Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
THROWBACK: The WPA Origins of the American Doll, with Allison Robinson
14 Plays1 year ago
During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration funded an interracial labor program in Wisconsin that employed over five thousand women to craft handmade goods: the Milwaukee Handicraft Project. Especially noteworthy among the rugs, quilts, costumes, and books that the women produced is a run of exquisitely crafted and clothed toddler-sized dolls. Host Benjamin Miller learns from scholar Allison Robinson about how these dolls—made to represent different ethnic groups both foreign and domestic—provide insight into New Deal–era debates over women’s labor, race, and cultural nationalism . . . and into the origins of Barbie and American Girl.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
This episode is sponsored by the Decorative Arts Trust, a nonprofit organization that provides and fosters the appreciation and study of the arts through virtual and in-person programs and grant making.
00:00:11
Speaker
For more information, visit decorativeartstrust.org.
Podcast Introduction
00:00:26
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:29
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:31
Speaker
This is the podcast about art, decorative arts, and antiques, the stories behind them, and what they can reveal to us about ourselves and the people who came before us.
WPA Dolls Overview
00:00:39
Speaker
We're off this week, so we're bringing back one of my favorites from the archives.
00:00:43
Speaker
This is a conversation I had with the wonderful Alison Robinson, who at the time was earning her PhD at the University of Chicago, but now she's associate curator at the New York Historical Society.
00:00:54
Speaker
She's done fantastic work in so many areas, but for this conversation, I wanted to hear about her dive into the really fascinating story behind a unique type of doll,
00:01:06
Speaker
That was produced by women working as part of the WPA program.
00:01:11
Speaker
And this is a terrific example of how a work of decorative art can shine a lens on aspects of history that might otherwise be overlooked.
00:01:20
Speaker
I hope you enjoy.
00:01:24
Speaker
Now, Allison, the WPA was primarily conceived as an employment program, but it did have significant cultural objectives as well.
00:01:34
Speaker
How did the Milwaukee Handicraft Project align with the overall goals of the WPA?
00:01:39
Speaker
So the Milwaukee Handicraft Project was started in August 1935 as a way to prepare women who were considered unskilled by the United States Employment Service for private employment.
00:01:55
Speaker
The head of District 4 of the Women's Division of the WPA needed a way to hire around 2,000 women off of the relief rolls.
Women's Employment in WPA
00:02:06
Speaker
And so she collaborated with
00:02:09
Speaker
a local professor at the Milwaukee State Teachers College to come up with a production for use project that could prepare these women to do assembly line labor without any previous experience doing so.
00:02:24
Speaker
The resulting project was the Milwaukee Handicraft Project.
00:02:29
Speaker
So I know that one of the concerns that hovered around the WPA was the idea that you'd want to avoid employing multiple people from the same household because that was seen as sort of taking a job that could be used to support another household instead.
00:02:49
Speaker
And so while women were employed under the WPA, in many cases, men were really the sort of target of
00:02:59
Speaker
employees.
00:03:00
Speaker
So you mentioned there are 2000 unemployed women in Milwaukee.
00:03:05
Speaker
Does that mean 2000 unmarried unemployed women or are these married women who are looking for a job?
00:03:13
Speaker
This is one of the really delightful aspects of the Milwaukee Handicraft Project.
00:03:17
Speaker
The administrators recognized that to be a female head of household involved both married and unmarried women.
00:03:26
Speaker
And they also recognized that it was a title held by women that crossed the racial and ethnic lines.
00:03:36
Speaker
And so
00:03:37
Speaker
The program was designed to eventually, not initially, but eventually hire any woman who did not have previous clerical, administrative, or teaching experience to prepare certain goods such as
00:03:54
Speaker
textiles and dolls to distribute to local tax institutions.
00:04:00
Speaker
And so, as you mentioned, it was a way of providing more income for local households and to bring more women into the workforce.
00:04:10
Speaker
One of my favorite facts about the Great Depression, actually, is that rather than employment rates going down in the 1930s, women's employment rates actually went up during the Great Depression.
00:04:23
Speaker
Oh, and was that because they were sort of making up for lost employment among men?
00:04:30
Speaker
Perhaps in some ways, there was a greater call for women to support the household.
00:04:35
Speaker
But it's also a result of the fact that many of the industries that women were working in, medicine, administrative work, teaching, were industries that were not as
00:04:49
Speaker
did not experience as much of a downturn as others, particularly in industry.
00:04:55
Speaker
And so with the continued need for people in hospitals, children who needed education, along with increased opportunities through the WPA and programs within the WPA, you end up having a higher number of women in the workforce, which is really quite incredible.
00:05:15
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really interesting sort of counter cyclical wrinkle.
00:05:21
Speaker
But before we get too far off subject here, to bring it back into
Milwaukee Handicraft Project
00:05:27
Speaker
the world of the arts.
00:05:27
Speaker
Yes.
00:05:28
Speaker
You know, there were other arts initiatives, you know, most famously there are the WPA murals.
00:05:36
Speaker
You know, I have spent a fair bit of time with the Lomax recording projects, you know, categorizing and documenting Southern folk music.
00:05:49
Speaker
So the WPA was no stranger to arts initiatives.
00:05:52
Speaker
But what was different about the Milwaukee Handicraft Project?
00:05:56
Speaker
The WPA was, as you noted, very, very eager to support out-of-work artists and encourage Americans to look to the arts as a form of leisure.
00:06:12
Speaker
One aspect that made the Milwaukee Handicraft Project so different was that rather than hiring professional artists to lead classes or produce works of art for the general public, they were hiring women who were
00:06:25
Speaker
considered to be unskilled to produce goods for tax-supported institutions.
00:06:30
Speaker
So this included hospitals, schools, and public libraries.
00:06:36
Speaker
A lot of these institutions were also heavily populated by children.
00:06:42
Speaker
And so rather than producing art for the general public, the Milwaukee Handicraft Project produced goods, not entirely, but largely for children.
00:06:52
Speaker
a child audience.
00:06:55
Speaker
One final thing that I find really, really interesting is that it was a program that was designed by women administrators for unemployed women on the relief rolls.
00:07:08
Speaker
And so, whereas many art projects are populated by men and women alike, this is one of, not perhaps a few, but one of the largest in the country that focused entirely almost on women.
00:07:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:23
Speaker
So just to give us a little bit more context around female labor in the period, we're talking about a time not long after World War I when a certain number of women had been brought into factory lines just for wartime necessity, really.
00:07:41
Speaker
And that would happen again in World War II.
00:07:45
Speaker
But those were generally seen, I think, as mostly isolated wartime trends.
00:07:51
Speaker
So what was the general state of women's labor outside of the house in America in the 1930s?
00:07:59
Speaker
And did it sort of change dramatically from urban areas to rural areas, between racial groups, that sort of thing?
Interracial Workforce Dynamics
00:08:09
Speaker
Women's labor, in many ways, reproduced a lot of the things that they would be doing in the home.
00:08:17
Speaker
So, as I mentioned, nursing, teaching, and clerical work were the three industries that were very female-dominated, both before and into the 1930s.
00:08:31
Speaker
Women's factory labor had existed since the Industrial Revolution, but as you noted, and as is
00:08:39
Speaker
really remarkable for the period.
00:08:40
Speaker
We just see an explosion of this phenomenon in World War II.
00:08:45
Speaker
There is a pretty sharp difference in terms of women's labor along racial lines.
00:08:52
Speaker
You see a higher number of
00:08:55
Speaker
Black women, particularly married Black women, in the workforce than white women.
00:09:02
Speaker
If you look to areas such as the American South, you see a large number of African American women engaging in domestic labor or in sharecropping labor.
00:09:13
Speaker
And while women were in, both white and Black women were in agricultural labor,
00:09:20
Speaker
the work and the circumstances in which they were doing the work was quite different.
00:09:26
Speaker
And so the Milwaukee Handicraft Project is striking because it's one of the few interracial labor spaces that is being funded by the WPA, but also the 1930s is still an era that's the height of de jure segregation.
00:09:44
Speaker
And so an integrated labor space
00:09:48
Speaker
at all is remarkable for the United States.
00:09:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:54
Speaker
So, you know, you mentioned that the Handicraft Project is run by women and it has an explicit mandate to employ women.
00:10:03
Speaker
You know, how did they take these sort of existing realities of the state of women's employment in America and use that as the basis for a women's employment project?
00:10:19
Speaker
The Division of Women's and Professional Service in the WPA was explicitly designed to figure out how to employ women and men who were
00:10:33
Speaker
men who had a background in professional, professionalized labor, but for whom manual labor would not have been a logical outlet.
00:10:43
Speaker
So this, this division is setting up all sorts of different programs across the country to get women into the workforce.
00:10:53
Speaker
Much of this involves sewing rooms, which can employ hundreds of women producing, uh,
00:11:01
Speaker
In many cases, sweaters and goods for men working in the CCC, but it also involved a lot of patching clothing and preparing them for individuals who were already working for the federal government.
00:11:17
Speaker
So much of the work opportunities available for women through the WPA operated in
00:11:24
Speaker
on a gendered basis and based off of work that they had been doing prior or would have been available to them, whether or not they were actually working outside of the home.
Doll Design and Purpose
00:11:34
Speaker
There were some other instances such as food preparation was quite popular, sewing coral robes was an option as was
00:11:47
Speaker
working as a teacher in newly created WPA preschools, for instance.
00:11:53
Speaker
But for the most part, the WPA is looking to bring more women into the American economy by simply reproducing the work that they had been doing before.
00:12:06
Speaker
And the Milwaukee Handicraft Project is no exception to this.
00:12:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:12
Speaker
So, I mean, as we mentioned at the top of the program, you know, the focus really was on textile work and related kinds of craft.
00:12:24
Speaker
But the pieces that we have decided to talk about today and that have really been the focus of your work are,
00:12:32
Speaker
are these dolls.
00:12:35
Speaker
And, you know, they're quite striking.
00:12:38
Speaker
I hope listeners will take a look on the web at themagazineantique.com slash podcast to see pictures of them.
00:12:48
Speaker
Um, you know, they're very, uh, sort of, um, distinctive.
00:12:53
Speaker
Uh, there's a lot of character to them and I'll ask you to tell us more about the, um, the form and their appearance and that sort of thing in a minute, but tell me just, um, right off the bat, what drew your attention to these dolls in the first place?
00:13:10
Speaker
The size is one aspect which I'm of course happy to talk more about, but these dolls are so unusual in American history because they are nearly two feet tall.
00:13:24
Speaker
They also have a number of design aspects that truly set them apart from most other dolls being produced both in the United States and around the world in that period.
00:13:37
Speaker
including molded faces that are designed to look realistic.
00:13:42
Speaker
What really caught my attention is that looking at these dolls, both the intent behind their design, but also the real response to the doll is it's...
00:13:54
Speaker
It's as if looking at an inanimate toddler, which is both arresting, but really beautiful once you start to unpack the larger history and purpose and goals behind these dolls.
00:14:09
Speaker
Did you come across them first in a museum collection or in literature or where did you first encounter them?
00:14:17
Speaker
I first encountered them admittedly in Google search.
00:14:23
Speaker
I had a long interest in studying the history of childhood education in public schools.
00:14:29
Speaker
And while doing background and preliminary research in this area, I discovered these truly remarkable dolls.
00:14:39
Speaker
And the fact that they were so different from anything I'd ever seen before made me want to learn more.
00:14:48
Speaker
Now, we've talked a little about that, or we've sort of hinted at this, but let's get a little more explicit.
00:14:56
Speaker
Why was the Milwaukee Handicraft Project interested in paying women to make dolls?
00:15:03
Speaker
So in the early 1930s, the federal government did something that is revolutionary in the history of childhood education.
00:15:14
Speaker
They started to fund the first federally funded preschools.
00:15:23
Speaker
And with this call and this need for preschools with both men and women going back to work through federally funded programs,
00:15:31
Speaker
The children and their teachers needed goods that the children could interact with, grow from, and learn from over the course of the day.
00:15:41
Speaker
The Milwaukee Handicraft Project dolls grew out of this phenomenon.
00:15:46
Speaker
The administrator who first operated it, Elsa Ulbricht, had a friend who was a teacher at a local WPA-funded preschool, and she asked Ulbricht if she could create a doll to teach her young toddlers in her classroom, actually her kindergartners in her classroom, how to dress themselves.
00:16:09
Speaker
Albrecht had had a doll in her childhood that had a molded face that stayed with her for her entire life.
00:16:16
Speaker
She continued to think about it for decades afterward.
00:16:19
Speaker
And she wanted to produce an object similar for local school children, but that would also teach them a very important idea.
00:16:30
Speaker
life skill that would also allow them to, in essence, contribute to their own homes by learning how to care for themselves a little bit more too.
00:16:40
Speaker
And so with this need for a new type of educational toy, the Milwaukee Handicraft Project ran a test in a Milwaukee preschool.
00:16:55
Speaker
It was successful and in a moment that I find quite endearing, the little boy who the doll was tested on asked, who is she?
00:17:05
Speaker
Because he was unable to tell from a distance whether the doll was inanimate or was a peer in his classroom that he hadn't.
00:17:14
Speaker
hadn't noticed before.
00:17:16
Speaker
And so these dolls are, they're meant to be recognized as peers, as friends.
00:17:22
Speaker
And within that bond between a child and a doll, the child would eventually learn how to dress themselves.
00:17:31
Speaker
That's quite a story.
00:17:32
Speaker
And I have to say, yeah, I mean, looking at the dolls, you alluded to this.
00:17:37
Speaker
There's a bit of an uncanny valley sort of feeling.
00:17:40
Speaker
I guess this is true of almost any kind of human-like doll.
00:17:47
Speaker
But yeah, that feeling that it's quite similar to a person.
00:17:53
Speaker
Not quite similar enough to be totally convincing, but similar enough to be
00:17:59
Speaker
at first glance, may be a little queasy.
00:18:01
Speaker
Yep, exactly.
00:18:06
Speaker
We'll get right back to Alison Robinson and her discoveries about the Milwaukee Handicraft Project.
00:18:11
Speaker
But first, this episode is sponsored by the Decorative Arts Trust, a nonprofit organization that promotes and fosters the appreciation and study of the arts through partnerships, programs, and grants in support of graduate students and young professionals.
00:18:24
Speaker
For more information about virtual events, including a panel discussion with antique dealers sponsored by the magazine Antiques and hosted by yours truly, as well as in-person programs, including a symposium in Salem and the North Shore of Massachusetts, visit decorativeartstrust.org or follow them on Facebook and Instagram.
00:18:45
Speaker
If you're enjoying Curious Objects and want to help us out, tell a friend about the podcast.
00:18:50
Speaker
Word of mouth is the main way that new listeners find us.
00:18:53
Speaker
And I know you have friends who like stories about old things, just like you.
00:18:58
Speaker
Also, you can leave a rating and review on your podcast app.
00:19:01
Speaker
Thank you very much.
00:19:07
Speaker
So, okay, so tell me about the context for these dolls.
00:19:11
Speaker
I mean, are these dolls based on other types of dolls that had already been made, you know, either informally or commercially, or are these something sort of created new out of whole cloth, if you'll pardon the pun, to suit the needs of the Handicraft Project?
00:19:33
Speaker
These dolls are...
00:19:36
Speaker
revolutionary in the history of American doll production.
00:19:41
Speaker
Prior to World War I, the United States did not have a robust toy industry.
00:19:50
Speaker
There's a long history of homemade doll production that is essential to understanding dolls and toys in American history.
00:19:59
Speaker
But in terms of commercially produced dolls, most of the objects
00:20:06
Speaker
circulating through the American economy came from Europe, predominantly France and Germany.
00:20:12
Speaker
Most of these dolls
00:20:15
Speaker
fall into one of two categories, either fashion dolls from the colonial era, less into the 1930s as we're getting mailing catalogs and different ways of circulating fashion.
00:20:30
Speaker
But prior to the 1930s, fashion dolls made for adults are a means of learning the latest trends on both sides of the Atlantic and circulating them in a way that is
00:20:43
Speaker
tangible and reproducible for tailors.
00:20:46
Speaker
And starting in the mid 19th century, again, mostly out of Germany and France, you're seeing baby dolls, which are designed with the intent to teach children how to, how to parent.
00:21:00
Speaker
The Milwaukee Handicraft Project dolls are so different because they're meant to
00:21:09
Speaker
reproduce the image of a toddler or embody the image of a toddler for children.
00:21:14
Speaker
They were one of the first, if not the first commercially made American doll to produce a doll other than these two categories.
00:21:24
Speaker
So that alone is incredibly striking in the history of doll production.
00:21:31
Speaker
Also, the dolls are the first
00:21:36
Speaker
mass produced toy in American history, as far as I can tell, where children are not meant to relate to them as parents, as authority figures, but they're meant to see them as a peer.
Impact on Toy Industry
00:21:49
Speaker
And so the unique design, the size, the modeled face, they're all
00:21:57
Speaker
meant to encourage a different type of reaction from children, which is also important because as a federally funded program, the Milwaukee Handicraft Project was legally not allowed to produce, to compete rather, with private companies.
00:22:14
Speaker
And so by producing a doll that was totally different, totally unique, you're getting a new
00:22:24
Speaker
a new branch in American doll history and one that, you know, we get Barbie by the late 1950s, but she's the first teen doll.
00:22:35
Speaker
In many ways, this is the first toddler one.
00:22:39
Speaker
That's incredible.
00:22:40
Speaker
I mean, I think the notion of the doll as a peer is probably the main way that we think of kids interacting with dolls today.
00:22:51
Speaker
I didn't realize it was such a relatively new concept.
00:22:55
Speaker
Oh, yes, yes.
00:22:56
Speaker
It really, I think, revolutionized the industry.
00:23:01
Speaker
And I would note, too, before we get more deeply into the different designs of the dolls, that there is a history of both homemade and mass-produced black dolls in the United States, starting in the mid to late 19th century.
00:23:16
Speaker
But even those are mostly focused on...
00:23:20
Speaker
Baby dolls or something called a shoulder head doll, which is very popular in the same period where essentially companies would produce the doll from the shoulders up.
00:23:31
Speaker
And so you end up with a lot of dolls that have a commercially produced head with a handmade body.
00:23:37
Speaker
because it's designed with the intent that people will finish it at home, hence the shoulder head because it's only from the shoulders up.
00:23:43
Speaker
But here with the Milwaukee Handicraft Project, it's still different because it's not a shoulder head doll.
00:23:50
Speaker
It's a complete object, but it's also not one that's meant to be used in homes because you can't compete with private industry.
00:23:58
Speaker
So it's a different doll, a different design for children in public school.
00:24:06
Speaker
So what did they look like?
00:24:09
Speaker
I mean, you know, is there a lot of variation among the dolls created, um, in the handicraft project, uh, or, or are they all more or less following the same rubric?
00:24:20
Speaker
They, there is a range of dolls in terms of size.
00:24:26
Speaker
They run from about 12 inches to 22 inches tall.
00:24:33
Speaker
Within their various designs, you have a pretty clear breakdown.
00:24:39
Speaker
About half of the dolls that are being produced are meant to represent white children, and the other half is a mixture of black children and European children from abroad.
00:24:52
Speaker
And so with the dolls, there were not a lot of room for personal expression from the women making them.
00:24:59
Speaker
The instructions were so thorough that they had
00:25:03
Speaker
directions down to an eighth of an inch for every single doll.
00:25:08
Speaker
But they did, particularly the 22 inch dolls, which we're focusing on today, come with a limited range, but still a range of designs.
00:25:20
Speaker
One of whom is from a storybook.
00:25:23
Speaker
Most of them are representing children from Southern
00:25:29
Speaker
and Central Europe, and along with one black American doll and one white American doll.
00:25:39
Speaker
The European dolls came in a number of different designs.
00:25:47
Speaker
The one aspect that unifies all of them is that all of the foreign dolls are meant to look like peasants.
00:25:59
Speaker
So compared to a modern American doll that you see being presented to children, it ends up being a really sharp contrast with a rural kind of pre-industrial foreign other.
00:26:17
Speaker
The foreign dolls, a couple of countries that are being represented includes Italy, Poland, Germany,
00:26:26
Speaker
Norway, Wales is included as well, as is Scotland.
00:26:32
Speaker
Personally, I find the inclusion of Poland and Italy quite striking, given that the dolls are first being produced in 1938 and actually were released two months before Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
00:26:49
Speaker
Wow.
00:26:52
Speaker
And the design of neither the American nor the Polish doll changed at all over the rest of the course of this program's operation.
00:27:05
Speaker
And so the, the Polish doll, for example, she looks in terms of her facial features exactly like the American doll because they're being produced on an assembly line.
00:27:17
Speaker
Every single molded face had the possibility or the opportunity to turn into any design.
00:27:25
Speaker
And this actually included the Negro American doll.
00:27:28
Speaker
So there's a fun undercurrent about the universality of
00:27:32
Speaker
the human form running throughout these objects.
00:27:35
Speaker
But with the Polish doll, she is wearing a vest that's heavily embroidered.
00:27:43
Speaker
She's wearing a, uh, brightly colored, almost rainbow striped skirt.
00:27:49
Speaker
Her boots are much taller than the American girl who wears short little Mary Jane booties.
00:27:56
Speaker
Um, the Polish girl wears boots that go up to about her knee along with stockings.
00:28:00
Speaker
And so,
00:28:02
Speaker
Visually, even though if a child were to remove the clothes of either doll and they would be completely indistinguishable because they both have the same hairstyle, the same facial features, they're painted the exact same range of colors.
00:28:19
Speaker
Ultimately, they're...
00:28:22
Speaker
lessons about nationhood and the cultural practices or ethnic groups or even racial groups that are a part of particular countries comes through only through their clothes.
00:28:37
Speaker
So it just makes it all the more interesting that, for instance, there's a Polish doll, which is Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
00:28:46
Speaker
There's an Italian doll with
00:28:49
Speaker
in the period of the rise of fascism.
00:28:52
Speaker
And yet there's no German doll.
00:28:55
Speaker
The American doll is meant to, not meant to, she looks the same as the other two.
00:29:02
Speaker
And there is no Japanese doll.
00:29:04
Speaker
And so there's no mention or not no mention, but no explicit connection between the politics happening around the world
00:29:13
Speaker
completely enveloping every country in its wake.
00:29:17
Speaker
And yet, the fact that the demographic that is the largest part of Milwaukee is not being included could either be a nod to
00:29:30
Speaker
the fact that the German ethnicity, despite rising anti-German sentiment in the wake of World War II, they're part of the American fabric.
00:29:40
Speaker
They've been around in a city for at least a century.
00:29:44
Speaker
Or it could indicate that...
00:29:47
Speaker
in an effort to keep some distance, perhaps, from politics and trying to keep the program as politically neutral as possible.
00:29:55
Speaker
The program didn't want to produce German dolls that might arise some ire out of potential public schools that want to incorporate them into their lesson plans.
00:30:05
Speaker
And so the political context...
Educational Focus of Dolls
00:30:09
Speaker
in which this program is operating does seem to have an influence.
00:30:16
Speaker
But the thing that I find really interesting is that these dolls are not produced with the intent of trying to explain global politics or, yeah, or even just the, yeah, particularly global politics to young children in preschool.
00:30:36
Speaker
They are,
00:30:37
Speaker
truly designed to teach children how to remove their clothes.
00:30:43
Speaker
But if the designs are done with the intent of trying to embody particular nationalities, that argument breaks down completely.
00:30:53
Speaker
The moment you put two dolls in the hands of an imaginative child that is perfectly content to mix and match clothes to suit whatever their imaginative needs are in the moment.
00:31:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:07
Speaker
That's so interesting.
00:31:09
Speaker
And I mean, do you think that the dolls were generally being made by women who demographically represented those dolls or were all of the women making all different kinds of dolls?
00:31:24
Speaker
From what I've seen from the oral histories from the project, they were supposed to represent the women working on the program, which might explain why actually no, which would not explain why there are no German dolls.
00:31:41
Speaker
But
00:31:43
Speaker
The dolls, because they were made in an assembly line manner to teach the women how to work in an assembly line, there was never any one woman who made the doll from start to finish.
00:31:55
Speaker
They all had very particular jobs, whether it was creating the molded face, braiding hair, painting the face, sewing the body that they would do for
00:32:07
Speaker
up to eight hours every single day.
00:32:10
Speaker
And so there are moments in the oral histories where administrators comment that perhaps the dolls represent the women working on the program or a name for a doll comes from something that an individual said upon looking at a doll.
00:32:29
Speaker
But overall, it does seem to me
00:32:34
Speaker
from my research that perhaps they gleaned some of the designs for foreign dolls from magazines such as geographical magazines and maybe gleaned the designs for American dolls based off of fashions that children are wearing in Milwaukee in the period.
00:32:52
Speaker
I see.
00:32:52
Speaker
Right.
00:32:53
Speaker
So tell me more about the, I know we don't know the names of specific women who were producing these dolls, because as you say, it's an assembly line production, or that is, you know, it's not, the dolls don't have signatures on them.
00:33:07
Speaker
We can't attribute a particular doll to a particular woman.
00:33:11
Speaker
But tell me more generally about the women who were employed in the project.
00:33:17
Speaker
You mentioned there were some 5,000 women over the course of the program.
00:33:22
Speaker
Are these generally young women or older women?
00:33:28
Speaker
You mentioned there's a variety of ethnic backgrounds represented.
00:33:34
Speaker
Who are these people?
00:33:37
Speaker
So much of the documentary evidence that's been left behind, unfortunately, doesn't go into a lot of detail about the women, but it does shed light on the evolution of the program in a way that
00:33:55
Speaker
speaks to what made it so exceptional, both in the WPA in general, specifically, and in the United States in general.
00:34:03
Speaker
The first 250 women selected to be on the project were almost certainly entirely white.
00:34:13
Speaker
The slips for the program were printed so close to the start date that
00:34:19
Speaker
In fact, they did not include a start date.
00:34:21
Speaker
It just said report at 8 a.m.
00:34:23
Speaker
with an address.
00:34:24
Speaker
And within two weeks, the director of this district of the WPA asked Elsa Ulbricht if she would be opposed to working with the women, to rather with hiring black women, to which she responded she was not.
00:34:44
Speaker
And it ended up
00:34:45
Speaker
booming in terms of size.
00:34:47
Speaker
It increased from about 250 to 800 women in the matter of just a few weeks.
00:34:56
Speaker
And so the women that we know about, while we don't know specific details, we do know that they came from a wide variety of backgrounds.
00:35:06
Speaker
Some of them
00:35:08
Speaker
didn't have more than an eighth grade education.
00:35:11
Speaker
Some of them did not have English as their first language.
00:35:15
Speaker
With Black women in particular, because most WPA programs were segregated, there was likely a mixture of skilled and unskilled women because they had been turned away from other programs based off of racial hiring policies.
00:35:30
Speaker
But the women working in the program overall were
00:35:35
Speaker
working class women who were designated as heads of household who needed employment to support their families.
Legacy and Influence
00:35:45
Speaker
And this relates to the doll division of the program specifically because Elsa Ulbricht was hoping that by sewing clothes for the dolls, which...
00:35:58
Speaker
or 22 inches tall, that the women would end up being able to reproduce and replicate some of the designs at home for their own children.
00:36:06
Speaker
And so there was the hope that this program would not only influence and educate children in WPA preschools, but that it would prepare women to work for work in assembly line labor and also influence their own home lives in a very positive way as well.
00:36:26
Speaker
Do you have any sense of what happened to these women after the close of the program, either during the war or afterwards?
00:36:34
Speaker
Did the program work in terms of preparing them for assembly line employment?
00:36:40
Speaker
This is one of the sadder aspects of the history.
00:36:46
Speaker
The administrator, Elsa Ulbricht, commented at one point in her oral history that
00:36:54
Speaker
quotes, these were the dregs of all the WPA, end quote.
00:36:59
Speaker
And so she and her administrative team did not necessarily see these women as skilled in a way that could be changed in a really dramatic and substantive way.
00:37:16
Speaker
The program was designed to give them assembly line skills.
00:37:20
Speaker
And for the first year,
00:37:22
Speaker
About 30 women did, in fact, rotate off of the Milwaukee Handicraft Project and into more skilled programs, particularly in sewing rooms.
00:37:31
Speaker
But as time wore on, fewer and fewer women were able to make the transition.
00:37:37
Speaker
And so my guess is that even though they'd had experience working in assembly lines, they
00:37:45
Speaker
were likely not able to make the leap to working in wartime assembly line industries.
00:37:51
Speaker
I suspect most of them ended up being rotated back onto relief rolls or simply back into their home lives.
00:37:57
Speaker
And I have the hope that the program had a really positive impact on their lives, but I'm not sure that the program changed their lives in the way they originally intended.
00:38:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:14
Speaker
How many dolls do you think they produced overall during the course of the program?
00:38:20
Speaker
Thousands, thousands and thousands of dolls.
00:38:23
Speaker
And so even though the women were not seen as
00:38:29
Speaker
skilled under the eyes of the United States Employment Service.
00:38:33
Speaker
The material itself speaks to the range of skills and abilities and the productive levels that these women had on truly astonishing levels.
00:38:43
Speaker
So the dolls were available for five years.
00:38:47
Speaker
And every single year in which they were available, 30 women, this is important, roughly 30 women worked in the doll division.
00:38:58
Speaker
They produced 10,000 dolls.
00:39:02
Speaker
per year for five years.
00:39:06
Speaker
3,000 of the dolls were the 22-inch dolls that we've spoken of.
00:39:12
Speaker
And these dolls, they were sent all across the country.
00:39:17
Speaker
The Milwaukee Handicraft Project had requests pouring in from
00:39:22
Speaker
All over the place.
00:39:23
Speaker
They even had missionaries in India and North Africa asking for the dolls for use in their classrooms.
00:39:31
Speaker
And so the dolls, the women who made the dolls do remain nameless.
00:39:38
Speaker
There is a stamp on the back of every single doll with the program number.
00:39:44
Speaker
And a sentence that just says Milwaukee Handicraft Project.
00:39:50
Speaker
They remain nameless, but in many ways, their lives and the skills that they had and their ability to touch so many people through their own hard work really lives on in the objects that they produced.
00:40:06
Speaker
How many of the dolls have survived to today?
00:40:10
Speaker
Are they a sort of a known quantity?
00:40:11
Speaker
I mean, are they recognized and collected and cataloged and that sort of thing?
00:40:18
Speaker
The dolls live on in private collections, museums, and libraries, predominantly in the Milwaukee area.
00:40:28
Speaker
A number of them exist in a private collection that has been very, very generously opened up to me for my research.
00:40:37
Speaker
The Milwaukee Public Museum has a number of dolls.
00:40:41
Speaker
And the Milwaukee County Historical Society has both dolls and one of the molds that was used to produce them, shedding light on the productive process.
00:40:55
Speaker
And so in all
00:40:58
Speaker
I believe I've seen 20 or 30 dolls.
00:41:01
Speaker
Admittedly, I've lost track because over my dissertation research, I've seen about 400 dolls and watercolors of dolls.
00:41:11
Speaker
But with the Milwaukee Handicraft Project, because there's, I think, about 20 different dolls, I've seen an example of almost all of them except for
00:41:21
Speaker
So we go from what would be about $50,000 to maybe about $20,000.
00:41:27
Speaker
But of course, they're being used in preschools by young children between the ages of maybe three and six.
00:41:34
Speaker
And so they tend not to be preserved in the same way as some other objects.
00:41:41
Speaker
Yeah, that's a tough life.
00:41:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:45
Speaker
Is there, I mean, can you draw a direct line or is it more of an indirect line between the production of these dolls and then the future of commercial doll production?
00:41:56
Speaker
I mean, you mentioned Barbie in the 50s.
00:42:01
Speaker
You know, what does the, is there a way in which this project specifically can be said to have changed the trajectory of doll manufacture?
00:42:10
Speaker
It is my dream to do research in the archives of the Pleasant Company, which was purchased by Mattel in the 1990s, because I believe it is not a coincidence that the Milwaukee Handicraft Project produced two dolls called the American Doll, which was white, even if they did not label it as such in the marketing material, and the Negro American Doll, because...
00:42:35
Speaker
Fifty years later, we see the production of American Girl Doll, which comes out of Madison, Wisconsin.
00:42:43
Speaker
And so I have to believe there is a link between the American Girl of the Milwaukee Handicraft Project and the American Girl of the Pleasant Company.
00:42:53
Speaker
I've not had the opportunity to explore that yet, but it is my hope one day to take a look because
00:43:01
Speaker
Some of the designs are strikingly similar.
00:43:05
Speaker
So the American doll, for instance, from the Milwaukee Handicraft Project has, um,
00:43:12
Speaker
A peach-painted face, blonde braids, and tends to wear matching outfits in a way that predates American Girl.
00:43:21
Speaker
Actually, if you compare the photo of the American Girl from Milwaukee Handicraft Project that I've provided with Kirsten, the American Girl doll, they look very similar.
00:43:35
Speaker
And so I like to think that even though their costumes are quite different, both their face and even down to the braids and kind of the cues that are being used to denote the American identity and particularly a white American girlhood is similar.
00:43:56
Speaker
And so I like to think there's a direct connection, but I hope one day to confirm that with some more research.
00:44:05
Speaker
Well, that is a really tantalizing idea.
00:44:07
Speaker
And I hope if you do manage to draw that connection, you'll come back and tell us about it.
00:44:12
Speaker
That would be great.
00:44:13
Speaker
I would love to talk about that.
00:44:15
Speaker
Well, Alison Robinson, thank you so much for talking with me today.
00:44:19
Speaker
Is there anything we should have talked about so far and haven't gotten around to?
00:44:24
Speaker
Oh, I do have one kind of, I don't even know where it would be spliced in, but I just have one more fun fact about the dolls.
00:44:32
Speaker
Bring it on.
00:44:35
Speaker
In addition to their size and design being quite unique in the history of dolls, they also sit at a 90 degree angle.
00:44:45
Speaker
They're designed, they're too top heavy truly to actually stand at 22 inches tall, but they're designed to sit at a 90 degree angle.
00:44:53
Speaker
in a way that can also be mimicked by their child playmate to try to make them seem more realistic because they don't have joints other than the hip joint.
00:45:03
Speaker
But that sitting was meant to encourage children to further relate to the object as something that is realistic and relatable.
00:45:14
Speaker
Clever.
00:45:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:16
Speaker
That is a fun detail.
00:45:18
Speaker
But that is truly all I have, Sal.
00:45:21
Speaker
Okay, well, wow.
00:45:22
Speaker
Well, this has been totally fascinating.
00:45:25
Speaker
Thank you.
00:45:26
Speaker
And I feel like I know about 500 times more about doll history than I did when we started talking.
00:45:35
Speaker
I'm happy to share it because I learned a lot about it along the way too.
00:45:39
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:45:40
Speaker
Fabulous.
00:45:41
Speaker
Well, thank you.
00:45:42
Speaker
Thank you so much for inviting me.
00:45:45
Speaker
That's our show.
00:45:46
Speaker
Thanks for listening.
00:45:47
Speaker
We'll be back next time with the painting dealer and advisor, Reagan Upshaw.
00:45:51
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
00:45:55
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:45:57
Speaker
And I'm Ben Miller.