I Still Love My American Girl Dolls. It’s Fine.

There are a few things I do every time I go home to San Francisco: Grab a donut from Bob’s on Polk, go vintage shopping at Wasteland, throw out the expired yogurts in my dad’s fridge, and make sure Nellie and Samantha are dressed appropriately for the season. Who are Nellie and Samantha? My two American Girl dolls. It’s fine.

I’m a college graduate with a full-time job and a driver's license. I have a cat and I do my laundry and I can paint my nails without getting polish all over my fingers. I drink. I vote. I've been to multiple Beyoncé tours. What I’m trying to say is, I am an adult. And yet, even after finishing Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (10/10, would life-change again) and dumping a solid two thirds of my worldly possessions at Goodwill, I was unable to part with a pair of unblinking, unfeeling, historically accurate toys. And more than that, I kind of...love them? Last time I was home, I gave the Nellie doll a tiny kiss on the forehead. It just happened, like a reflex. I couldn't control it and I didn't mean to do it and I think it surprised both of us.

An American Girl doll, at least in the late nineties, when Samantha came into my life, was a status symbol, because you can't give a kindergartener a Birkin. The dolls were expensive and had to be ordered via catalog; you couldn't just walk into Toys R Us and pick one up last-minute. But with the price tag came value. The clothes and accessories were high-quality. The faces were washable and durable. It wasn't out of the question to think that a Samantha or a Molly or an Addy might one day find her way into the hands of her original owner's daughter. Plus, they came with books and back stories. Any kid could get into Barbie or Polly Pocket; American Girl dolls were for the intellectual. In a pre–Rory Gilmore, pre–Hermione Granger world, American Girl dolls were the go-to for girls who liked history and reading.

Historical fiction is essential to young readers, especially girls; we have to be able to imagine ourselves and our foremothers as vital, even in a small way, to the story of our society. The American Girl books (and later, the Dear America series, another 10/10 rec) put young women at the center of history and said that virtues like bravery and honesty and friendship and hard work were the keys to happiness and fulfillment, rather than a sweet disposition and a pretty face and a nice singing voice, as Disney might have us believe. Issues like racism and classism were present in the series (Addy was a damn slave!), but with a little sympathy and patience, nothing was too sticky to be fixed. Compared to the feminist quicksand I routinely find myself drowning in (showing skin is empowering but distracting but shouldn’t be but is, etc.), American Girl–ism is downright quaint. Samantha, and by extension Nellie, is from a Girl Power! era that, for better or for worse, significantly shaped who I am and how I think. They’re the tangible product of the first however many waves of feminism we’re counting pre-1995. And it wasn’t perfect, but man, it felt good.