Toys with Professions: Racialized Black Dolls, 1850-1940

Abstract

Debates on the character of the old and new South in the USA developed during the late 1800s, leading to creation of restrictive Jim Crow laws and reconceptualizations of the Civil War. A shifting racial ideology included a nostalgic fiction of an antebellum period in which all were happy and accepted their places in life. Such ideological developments also entailed transference of prejudices and stereotypes from a period of slavery to a context of emancipated African Americans. Racialized toys were created and deployed as part of this social discourse. Social constructs such as class, gender, race, and nationalism were structured early in life through the use of toys. I compare an array of dolls with Black and White design themes, sold in the period 1850-1940, and the facets of racialization unfolding in the hands of children and adults. These dolls said more than just “play with me,” and radiated racial messages of social construction.