Girls' domestic, emotional, political, and self-development labor in the American Girl Neo-Historical Book Series

In the American Girl neo-historical fiction series, the girl protagonists are always at work. The girls are involved not only with the reproductive labor of the household, but also with the labor of creative and political production.

With close to 150 million American Girl books sold in the last 30 years, the narratives of the fourteen historical dolls are a part of our cultural discourse about girls’ lives in American history. Despite the popularity of this book series, and critical analyses of the collection, there has been little analysis of how American Girl imagines and represents the domestic and informal labor produced by the girl protagonists. For contemporary girl readers, the American Girls’ narratives serve to shape perceptions of girlhood and girls’ labor, despite the series’ historical inaccuracies.

This paper explores the labor in which the girl protagonists are involved, the maternal response to their labor, the ways in which social value is ascribed to their work, and the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and historical location in the representation of this work. I explore how mothers in these stories reward domestic labor with attention, praise, and demonstrations of love while the girls challenge this by seeking similar rewards and an acknowledgement of value for their creative and political labor. While the mothers’ labor often serves to reify an ideology of domesticity, the girls’ labor can be emancipatory and used to challenge the normative roles ascribed to them by their mothers and the historical realities of their fictitious times.