As a mother to a young baby girl, I have decided that I do
not want her playing with baby dolls.
What brought me to this assertion, one might ask? It was teaching an excerpt from The Bluest
Eye by Toni Morrison for about five years to ninth grade students.
When I taught TBE,
I used two excerpts from the text.
For this post, I’m only focusing on one. Within this excerpt, Claudia
MacTeer, a nine-year-old African American female character growing up in Ohio
in 1941, eviscerates a blue eyed, blonde haired baby doll she receives for
Christmas. Claudia struggles with
how society idealizes white beauty standards. She’s critical of the way the people around her romanticize
this beauty, and she rebels against it in her own way. Thus, she destroys her Christmas gift
in an attempt to see what it was that made people love the blue eyed, blonde
hair baby doll so much. Claudia
proclaims that if any adult had asked her what she wanted, she would have said
that she desired to have a family experience, sitting in the kitchen with her
grandma, listening to her grandpa play the violin.
So how did I arrive at not wanting dolls for my little girl?
Well, it has nothing do with race, which was the basis of Claudia’s distaste,
but rather gender. After about the
second or third time I taught TBE, I
started to critically think about what else Claudia was saying about baby
dolls:
I
was bemused with the thing itself, and the way it looked. What was I
supposed to do with it?
Pretend I was its mother? I had no interest in babies
or the concept of motherhood. I was
interested only in humans my own age
and size, and could not generate
any enthusiasm at the prospect of being a
mother. Motherhood was old age, and
other remote possibilities. I
learned
quickly, however, what I was
expected to do with the doll: rock it, fabricate
storied situations around it, even
sleep with it. Picture books were full of
little girls sleeping with their
dolls.
And it was these lines that made me question why in the
world we give little girls baby dolls to play with. Before you throw me under
the radical bus, pause and think about it for a second. Why do we
give dolls to little girls? As
Claudia says, do we want them pretending to be mothers? If so, why? Some might argue that the issue I’m
presenting is not that big of a deal, that a doll is just a toy. It’s more than just a toy. Please don’t say that.
Let’s go back to the idea of pretending to be the baby’s
mother. If little girls are
playing with dolls and pretending to be mothers, who are the babies’ fathers?
In giving little girls dolls, have we normalized single parenthood? Having kids
out of wedlock? “Baby daddies” and
“baby mommas,” or “baby’s mothers” and “baby’s fathers,” if you will? Or am I reaching?
Maybe, but one of things I’ve come to understand is the
power of subtle conditioning. And
with that being said, I don’t want my little girl playing with dolls. The only exception I’d make is if the
doll was associated with an occupation (e.g. Doc McStuffins), where my child
would not be pretending to be a mother but perhaps a professional.
Comments
Post a Comment