Transcript
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.
Speaker: For more information, visit decorativeartstrust.org.
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
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.
Speaker: We're off this week, so we're bringing back one of my favorites from the archives.
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.
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,
Speaker: That was produced by women working as part of the WPA program.
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.
Speaker: I hope you enjoy.
Speaker: Now, Allison, the WPA was primarily conceived as an employment program, but it did have significant cultural objectives as well.
Speaker: How did the Milwaukee Handicraft Project align with the overall goals of the WPA?
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.
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.
Speaker: And so she collaborated with
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.
Speaker: The resulting project was the Milwaukee Handicraft Project.
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.
Speaker: And so while women were employed under the WPA, in many cases, men were really the sort of target of
Speaker: employees.
Speaker: So you mentioned there are 2000 unemployed women in Milwaukee.
Speaker: Does that mean 2000 unmarried unemployed women or are these married women who are looking for a job?
Speaker: This is one of the really delightful aspects of the Milwaukee Handicraft Project.
Speaker: The administrators recognized that to be a female head of household involved both married and unmarried women.
Speaker: And they also recognized that it was a title held by women that crossed the racial and ethnic lines.
Speaker: And so
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
Speaker: textiles and dolls to distribute to local tax institutions.
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.
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.
Speaker: Oh, and was that because they were sort of making up for lost employment among men?
Speaker: Perhaps in some ways, there was a greater call for women to support the household.
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
Speaker: did not experience as much of a downturn as others, particularly in industry.
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.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a really interesting sort of counter cyclical wrinkle.
Speaker: But before we get too far off subject here, to bring it back into the world of the arts.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: You know, there were other arts initiatives, you know, most famously there are the WPA murals.
Speaker: You know, I have spent a fair bit of time with the Lomax recording projects, you know, categorizing and documenting Southern folk music.
Speaker: So the WPA was no stranger to arts initiatives.
Speaker: But what was different about the Milwaukee Handicraft Project?
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.
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
Speaker: considered to be unskilled to produce goods for tax-supported institutions.
Speaker: So this included hospitals, schools, and public libraries.
Speaker: A lot of these institutions were also heavily populated by children.
Speaker: And so rather than producing art for the general public, the Milwaukee Handicraft Project produced goods, not entirely, but largely for children.
Speaker: a child audience.
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.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: And that would happen again in World War II.
Speaker: But those were generally seen, I think, as mostly isolated wartime trends.
Speaker: So what was the general state of women's labor outside of the house in America in the 1930s?
Speaker: And did it sort of change dramatically from urban areas to rural areas, between racial groups, that sort of thing?
Speaker: Women's labor, in many ways, reproduced a lot of the things that they would be doing in the home.
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.
Speaker: Women's factory labor had existed since the Industrial Revolution, but as you noted, and as is
Speaker: really remarkable for the period.
Speaker: We just see an explosion of this phenomenon in World War II.
Speaker: There is a pretty sharp difference in terms of women's labor along racial lines.
Speaker: You see a higher number of
Speaker: Black women, particularly married Black women, in the workforce than white women.
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.
Speaker: And while women were in, both white and Black women were in agricultural labor,
Speaker: the work and the circumstances in which they were doing the work was quite different.
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.
Speaker: And so an integrated labor space
Speaker: at all is remarkable for the United States.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, you know, you mentioned that the Handicraft Project is run by women and it has an explicit mandate to employ women.
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?
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
Speaker: men who had a background in professional, professionalized labor, but for whom manual labor would not have been a logical outlet.
Speaker: So this, this division is setting up all sorts of different programs across the country to get women into the workforce.
Speaker: Much of this involves sewing rooms, which can employ hundreds of women producing, uh,
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.
Speaker: So much of the work opportunities available for women through the WPA operated in
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.
Speaker: There were some other instances such as food preparation was quite popular, sewing coral robes was an option as was
Speaker: working as a teacher in newly created WPA preschools, for instance.
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.
Speaker: And the Milwaukee Handicraft Project is no exception to this.
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: But the pieces that we have decided to talk about today and that have really been the focus of your work are,
Speaker: are these dolls.
Speaker: And, you know, they're quite striking.
Speaker: I hope listeners will take a look on the web at themagazineantique.com slash podcast to see pictures of them.
Speaker: Um, you know, they're very, uh, sort of, um, distinctive.
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?
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.
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.
Speaker: including molded faces that are designed to look realistic.
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...
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.
Speaker: Did you come across them first in a museum collection or in literature or where did you first encounter them?
Speaker: I first encountered them admittedly in Google search.
Speaker: I had a long interest in studying the history of childhood education in public schools.
Speaker: And while doing background and preliminary research in this area, I discovered these truly remarkable dolls.
Speaker: And the fact that they were so different from anything I'd ever seen before made me want to learn more.
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.
Speaker: Why was the Milwaukee Handicraft Project interested in paying women to make dolls?
Speaker: So in the early 1930s, the federal government did something that is revolutionary in the history of childhood education.
Speaker: They started to fund the first federally funded preschools.
Speaker: And with this call and this need for preschools with both men and women going back to work through federally funded programs,
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.
Speaker: The Milwaukee Handicraft Project dolls grew out of this phenomenon.
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.
Speaker: Albrecht had h ad a doll in her childhood that had a molded face that stayed with her for her entire life.
Speaker: She continued to think about it for decades afterward.
Speaker: And she wanted to produce an object similar for local school children, but that would also teach them a very important idea.
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.
Speaker: And so with this need for a new type of educational toy, the Milwaukee Handicraft Project ran a test in a Milwaukee preschool.
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?
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.
Speaker: hadn't noticed before.
Speaker: And so these dolls are, they're meant to be recognized as peers, as friends.
Speaker: And within that bond between a child and a doll, the child would eventually learn how to dress themselves.
Speaker: That's quite a story.
Speaker: And I have to say, yeah, I mean, looking at the dolls, you alluded to this.
Speaker: There's a bit of an uncanny valley sort of feeling.
Speaker: I guess this is true of almost any kind of human-like doll.
Speaker: But yeah, that feeling that it's quite similar to a person.
Speaker: Not quite similar enough to be totally convincing, but similar enough to be
Speaker: at first glance, may be a little queasy.
Speaker: Yep, exactly.
Speaker: We'll get right back to Alison Robinson and her discoveries about the Milwaukee Handicraft Project.
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.
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.
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Speaker: Thank you very much.
Speaker: So, okay, so tell me about the context for these dolls.
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?
Speaker: These dolls are...
Speaker: revolutionary in the history of American doll production.
Speaker: Prior to World War I, the United States did not have a robust toy industry.
Speaker: There's a long history of homemade doll production that is essential to understanding dolls and toys in American history.
Speaker: But in terms of commercially produced dolls, most of the objects
Speaker: circulating through the American economy came from Europe, predominantly France and Germany.
Speaker: Most of these dolls
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.
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
Speaker: tangible and reproducible for tailors.
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.
Speaker: The Milwaukee Handicraft Project dolls are so different because they're meant to
Speaker: reproduce the image of a toddler or embody the image of a toddler for children.
Speaker: They were one of the first, if not the first commercially made American doll to produce a doll other than these two categories.
Speaker: So that alone is incredibly striking in the history of doll production.
Speaker: Also, the dolls are the first
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.
Speaker: And so the unique design, the size, the modeled face, they're all
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.
Speaker: And so by producing a doll that was totally different, totally unique, you're getting a new
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.
Speaker: In many ways, this is the first toddler one.
Speaker: That's incredible.
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.
Speaker: I didn't realize it was such a relatively new concept.
Speaker: Oh, yes, yes.
Speaker: It really, I think, revolutionized the industry.
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.
Speaker: But even those are mostly focused on...
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.
Speaker: And so you end up with a lot of dolls that have a commercially produced head with a handmade body.
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.
Speaker: But here with the Milwaukee Handicraft Project, it's still different because it's not a shoulder head doll.
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.
Speaker: So it's a different doll, a different design for children in public school.
Speaker: So what did they look like?
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?
Speaker: They, there is a range of dolls in terms of size.
Speaker: They run from about 12 inches to 22 inches tall.
Speaker: Within their various designs, you have a pretty clear breakdown.
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.
Speaker: And so with the dolls, there were not a lot of room for personal expression from the women making them.
Speaker: The instructions were so thorough that they had
Speaker: directions down to an eighth of an inch for every single doll.
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.
Speaker: One of whom is from a storybook.
Speaker: Most of them are representing children from Southern
Speaker: and Central Europe, and along with one black American doll and one white American doll.
Speaker: The European dolls came in a number of different designs.
Speaker: The one aspect that unifies all of them is that all of the foreign dolls are meant to look like peasants.
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.
Speaker: The foreign dolls, a couple of countries that are being represented includes Italy, Poland, Germany,
Speaker: Norway, Wales is included as well, as is Scotland.
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.
Speaker: Wow.
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.
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.
Speaker: Every single molded face had the possibility or the opportunity to turn into any design.
Speaker: And this actually included the Negro American doll.
Speaker: So there's a fun undercurrent about the universality of
Speaker: the human form running throughout these objects.
Speaker: But with the Polish doll, she is wearing a vest that's heavily embroidered.
Speaker: She's wearing a, uh, brightly colored, almost rainbow striped skirt.
Speaker: Her boots are much taller than the American girl who wears short little Mary Jane booties.
Speaker: Um, the Polish girl wears boots that go up to about her knee along with stockings.
Speaker: And so,
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.
Speaker: Ultimately, they're...
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.
Speaker: So it just makes it all the more interesting that, for instance, there's a Polish doll, which is Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
Speaker: There's an Italian doll with
Speaker: in the period of the rise of fascism.
Speaker: And yet there's no German doll.
Speaker: The American doll is meant to, not meant to, she looks the same as the other two.
Speaker: And there is no Japanese doll.
Speaker: And so there's no mention or not no mention, but no explicit connection between the politics happening around the world
Speaker: completely enveloping every country in its wake.
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
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.
Speaker: They've been around in a city for at least a century.
Speaker: Or it could indicate that...
Speaker: in an effort to keep some distance, perhaps, from politics and trying to keep the program as politically neutral as possible.
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.
Speaker: And so the political context...
Speaker: in which this program is operating does seem to have an influence.
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.
Speaker: They are,
Speaker: truly designed to teach children how to remove their clothes.
Speaker: But if the designs are done with the intent of trying to embody particular nationalities, that argument breaks down completely.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's so interesting.
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?
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.
Speaker: But
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.
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
Speaker: up to eight hours every single day.
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.
Speaker: But overall, it does seem to me
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.
Speaker: I see.
Speaker: Right.
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.
Speaker: We can't attribute a particular doll to a particular woman.
Speaker: But tell me more generally about the women who were employed in the project.
Speaker: You mentioned there were some 5,000 women over the course of the program.
Speaker: Are these generally young women or older women?
Speaker: You mentioned there's a variety of ethnic backgrounds represented.
Speaker: Who are these people?
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
Speaker: speaks to what made it so exceptional, both in the WPA in general, specifically, and in the United States in general.
Speaker: The first 250 women selected to be on the project were almost certainly entirely white.
Speaker: The slips for the program were printed so close to the start date that
Speaker: In fact, they did not include a start date.
Speaker: It just said report at 8 a.m.
Speaker: with an address.
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.
Speaker: And it ended up
Speaker: booming in terms of size.
Speaker: It increased from about 250 to 800 women in the matter of just a few weeks.
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.
Speaker: Some of them
Speaker: didn't have more than an eighth grade education.
Speaker: Some of them did not have English as their first language.
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.
Speaker: But the women working in the program overall were
Speaker: working class women who were designated as heads of household who needed employment to support their families.
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...
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.
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.
Speaker: Do you have any sense of what happened to these women after the close of the program, either during the war or afterwards?
Speaker: Did the program work in terms of preparing them for assembly line employment?
Speaker: This is one of the sadder aspects of the history.
Speaker: The administrator, Elsa Ulbricht, commented at one point in her oral history that
Speaker: quotes, these were the dregs of all the WPA, end quote.
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.
Speaker: The program was designed to give them assembly line skills.
Speaker: And for the first year,
Speaker: About 30 women did, in fact, rotate off of the Milwaukee Handicraft Project and into more skilled programs, particularly in sewing rooms.
Speaker: But as time wore on, fewer and fewer women were able to make the transition.
Speaker: And so my guess is that even though they'd had experience working in assembly lines, they
Speaker: were likely not able to make the leap to working in wartime assembly line industries.
Speaker: I suspect most of them ended up being rotated back onto relief rolls or simply back into their home lives.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: How many dolls do you think they produced overall during the course of the program?
Speaker: Thousands, thousands and thousands of dolls.
Speaker: And so even though the women were not seen as
Speaker: skilled under the eyes of the United States Employment Service.
Speaker: The material itself speaks to the range of skills and abilities and the productive levels that these women had on truly astonishing levels.
Speaker: So the dolls were available for five years.
Speaker: And every single year in which they were available, 30 women, this is important, roughly 30 women worked in the doll division.
Speaker: They produced 10,000 dolls.
Speaker: per year for five years.
Speaker: 3,000 of the dolls were the 22-inch dolls that we've spoken of.
Speaker: And these dolls, they were sent all across the country.
Speaker: The Milwaukee Handicraft Project had requests pouring in from
Speaker: All over the place.
Speaker: They even had missionaries in India and North Africa asking for the dolls for use in their classrooms.
Speaker: And so the dolls, the women who made the dolls do remain nameless.
Speaker: There is a stamp on the back of every single doll with the program number.
Speaker: And a sentence that just says Milwaukee Handicraft Project.
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.
Speaker: How many of the dolls have survived to today?
Speaker: Are they a sort of a known quantity?
Speaker: I mean, are they recognized and collected and cataloged and that sort of thing?
Speaker: The dolls live on in private collections, museums, and libraries, predominantly in the Milwaukee area.
Speaker: A number of them exist in a private collection that has been very, very generously opened up to me for my research.
Speaker: The Milwaukee Public Museum has a number of dolls.
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.
Speaker: And so in all
Speaker: I believe I've seen 20 or 30 dolls.
Speaker: Admittedly, I've lost track because over my dissertation research, I've seen about 400 dolls and watercolors of dolls.
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
Speaker: So we go from what would be about $50,000 to maybe about $20,000.
Speaker: But of course, they're being used in preschools by young children between the ages of maybe three and six.
Speaker: And so they tend not to be preserved in the same way as some other objects.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a tough life.
Speaker: Yeah.
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?
Speaker: I mean, you mentioned Barbie in the 50s.
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?
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...
Speaker: Fifty years later, we see the production of American Girl Doll, which comes out of Madison, Wisconsin.
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.
Speaker: I've not had the opportunity to explore that yet, but it is my hope one day to take a look because
Speaker: Some of the designs are strikingly similar.
Speaker: So the American doll, for instance, from the Milwaukee Handicraft Project has, um,
Speaker: A peach-painted face, blonde braids, and tends to wear matching outfits in a way that predates American Girl.
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.
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.
Speaker: And so I like to think there's a direct connection, but I hope one day to confirm that with some more research.
Speaker: Well, that is a really tantalizing idea.
Speaker: And I hope if you do manage to draw that connection, you'll come back and tell us about it.
Speaker: That would be great.
Speaker: I would love to talk about that.
Speaker: Well, Alison Robinson, thank you so much for talking with me today.
Speaker: Is there anything we should have talked about so far and haven't gotten around to?
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.
Speaker: Bring it on.
Speaker: In addition to their size and design being quite unique in the history of dolls, they also sit at a 90 degree angle.
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.
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.
Speaker: But that sitting was meant to encourage children to further relate to the object as something that is realistic and relatable.
Speaker: Clever.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That is a fun detail.
Speaker: But that is truly all I have, Sal.
Speaker: Okay, well, wow.
Speaker: Well, this has been totally fascinating.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: And I feel like I know about 500 times more about doll history than I did when we started talking.
Speaker: I'm happy to share it because I learned a lot about it along the way too.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Fabulous.
Speaker: Well, thank you.
Speaker: Thank you so much for inviting me.
Speaker: That's our show.
Speaker: Thanks for listening.
Speaker: We'll be back next time with the painting dealer and advisor, Reagan Upshaw.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
Speaker: And I'm Ben Miller.
