I appreciate your Open Letter to the President-Elect (Vol. 23, No. 2). Right now is the right time for such letters, a time to be hopeful and firm, to tell Obama what's right, what's real, and what he needs to do to enact the will of the people.