Dolls, Play, and the History ofAmerican Girlhoods
An Interview with Miriam Forman-Brunell

Miriam Forman-Brunell, Emerita Professor of History, Women’s, Gender,
and Sexuality Studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, has long
been at the forefront of girlhood studies, dolls’ studies, and the field of play.
She is the author of Made to Play House: The Commercialization of Girlhood(1994, 1998) and Babysitting: An American History (2009). She edited Girlhood in America: An Encyclopedia (2001), The Girls’ History & Culture Reader:
The Nineteenth Century (2011), The Girls’ History & Culture Reader: The
Twentieth Century (2011), Princess Cultures: Mediating Girls’ Imaginations
and Identities (2015), Dolls Studies: The Many Meanings of Girls’ Toys and Play(2015), Deconstructing Dolls: Girlhoods and the Meanings of Play (2021), andThe Story of Rose O’Neill: An Autobiography (1997, 2022). She has served asguest editor for an issue of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth(Fall 2019) focused on the history of girlhoods and the girling of work, play,and performance and for an issue of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary
Journal (2012) on new research in dolls studies. Forman-Brunell codirectedChildren & Youth in History, an online world resource for students and teachers, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is currently
working on Girls in America: A Narrative History of Girlhoods as well as ahistory of her mother’s girlhood in Nazi Germany and wartime America.
Key words: babysitting; doll collectors; doll makers; doll play; dolls’ studies;girls; girlhoods; girls’ studies; princess culture; Rose O’Neill

American Journal of Play: Your research and scholarship have made significant
contributions to the history of dolls, girlhoods, and play. What exactly is
girlhood, and how would you describe girls’ studies to those unfamiliar
with the field?
Miriam Forman-Brunell: According to popular understandings that draw upon
deeply rooted beliefs, girlhood is the natural (biologically determined),
uniform, unchanging, and inconsequential condition and period in the1
American Journal of Play, Volume 15, number 1 © 2023 The Strong
Contact Miriam Forman-Brunell at foreman-brunellm@umkc.edu

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not a fixed category but a fluid one of experiences and expectations. Aschangeable as the category of “girl” itself, girlhoods are culturally constructed, historically specific, contingent, mutable, discursive, contested,intersectional, and heterogeneous. While recognizing the significance ofcontinuities among girls across time and place, the many differences among
girlhoods renders the term girlhood less accurate than “girlhoods.” Thisis because the particular ways in which age, race, class, ethnicity, religion,
region, gender, sexualities, and other forces intersect with historicallyspecific and changing material realities, biological developments, shifting
discursive prescriptions, and girls’ contestations. These have given rise todifferent opportunities and obstacles, identities and agency among various
populations of girls.
		 This revision of inaccurate notions about girlhood is the result of
decades of research dating back to the emergence of the “new women’s
history” in the 1970s. Nancy Cott, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and Debra
Gray White were among the first to study the history of adolescent girls,
although they did so still within the larger framework of women’s history.
By the 1980s, other historians (e.g., Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Jane Hunter,Barbara Benzel, and myself) began to place girls at the center of analysis
as did influential scholars in other fields (e.g., Carol Gilligan in psychology
and Angela McRobbie in cultural studies). The subsequent rapid growth ofscholarship by literary scholars and those in mass communications soon
gave rise to the interdisciplinary field of girls’ studies (also referred to as
girlhood studies), that coalesced in a flourishing academic enterprise by
the mid to late 1990s. Seeking to establish girls’ history within the broader
fields of history and girls’ studies, in 2001 I published the first reference
work, American Girlhood: An Encyclopedia. Also aiming to define the fieldof American girls’ history, I coedited with Leslie Paris The Girls’ History &Culture Readers, a two-volume collection that features the canonical essays
on American girls’ history and culture in the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies.
AJP: How did you come to study the history of girls and girlhoods?
Forman-Brunell: My scholarly interest in the history of girls and girlhoods
began with a curiosity about dolls and what they seemed to be saying about
gender. While taking a class in U.S. women’s history my senior year at

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Sarah Lawrence College, our professor, Barbara Berg, asked us to consider
what kinds of sources one might use to study the history of women. I had
just returned from a trip to the Philadelphia Children’s Museum where
I had seen cases of well-heeled, adult-looking Victorian-era bisque andchina head dolls that looked nothing like the plastic girl dolls (Ginny, Patti
Playpal, Barbie) of my midcentury girlhood. Although I thought that dolls
might be informative sources, just what they might have to say about girlhood eluded me until I began my dissertation research in the mid-1980s.
AJP: Who were the scholars who influenced your approach to what was, at thetime, an emerging field?
Forman-Brunell: Returning to Sarah Lawrence College for a master’s degree inwomen’s history, I studied under Gerda Lerner, a pioneer of the groundbreaking field of the new women’s history she assiduously sought to legitimize. While I researched and wrote an uninspired thesis that fit moresquarely within the framework of women’s history, frustration with themarginalization of girls led me to consider other historical subfields. In
so doing, I came upon John R. Gillis’s 1974 Youth and History: Tradition
and Change in European Age Relations, 1770–Present. In this groundbreaking work, which traced the emergence of youth as a distinct category inEngland and Germany, Gillis’s youth-centered perspective brought to lightthe historical significance young people and their interactions with theirelders played in changing expectations. Inspired by Gillis’s approach andencouraged by his response to my embryonic doll project, I decided tocontinue doctoral work under his direction in the department of history
at Rutgers University. Girlhood itself gradually moved to the center of myanalysis as I located more and more evidence of girls’ unconventional dollplay. I began to see evidence of girls’ acceptance as well as their rejectionof dominant girlhood ideals. By viewing the past through a girl-centeredlens, I came to realize that occasionally, girls, eager to shape their own
girlhoods, were willing to engage in political struggles with doll producers
and gift-giving parents.
		 A breakthrough in my understanding of dolls and girlhood had takenplace after I came upon the work of cultural anthropologists, such as
Mary Douglas, and social archeologists, folklorists, and historians who
used material culture methodologies to read objects as texts. It wasn’t long
before I began to see that the intentions and beliefs of doll makers could be
gleaned from dolls that together constituted a body of historical evidence.

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Developing a self-styled methodology to analyze dolls, I came to see thatthey did not embody a single notion of girlhood but many notions that were
often at odds with each other and changed over time. Rather than seeing
dolls as mute and impassive, as had others before me, I came to realize thatalong with girls, dolls had a lot to say about girlhoods. My dissertation
director, T. J. Jackson Lears, played an important role in my understandingof the broader significance of dolls and girls in American history, society,and culture. Lears’s essay on cultural hegemony, in particular, enabled me
to finally comprehend how and why cultural producers and parents givedolls to girls.
AJP: Dolls were at the center of your first book Made to Play House: Dolls andthe Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830–1930. Before your book,how had scholars and researchers studied dolls?
Forman-Brunell: A major problem I faced early on in my research was thedearth of scholarship on the history of dolls. Although this is no longer
the case, in the late 1970s and early 1980s when I first began my research,dolls were widely dismissed as trivial objects unworthy of serious scrutiny.
Historians of women influenced by Second Wave perspectives saw dolls
as uniform, static artifacts and agents of patriarchal culture. Within that
limited framework, girls who played with dolls were understood to be passive victims of an oppressive ideology that promoted femininity, maternity,
domesticity, and consumerism. While I questioned the patriarchal imperative of dolls and the presumption that girls were passive players, there wasno research upon which I could build.
		 Fortunately, there were many books written by doll collectors! These
included a treasure trove of information, although it was presented in waysthat were highly fractured. Collectors generally disregarded the historicalforces that informed imagination and invention, production, consumption,and reception. The information included in doll encyclopedias, for example,
often obscured significant patterns as well as meaningful contexts in whichdoll artifacts were situated. Cataloguing dolls by national origins or material make-up typically concealed the historical forces that gave shape andmeaning to dolls, such as the changing and competing notions of girlhoodthat dolls embodied. Collectors’ uncritical perspectives, moreover, praisedleading doll manufacturers but in ways that made it difficult to discern
much of anything about the motivations and intentions of doll making
businesswomen and men. Other works suffered similar problems. Orga-Dolls, Play, and the History of American Girlhoods

nized according to the principal material used to make a doll head (wax,wood, porcelain), they also isolated dolls from the people and the culturesthat produced and played with toys. Girls were largely absent, or—if they
did appear in collectors’ histories—they were presumed to conform toconventional notions of feminine girlhood they did not challenge.
AJP: What did your research discover about the American businesswomen andbusinessmen who designed and manufactured dolls in the nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries?
Forman-Brunell: Although collectors’ works provided little more than names
and dates of inventors, producers, and designers of dolls and feminists
assumed that all doll manufacturers promoted a uniform notion of gender,
there were clear differences between the business models established byfemale and male entrepreneurs and the dolls they produced. The Victorian separate sphere ideology informed the gender-based principles andpractices, skills and sensibilities, intentions and inventions, aesthetics andattitudes, perceptions, production, and marketing of male and female dollmakers. Male producers would ultimately achieve greater ascendance over
the American doll economy during the 1920s, but there were importantinterludes when businesswomen reappropriated dolls as cultural forms
that reflected women’s prevailing social agendas, such as “scientific motherhood” during the Progressive era.
		 Dolls were contested artifacts of businesswomen who traversed the private and public spheres, on the one hand, and of businessmen who would
ultimately appropriate the dolls they marketed as symbols of an idealized
feminine domesticity, on the other. Not only were adult producers at odds
over the meanings of dolls, so were girls who often engaged in embryonicstruggles to define the place and purpose of dolls in their own lives andgirlhoods.
AJP: What purpose did these doll makers believe their products served for the
girls whose families could afford to buy them? Did this change over time?
Forman-Brunell: American male and female doll makers were motivated byconcerns as different as the dolls they designed, manufactured, and marketed. American male inventors turned out hard-bodied feminine-looking
mechanical dolls meant to “entertain” and “amuse,” as they explained intheir patent applications. Drawing upon a tradition of homemade rag
dolls, late-nineteenth century women producers—critical of bourgeois andbreakable European bisque and china head dolls that encouraged feminine

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as the basis for their inventions. In their patents, these women claimed
that children needed safe, portable, and durable dolls to teach them about
relationships. Businesswomen like Martha Chase and contemporaries like
Rose O’Neill believed that the purpose of dolls was to instruct children,
girls along with boys, middle class as well as working class, in health andhygiene. By the 1920s, when the American doll industry achieved dominance over the European trade, women in the American industry weremore likely to serve as doll designers for male manufacturers who promoted
idealized notions of maternity, domesticity, and consumerism in the dolls
they marketed to girls.
AJP: What were Kewpie dolls? How did their creator, Rose O’Neill, and her dolls
differ from other early twentieth-century American doll makers?
Forman-Brunell: Kewpie dolls, the best-known figures in American culture
before Mickey Mouse, evolved from the cherubic-looking characters created by Rose O’Neill in comics printed in popular women’s magazines. She
was a talented young illustrator and “new woman.” As a cultural feminist,
O’Neill’s modern ideas about gender found expression in the realisticlooking Kewpie boy figures (different from highly sentimentalized Victorian depictions of children) whose playful activities centered on municipal
reform—even women’s suffrage. O’Neill disliked the small bisque Kewpie
dolls manufactured by German manufacturers that flooded the American
market. Responding to changing notions of childhood and play in theearly twentieth century, male manufacturers made poorly constructed (andracist) dolls that, like the Kewpie, encouraged children—and adults—toplay. (For those who are interested in learning more about Rose O’Neill,
the University of Missouri Press has just published the paperback editionof The Story of Rose O’Neill, an autobiography that I edited of the creatorof the Kewpie doll.)
AJP: You have suggested that dolls were objects of struggle, particularly forchildren who often viewed and used their playthings differently than dollmakers and parents intended. What kind of evidence did you find to help
you understand how girls (and boys) played with their dolls?
Forman-Brunell: Many girls who challenged adult prescriptions expressed theirpreference for one kind of girlhood over another through their play. InsteadDolls, Play, and the History of American Girlhoodsof following the visiting and other social rituals encouraged in juvenile
magazines, some girls staged doll funerals. When girls outright rejected
dolls in preference for running, roller skating, or riding bicycles, they senta strong message to parents and producers that they preferred an active
and outdoor girlhood. There is an abundance of evidence of doll play inVictorian children’s print culture, twentieth-century advertisements, andother sources of consumer culture. Most prevalent are sentimentalized
images of girls affectionately hugging and bathing their dolls, washing theirclothes, or pushing them in prams. Surprisingly widespread are depictionsof girls lopping off their dolls’ heads and engaging in other unconventional
doll play that provide evidence more of loathing than loving. One needhardly read against the grain when interpreting the many images in juvenile
magazines, children’s books, prints, stereographs, and other visual sources
depicting hoydens challenging conventional gender prescriptions. Girls’
agency is corroborated by recollections of doll play in memoirs, autobiographies, interviews, and oral histories.
AJP: What were some of the challenges you faced in interpreting these sources?
What did you learn about children’s doll play from them?
Forman-Brunell: Analyzing the history of dolls posed a number of challenges
beginning with museum curators who would not allow me to undress thedolls in their collections. As a result, I more closely examined the many broken dolls not typically included in exhibition display cases. These revealed
construction methods and materials and the impact of girls’ play on dolls.
Another challenge I faced was the dearth of extant records from the manysmall doll-making enterprises. As for other sources, recollections, memoirs, and the like are not wholly reliable, and popular culture sources areheavily mediated. Both are also subject to nostalgia, sentimentalization,and stereotyping. Among the many sources I used, I found patents to beenormously useful. The problem was that not all inventors included thesame kind of information. Some provided fuller justifications for theirinventions than did others. What helped to mitigate the challenges I facedwith these sources was the emergence of patterns and recurring themesthat corroborated broader understandings.
AJP: How has the study of dolls changed since the publication of Made to Play
House?
Forman-Brunell: Since the 1990s, the scholarship on dolls has expanded into
the recognizable field of dolls’ studies. During the last decade of the twen-

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developments—girls’ studies, Black studies, and cultural studies—alongwith the commercial success of the American Girl doll line and the proliferation of the Barbie brand fueled doll research. In departments of English,
anthropology, and sociology, a new generation of feminist scholars explored
relationships between dolls and girls’ identities from interdisciplinary, intersectional, and discursive perspectives. Although Ann duCille, Elizabeth
Chin, and Sherrie A. Inness, among others, recognized the ways in whichdolls reinforced normative notions and racial and gendered “otherness,”they showed too how girls who played with dolls also negotiated, revised,and disrupted the cultural categories of girlhood. Building on the workof previous scholars, Robin Bernstein pioneered a new methodology forinterrogating dolls and doll play in regard to race. Applying performance
theory to the study of dolls, Bernstein’s 2011 Racial Innocence: Performing
American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights demonstrated the ways inwhich dolls and stories about them scripted children’s behavior and beliefs.
		 For more than a decade now, the state of doll research has been in thehands of a new generation, pioneering Gen X and Millennial dolls’ studies scholars who apply postmodern, feminist epistemologies and criticalrace theory. They employ innovative sources of evidence, novel research
designs, and a variety of critical practices to explore new themes in dollscholarship—from cultural work to historical memory reception practices. Their imaginative scholarship, featured in the 2015 Dolls Studies: The
Many Meanings of Girls’ Toys and Play and the 2021 Deconstructing Dolls:
Girlhoods and the Meanings of Play, two collections I had the privilegeof editing, is particularly noteworthy for its amplification of girls’ voices,challenges to notions of scholarly objectivity, privileging of subculturalprinciples and practices (e.g., DIY), and expansion of the age of doll players and sites of doll performance. Locating novel doll play in new spaces
and sites where doll performances take place, they unpack dolls’ and dollplayers’ potentiality to construct and disrupt, mediate and contest, perform
and rescript girlhoods. Together, those conducting doll research today see
dolls as dynamic texts that represent layered versions of realities, mediatedby the often contradictory ideologies, values, or world views of doll creators,
producers, consumers, and players.
AJP: How have the ways in which children played with dolls changed or remained
the same over the past century?

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Forman-Brunell: The variety of girls’ doll play has long been informed by changing doll products along with coexisting, competing, and changing notionsof girlhoods. Robin Bernstein argues that dolls (and stories about them)
functioned like scripts that elicit particular performances or behaviors. In
this way, a girl is more likely to dress a sexy fashion doll than to cuddle it.
Despite dolls’ “scriptive” nature, however, girls have long turned dolls on
their heads, figurately and literally subverting adult expectations by playing
with them in unexpected and unauthorized ways. (Along with many girls,
my mother simply rejected the dolls she received from her conventional
mother, preferring less girlish activities instead.)		 While Bernstein researched the ways in which turn-of-the-twentiethcentury white girls followed racist scripts in their often violent play withBlack dolls, other scholars have more recently examined Black girls’ dollplay through an intersectional lens. Media scholar Rebecca C. Hains’s
2012 study, “An Afternoon of Productive Play with Problematic Dolls: The
Importance of Foregrounding Children’s Voices in Research” looked at theactivities of a small group of African-American girls playing with Bratz
dolls. What she found was that, while playing with their dolls, the girls
explored issues of racial identity and racism within historical and contemporary contexts but paying little attention to the sexualized nature of the
Bratz dolls. Building on the work of Hains (and a study by Elizabeth Chinin 1999 called “Ethnically Correct Dolls: Toying with the Race Industry”),
Janet Seow in her 2019 essay “Black Girls and Dolls Navigating Race, Class,and Gender in Toronto” found that inner-city Afro-Caribbean girls’ playwith Black Barbies and Bratz dolls revealed their accommodation to racialized identities and marginalization. But the girls’ repurposing of narratives
also led them to circumvent dominant Western constructions of girlhood.
		 In the 1990s, new types of dolls and refashioned doll lines drew uponGirl Power, a girlhood ethos that commercialized Third Wave Feminism.
The political activism and artistic critiques of adolescent girls and young
women not only empowered girlhood but also extended the age of girlhood
past the teenage years. Since the 1990s, older adolescent girls and young
women musicians have been imaginatively toying with dolls as symbols of
feminist resistance. In musical performances, subcultural Riot Grrrl bands
and rappers like Nicki Minaj have been reappropriating dolls as signifiersof idealized white feminine girlhoods they mischievously deconstruct,reconstruct, recontextualize, and reinvent.

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AJP: What prompted you to write Babysitter: An American History?
Forman-Brunell: While researching Made to Play House, I had run across several accounts of turn-of-the-twentieth-century girls who, to earn money
to buy the dolls they wanted, worked as “baby-walkers” and “baby tenders” pushing prams for mothers. These early twentieth-century babysittersproved to be just as business minded as a group of plucky preadolescents I
happened to encounter at the end of the century who confidently charged
the parent-employers they worked for by the number of children they caredfor. I understood the piecework they had reappropriated within the context
of women’s labor history, which had first captured my interest during myadolescence in the early 1970s. I struggled to find research materials until
the rise of the internet and the founding of eBay enabled me to access a
wealth of popular culture sources that eventually made plain that babysitters were a lightning rod for broader fears about teenage girls and theirsubcultures.
AJP: Does the history of babysitting provide insight into the relationship between
girls’ work and play?
Forman-Brunell: The history of babysitters is useful for the light it sheds on thefluid and contested borders of girls’ work and play. Hiring white, middleclass girls to “mind the baby” and modern American girlhood occurred
simultaneously in the 1920s, a period of major transformation in American
society and culture. Parents then, as now, believed that high school girls
brought a particular set of age- and gender-specific skills and sensibilities
to the job of babysitter: not only were girls young enough to still want
to play with younger children but they also possessed innate maternal
instincts and domestic abilities. During the interwar period, the development of an American girls’ subculture—with practices and principles thatfrequently challenged traditional ideals and gender norms—informed teenage girls’ play in ways adults generally found threatening. Parents’ worries
that teenage girls’ play might be neither wholesome nor child centeredreflected widespread cultural anxieties that teenage girls were more harmful
than helpful. In magazines and movies, cartoons and conversations eversince, adults have imagined babysitters as girls who recklessly transgress
the boundaries between private and public, family and community, workand play, childhood and adulthood, girlhood and womanhood, love andlust, reality and fantasy, culture and chaos, yours and theirs. Aiming tosatisfy parents’ needs for youthful feminine accountability, harness girls’

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autonomy, empowerment, and enjoyment and transform seemingly disruptive and destructive girls into future mothers, generations of advisors andeducators, among other cultural producers, have sought creative ways todiscipline girls’ work and play beliefs and behaviors through the changing
field of babysitting.
AJP: Speaking of work and play, you and other play scholars have written about
girls’ “playbor.” What is playbor and what impact has it had on girls’ playin the twenty-first century?
Forman-Brunell: Playbor is a concept that refers to the recent intertwining ofplay and labor among media audiences who unwittingly provide digitalbusinesses with free labor. I was introduced to this incredibly useful concept by Cheryl Williams, whose essay “The ROI of Play: Girls’ Immaterial
Labor, Smart Toys, and the Digital Economy” that I included in a 2019 issueof the Journal of the History of Children and Youth (JHCY) I edited on thegirling of work, play, and performance. In her piece, Williams examined
the ways in which the digital toy industry that produces digitally connected smart toys (like Barbie Digital Makeover introduced in 2013), hastransformed play from the physical to the virtual realm. In the process,they have eroded the distinctions between girls’ play and work while also
exploiting girls’ immaterial labor. Although this is a new phenomenon,
the division between play and work has often been an indistinct one in thehistory of girls. Also included in the JHCY issue, an essay by Michael B.
Kahan, entitled “Jewish Girls’ Street Peddling in Gilded Age Philadelphia:
Ethnic Niche, Family Strategy, and Sexual Danger,” examined immigrantworking-class girls who played games between street-trade transactions
and performances that blurred the borders between work and play, discipline and pleasure, opportunities and obstacles.
AJP: Some critics and parents have said that commercialized princess culture
traffics in stereotypes and encourages passivity, consumerism, and unrealistic beauty ideals. Are these fair criticisms? In the introduction to Princess
Culture: Mediating Girls’ Imaginations and Identities, you write that princesses are discursive and disruptive figures. How so?
Forman-Brunell: What many parents and pundits might not realize is that
there is not one type of princess but many whose identities range from thetraditional to the transgressive, the submissive to the spunky. Whether
graceful or gritty, moreover, princess figures have played important roles in
the construction of various girlhoods. Within dominant cultures, the hege-

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parents, and others who seek to constitute girls’ subjectivities and constrain
girls’ power within the social order. Within girls’ subcultures, however,generations of agential girls have been instrumental in the reinvention ofprincesses they imbue with alternate identities that are less dependent andmore disruptive. In their resistant play, girls often redraw and recast commodified and commercialized princesses into empowered figures who assist
girls in their mediation of the conflicts and contradictions of girlhood.
AJP: Did you play with dolls or as a princess when you were a child? What doyou remember most about how you played?
Forman-Brunell: When I was a little girl, I wasn’t all that interested in dolls
and much preferred to play in the orchards and fields where we lived in
Vienna, Austria. When we moved to New York City in the mid-1960s, I
spent a lot of time in the park across the street from our apartment where
I played with friends and rode my bike. At home, I liked to dress my Ginnydoll but also play with my toy carwash, Tonka jeep, and the innumerable
animals—frogs, mice, turtles, rabbits, and cats—I brought home and caredfor. My mother, an early feminist, encouraged our creativity with arts andcrafts materials and classes.
AJP: How do you play as an adult today?
Forman-Brunell: In my adulthood, toys and play have remained important tome. I continue to use my imagination to make everyday activities moredelightful and less dull. For years now, I have been collecting mid-twentiethcentury German stuffed animals—Kersa cats; Schuco miniatures, and Steiff
in all sizes, including a nearly nine-foot giraffe, life-sized baby elephant, andmountain donkey. I still love animals: I have three cats and three big-breed
dogs. I also collect dolls, household toys, and other things “girl,” justified
by my various scholarly projects. Over the last five years, my long-standing
passions have come together in the eight-inch “Anidoll” figures I needlefelt
and dress in vintage Ginny doll clothing purchased on eBay.
AJP: What are you currently working on?
Forman-Brunell: As to book-length projects, Girls in America: A History of Girlhoods is a narrative history of girlhoods from precontact to the present thatplaces girls and beliefs about them at the center of American social, cultural,
economic, and political history. Synthesizing more than half of century ofscholarly studies on girls and using textual, material, and visual culture
methods to analyze archival and artifactual sources, Girls in America pro-

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vides a unique interpretive framework for understanding America’s pastin ways that brings to light the significance of girls and girlhoods in our
nation’s history.
		 I am also researching and writing, Resisting and Reinventing Girlhoods:
The Everyday Life of a German Jewish Refugee from Germany to the US,
1923–1946, a book about my mother’s girlhood. The historical figure of
the German Jewish refugee girl to prewar America has long been overshadowed by girls in Holocaust narratives who survived or succumbed tomass extermination on the one hand and the adult professionals who havedominated the historiography on German Jewish refugees on the other.
Generation Exodus: The Fate of Young Jewish Refugees, published in 2001,
examined the generation of adolescent refugees, but what has remained
unexamined is the difference that being a girl made.
		 Placing girls at the center of historical inquiry, this new book project
aims to contribute to the historiography on German and Austrian Jewish
refugees by demonstrating the significance of girlhoods among those born
during the Weimar Republic, who endured the Nazi regime and who fled
to the United States in the years before World War II.
		 More specifically, drawing upon a memoir and recollections, this work
examines how Ruth, an unconventional bookish girl in provincial Germany, resisted her mother’s assimilated bourgeois feminine expectations
and persisted amidst anti-Semitism and the ideal of Aryan girlhood. A
self-styled smart girls’ subculture and the transformational Zionist Socialist
youth movement—which taught Jewish girls that they, too, could be criticalthinkers—led to the development of Ruth’s contested intellectual feminist
identity. The book demonstrates that among this youthful refugee generation, which would excel professionally, there were fledgling feminist girls
like Ruth whose intellectual girlhood principles and practices enabled themnot only to survive family and fascism but also to thrive as refugees. The
feminist intellectual identities and intersectional girlhoods of these girls
transported to and transplanted in the United States would enable themto flourish in the future as pioneering feminist professionals.

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