Is American Girl a Religious Authority?

In October, Mattel-owned American Girl released a “Celebration of Cultures” collection of doll outfits and accessories for Lunar New Year, Eid al-Fitr, Diwali, Hanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa. A wide range of representations of Christmas have been central to American Girl’s offerings since its creation as Pleasant Company in 1986. Outfits and accessories representing Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Lunar New Year were first offered in 1996. American Girl has also represented Native American beliefs and practices in historical fiction books and outfits since 2002.

The “Celebration of Cultures” collection is particularly noteworthy because it includes American Girl’s first step toward representing Muslim American girls and its first representation of Diwali. This increased diversity of representation—including American Girl’s first hijab—comes after years of petitions for the company to adopt a more inclusive approach to American religions. Even as the company carefully markets these items as “cultural” rather than “religious,” we might see that American Girl has the potential to take on—and in some ways already enacts—a kind of religious leadership.

Since its founding, and even after it became a subsidiary of Mattel in 1998, American Girl has reflected the vision of its creator, Pleasant Rowland, to provide an authoritative history of the United States for girls, especially those ages eight to twelve. As Rebecca Brenner Graham pointed out in this blog in September, a number of scholars already take American Girl seriously as a vehicle of public history that shapes the way Americans—especially American girls and women—think and feel about the past.

In particular, American Girl’s line of historical characters, represented in dolls, books, and accessories, is a pantheon of historical moments the company deemed important. Since the 1990s, both its historical fiction and its contemporary characters have become increasingly representative of Americans’ historical racial diversity. For over three decades, American Girl has served as a significant bellwether of how Americans see themselves and want to be seen, and inclusion in their product line has been an important marker for minority groups.

In my book, Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice, I examine American Girl’s historical character of Rebecca Rubin as part of my study of the materials and institutions of American Jewish nostalgia for turn-of-the-century immigration from Central and Eastern Europe to the United States. Rebecca, a fictional Jewish nine-year-old girl living in New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood in 1914 was first released to much fanfare in 2009. (I am also writing a teaching-focused piece on Rebecca Rubin for Rhae Lynn Barnes and Glenda Goodman’s American Contact project.) In Beyond the Synagogue — GROSS30-FM provides 30% off and free shipping from NYU Press — I find that nostalgia for this particular moment, which many see as American Jews’ communal origin, has become a prominent part of American Jewish religion since the 1970s and into the present day. I argue that reading about and buying Rebecca stories and products can be a religious practice for some Jewish consumers.

Following other religious studies scholars such as Robert Orsi and Kathryn Lofton, I define religion as meaningful relationships and the practices, narratives, and emotions that create and support these relationships. These relationships might include connections to living family members, ancestors, imagined communities, or the divine. Understanding religion as relationships makes families, communities, and memory central to religious activity. This allows us to see how individuals who do not regard themselves as “religious” make meaning in their lives, as well as how those who do see themselves as religious find meaning outside of traditional practices.

American Girl encourages consumers—and potential consumers—to identify their historical dolls and accessories with their books’ characters and to relate those characters to themselves, their families, and their communities. Like other individuals and institutions that create and market nostalgic American Jewish public history, American Girl deliberately works to create a community of consumers united by emotional reactions to particular materials of Jewish public history. Supposedly secular institutions and materials, such as American Girl and its products, might seem inconsequential, but they can support and encourage powerful relationships in ways that provide existential meaning and answer questions about life’s purpose.

In regards to the Rebecca products, American Girl can be understood as a type of Jewish communal leader or religious expert. As historian Robin Bernstein identifies, the purveyors of “scriptive things”—her term for the powerful dynamic of book-and-toy combinations—prompt consumers’ behaviors and shape their values. In doing so, American Girl performs the work of religious leadership by meaningfully connecting individuals’ practices, sense of self, family histories, and community narratives.

For instance, the book Candlelight for Rebecca features an illustration of Rebecca lighting a Hanukkah menorah on its cover. The American Girl historical fiction series regularly include a Christmas or winter holiday book, and Candlelight for Rebecca fills this slot. American Girl sells a miniature version of Rebecca’s menorah, which matches the image in the book. Unlike American Girl’s contemporary Hanukkah set (a version of which was originally released in 1996), Rebecca’s menorah is a traditional design, featuring two lions framing a crown and, in the center, an image of a seven-branched candelabra, representing the lampstand in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem that is a central part of the Hanukkah story. Her menorah is made even more “real” by a photograph of a real menorah with the same design in the “Looking Back” section at the end of Candlelight for Rebecca, which places Rebecca’s fictional story in historical context.

Some Jewish consumers—those who Bernstein calls “competent performers”—connect Rebecca’s story, images, and miniatures to their own practices and family histories. “Unreal!” wrote one online reviewer. “This is the exact menorah I had growing up! I cannot believe it.” Another reviewer said, “The menorah and dreidel are both made of metal with a [sic] old world design which reminds me of my grandmothers.” These competent performers emotionally connect memories of holidays with families and their own practices with the Rebecca doll, stories, and accessories.

Like other forms of religious practice, engagement with the Rebecca items could be momentary or more substantial; in either case, it has the potential to help consumers answer questions like “who am I?” and “where do I come from?” American Girl’s Rebecca character and consumer items use the intimacy and emotion of historical fiction and miniature collection to help consumers answer these existential questions by placing themselves, their families, and their communities in a powerful and meaningful historical narrative.

American Girl’s engagement with Eid al-Fitr and Diwali could be a one-off, but it’s more than likely that the company will continue to feature religious diversity alongside other kinds of representation. It might not be appropriate to call American Girl a “religious leader” in relation to American Muslim, Hindu, Jain, Sikh, and Buddhist traditions yet, especially when these new holiday outfits are not tied to historical narratives. But scholars should be on the lookout for how this will shape how Americans see their own and others’ religious traditions, as well as the range of what counts as “American religion” in popular imagination.