Other examples of these sharp memes are more politically resonant. A meme account whose Instagram handle is a bawdy play on “Kit Kittredge” posted a viral image after Roe v. Wade fell, highlighting the states where the Nixon-era American Girl doll Julie may have had more access to abortion in 1974 than we do today.
Lydia Burns, who is 24 and runs that account, told me that when she was a girl growing up in Kentucky, American Girl dolls were considered edgy, and some people at her church boycotted them. In 2005, conservative groups were upset because the American Girl brand supported a charity called Girls Inc., which the American Family Association claimed was “a pro-abortion, pro-lesbian advocacy group.” Burns said her mother is a feminist who stuck by the American Girl dolls and allowed her daughter to continue playing with them despite the blowback. The books and the dolls, Burns said, “exposed me to ideas of girls who don’t look like me, and a set of history” that involved cultural and political conflict, offering perspectives she wasn’t necessarily getting at school.
On a certain level, what these adult creators are doing is the same thing my kids were doing with their doll hospital: working through the distressing news of the day with their doll icons. This is something enthusiasts have always done with American Girl dolls, said Nina Diamond, a professor emerita in the department of marketing at DePaul University and the lead author of a 2009 paper in the Journal of Marketing titled “American Girl and the Brand Gestalt: Closing the Loop on Sociocultural Branding Research.” In it, she and her co-authors wrote:
Meanings associated with these iconic brands serve to eliminate felt tensions between societal ideals and people’s day-to-day experiences, and they address the anxieties of a nation through myths or stories that affect the way people think about themselves and their lives.
Diamond describes American Girl as one of the most successful “open source” brands, meaning that all of its constituents — kids, their parents, journalists, cultural commentators — are contributing to and remixing the American Girls’ meaning in the world. And, by extension, adding a small piece to the image — and aspiration — that actual American girls and women have of ourselves.
Tara Strauch, an associate professor of history at Centre College, taught a class where she had students look at the dolls as a “vehicle for teaching” and consuming “historical narratives.” Strauch told me that one of students’ projects was to create their own historical doll’s story. One student created an American Girl doll who lived through 9/11 while also figuring out her sexuality. “Those of us who grew up with them are still trying to use them to understand the world, putting our thoughts and ideals into their mouths in fun and subversive” ways, Strauch told me.
Memes aren’t a replacement for actual advocacy or action. They’re an escape that makes me feel a little better about raising my kids at a time that can often feel anti-girl, anti-woman and even anti-humanity. Burns doesn’t just run an American Girl Instagram account, she also works with student organizers to create real-world change. The two women who run @hellicity_merriman met working in politics. These women, all of whom are in their 20s, are communicating that even when life feels apocalyptic, both laughter and change are possible. As my colleague Valeriya Safronova put it in an article about these memes:
Each image imagines the American Girl dolls surviving highly stressful, sometimes catastrophic events. Within the world of these memes, there is nothing the world won’t throw at an American Girl doll, and there is nothing she can’t do. She, a representation of the childhoods of countless girls, can succeed where others have failed.
There’s a can-do attitude to the memes, one that I already see in my older daughter. She’s only 9, and any time she learns something awful about the world she responds with outrage and a desire to change it, urgently. When she saw a magazine headline about the rapid decline of bee populations due to climate change, she earnestly exclaimed, “We need to save all the bees!”
