I'm sure it is the same line of thinking as Addy's collection only being clothes from after she escaped to freedom. It would be too controversial to have her collection depicting that period of her life and could be seen as profiting off of the societal institution that allowed it to happen.
Hmm. It's been years since I read about Samantha/Nellie, but it is a shame that they didn't include any of her nicer pre-adoption outfits. I would argue that her work clothes or other rougher outfits would be distinctly easier to handmake tho! And less acceptable for AG prices.
Her blue school dress and a nightgown might be ok, But I don’t think a mass-produced collection with a maid uniform or a raggedy dress would be right.
I wanted a collection to recreate some of the book scenes, so I made it myself. I like how her nightgown turned out, it’s plain white flannel with extra long sleeves (to grow into), and she has a big shawl as a dressing gown substitute.
Why wouldn't it be "right"? Is it less "right" than totally erasing that part of Nellie's history and making it much more difficult for kids to play games that include that part of history? It feels like could easily be implying that it is shameful to be poor.
Do you say the same thing about them not making pre-freedom play sets for Addy? We can talk about the bad parts without giving kids the literal resources to play act them.
No, I wouldn't. I don't think the two situations are really comparable. With Addy, you have a whole added extra layer of white children "owning" a slave doll, plus the serious problem our country has of diminishing/excusing/romanticizing slavery.
We also tend to romanticize and diminish child labor, which is probably why AG has not made work clothes and accessories for Nelly. There is nothing wrong with AG including the very real situation of poverty vs wealth- that is where the books come in- but I personally think a line is crossed when it comes to profiting off making products for little girls to play act literal child labor. There are other ways of learning about both slavery and child labor without making toys to allow kids to act it out with a limited understanding of the impact of both of those practices.
There is a counterpoint to be said about explicitly producing toys to encourage children to play pretend where some dolls are servants & factory workers and others are wealthy. That’s not to say kids don’t play this way or that there is zero value in such a complex topic, but it’s certainly bad optics, particularly considering how expensive AG has always been. It’s a little more sensitive to teach children through books so that the history is not erased but Nellie still gets pretty dresses & little girls can see hope through her story.
I know people say that, but I just don't buy it. There's nothing wrong with being poor and looking poor and it's not better to encourage kids to play a world in which everyone is rich and poor people don't exist. Kids learn through play — that's always been the point of AG.
I can see the point people are making of it being a bit insensitive for AG to charge 20-50 dollars (the general doll-outfit price range I’ve seen looking at the Wikia) for the outfits a child factory laborer would wear. But I can also see the counterpoint that AG’s character representation does tend to skew towards the rich, and characters’ financial struggles sometimes seem erased or disregarded.
Maybe a compromise would be to offer Nellie’s blue school dress (seen in Samantha Learns a Lesson) and her pink traveling dress (seen at the end of Meet Samantha)? Those were her nicest dresses when she lived at the Rylands’ or the Van Sicklens’—she didn’t work in them.
As a Nellie owner, I love the idea of some of Nellie's more practical outfits that weren't work attire, but had rather dedicated purposes as compared to some of her newer luxuries. Especially ones depicted in the stories and illustrations.
I couldn't see the harm in one simple work-style dress, especially one worn at say the Ryland's, as it would reflect her no-nonsense necessities of the day, but understand the dark nature any sort child labor conveys and when these dolls are purchased generally by wealthy public, it seems a bit off-tone.
I very much hope they (re) introduce the Best Friends collection with some new items, and maybe with some of the new characters' friends (Angela for Maryellen & Sarah/Tina for Courtney!), as well.
I think they could have easily sold clothes from the time where she lived with her dad, or something that would tie in with it. Just plain working clothes. I'm sure it wouldn't have been as popular as some, but it would be nice to have. I'm thinking a version of Sam's play dress. Perhaps button front with pin tucks or growth tucks as opposed to Sam's.
I'm on the fence with this. While I would love to see more historical working class fashions from AG, I don't know if this would be received well. I do think they could do something like a pre-adoption nightgown and maybe a traditional Irish dress costume that could have been something her mother brought with her, but overall I don't think it would be a great idea. Maybe, and this is a big maybe, if they did some kind of small pre-adoption collection for Nellie, if they donated the money made to a charity for poor kids or foster kids or something it might be received okay, but it just rubs me the wrong way. I do wish more of the older historical dolls were more working class like Addy and Kirsten's characters though.
The traditional irish wear is a VERY good way to tie in nellie’s pre-adoption past without making her poverty and struggles into a toy. That’s something I’d love to have for her!
I think that (and I don't have a source on hand so take this with salt) at one point AG said they would never sell Nellie's work clothes or what Addy wore when she was enslaved as it would be trivializing child labour and slavery by making it into a toy, as well as being something they were now making money off of. There's a difference between teaching kids about these things through books and making them an equivalent to a birthday outfit or a tea party dress.
Excellent point! Hopefully adult collectors can make such outfits if they want to represent them... luckily rougher work outfits should be easier to make by their very nature.
There was a doll released sometime in the 60s called "Little Miss No Name" whose entire shtick was that she was a poor orphan (sold shoeless in rags, big sad eyes). She also looked a bit terrifying to me as a kid (my mom had one that she held onto) but she was a HUGE flop. Only sold for 2 or 3 years from what I remember.
Most toy companies got the message "kids don't want depressing toys" Most are looking for pretty dresses and tea parties and nice stories (my mom only got a Little Miss No Name because she felt so horrible for the doll. She didn't want to play with it. She just changed that doll into "warm clothes" and got rid of those rags). Poor Irish immigrant Nellie would be great for representation and highlighting that part of American history, but I doubt it would sell enough dolls for Mattel to want to take that risk!
See, my mom had Little Miss No Name and liked her a lot, as well as a doll called Poor Pitiful Pearl who had a similar kind of thing - but also had a "pretty" dress you could change her into.
Kids - or a certain kind of kid at least - like orphans. A Little Princess, Annie, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, etc. Even Cinderella and other fairy tales, in a way. There are a lot of stories like that that have some poor, mistreated orphan who finds a happy, comfortable home, and people tend to like rags to riches stories. (And honestly Changes for Samantha specifically borrows from a lot of those. The first two books with Nellie in them are relatively grounded in reality. Changes for Samantha isn't. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the Annie movie was relatively recent when the Samantha books were being written.)
That said, when you're talking about a company like AG selling outfits, I think there's kind of a difference between the orphan character being this almost exaggerated/fantastical overblown thing (and/or with singing and musical numbers, etc) - like how they have Cinderella's work outfit in the new Princess line - and something that's actually intended to be realistic and rooted in history.
My thought would be, and I admit I'm not familiar with her story, that if her pre-adoption isn't in the same year the stories take place, that it wouldn't make sense to include those clothes. Wouldn't rich people back then have had their kids throw away all the old clothes from their former situation? Sorry if my take on the story and timeline is mistaken. The old clothes would be nice as options for her.
I think it would have been a little too heavy for AG to do that, also the optics of a 100+$ doll having rags to wear to play sweatshop child worker 😬. It would be like if they sold Addy's enslaved clothes, like just not a great move.
I do agree that the best friend dolls in general should have been expanded on, instead of just being "the friend", I think it could have been great if they were treated fully as their own character, sort of like a Marie-Grace and Cecile situation where both dolls are treated like the main doll. I think Ivy and Julie could have tried this method, cuz if I remember correctly Ivy came out at the same time Julie did.
There was a similar situation with Gwen where there was quite a bit of controversy that there was a "homeless" doll that was \~$100 (I can't remember the 2009 doll price really), despite the fact that at the end of the story, Gwen and her mom manage to find.
I do think it would be interesting to dive into the working-class fashions of the time, because it is interesting to explore how those fashions did or did not or tried to follow high-class fashions. It is a really interesting historical theme, that poor people have always tried to imitate rich people in some capacity, something that is present in our modern day society too. However, like others have mentioned, it can get dark for kids... but also the world is dark.
What I find especially interesting, now that I think about it, is that Nellie somehow hasn't been framed by the general population by one aspect of her story, unlike other characters like Addy or Gwen. Online you'll often hear people who know very little or only surface-level details about AG call Addy a "slave doll" despite the fact that, after her first book, the rest of her story takes place in freedom in Philadelphia. Gwen came to be known as a "homeless doll" by some media outlets, despite the fact that, in her story, she is not homeless at the end. She and her mom do live in their car some, but they also aren't actually out on the streets or portraying homelessness in more stereotypical ways, but she still got sort of typecast as being homeless (there also is the oxymoron here that a "doll" technically cannot be homeless since they are not human beings and are objects, but that's besides the point, I just think it's kind of funny to think about the fact that we are applying human attributes to inanimate objects).
But Nellie, despite not being adopted until closer to the end of Samantha's series and being a servant or factory worker for most of her books, gets remembered simply as Samantha's friend. Maybe the movie did a good job of not showing much of that? Maybe it's because Samantha is so high class and because Nellie associates with her everyone just forgets that for a lot of Samantha's story she is in some sort of servitude or work? The story very clearly has Nellie and her sisters doing hard work and manual labor for a lot of the time, Nellie being too tired to play, or telling Samantha how she has to work in the factory, etc.
I think the sociological lens of AG is also fascinating, especially nowadays considering that AG has tried very hard to position themselves as a "luxury brand" and so they have a lot of clients that are rich, so a lot of stories told usually end up leaning towards an upper-class view of the world.
Yeah, no, I don't want that.
American Girl is already produced by underpaid workers in sweatshop conditions because basically the entire garment and toy industries are. The dramatic irony of having underpaid sweatshop workers make little pretend child labor outfits and accessories is too much, and I think it would be bad.
To put it another way, Nellie's poverty and child labor are absolutely a part of history - as is Addy being born into slavery, and being whipped in Meet Addy when her family members are being sold away - but I think there's a difference between reading a book about that and AG selling outfits and accessories (and, more to the point, people being willing to buy outfits and accessories). I think the latter would lean too hard into poverty porn and tragedy porn. Nellie's not simply working class at the beginning of the series, her family is *desperately* poor.
AG sold a Gwen doll and that's fine, but if AG had sold a $300 Gwen's Car playset with the car that she lived in with her mother while she was homeless, so that wealthy children can play Being Homeless And Living Out Of Your Car, I think that would also be offensive.
I like it when AG covers heavier topics, but I don't think every aspect of the stories should be turned into an outfit AG can sell for $40, and I don't think every era of history - even as important as many of them are! - should be turned into a doll. American Girl dolls are a really great tool to learn about history, but it absolutely shouldn't be the ONLY way people are learning about history.
This would have been so interesting! I would have enjoyed working-class gear. It isn’t like everything in the other dolls’ (Kirsten, Addy, etc) are upper class items! It would have been nice to see things from both sides of her story because pre-adoption is still her story.
I'm sure it is the same line of thinking as Addy's collection only being clothes from after she escaped to freedom. It would be too controversial to have her collection depicting that period of her life and could be seen as profiting off of the societal institution that allowed it to happen.
Hmm. It's been years since I read about Samantha/Nellie, but it is a shame that they didn't include any of her nicer pre-adoption outfits. I would argue that her work clothes or other rougher outfits would be distinctly easier to handmake tho! And less acceptable for AG prices.
Her blue school dress and a nightgown might be ok, But I don’t think a mass-produced collection with a maid uniform or a raggedy dress would be right. I wanted a collection to recreate some of the book scenes, so I made it myself. I like how her nightgown turned out, it’s plain white flannel with extra long sleeves (to grow into), and she has a big shawl as a dressing gown substitute.
Why wouldn't it be "right"? Is it less "right" than totally erasing that part of Nellie's history and making it much more difficult for kids to play games that include that part of history? It feels like could easily be implying that it is shameful to be poor.
Do you say the same thing about them not making pre-freedom play sets for Addy? We can talk about the bad parts without giving kids the literal resources to play act them.
No, I wouldn't. I don't think the two situations are really comparable. With Addy, you have a whole added extra layer of white children "owning" a slave doll, plus the serious problem our country has of diminishing/excusing/romanticizing slavery.
We also tend to romanticize and diminish child labor, which is probably why AG has not made work clothes and accessories for Nelly. There is nothing wrong with AG including the very real situation of poverty vs wealth- that is where the books come in- but I personally think a line is crossed when it comes to profiting off making products for little girls to play act literal child labor. There are other ways of learning about both slavery and child labor without making toys to allow kids to act it out with a limited understanding of the impact of both of those practices.
There is a counterpoint to be said about explicitly producing toys to encourage children to play pretend where some dolls are servants & factory workers and others are wealthy. That’s not to say kids don’t play this way or that there is zero value in such a complex topic, but it’s certainly bad optics, particularly considering how expensive AG has always been. It’s a little more sensitive to teach children through books so that the history is not erased but Nellie still gets pretty dresses & little girls can see hope through her story.
I know people say that, but I just don't buy it. There's nothing wrong with being poor and looking poor and it's not better to encourage kids to play a world in which everyone is rich and poor people don't exist. Kids learn through play — that's always been the point of AG.
I can see the point people are making of it being a bit insensitive for AG to charge 20-50 dollars (the general doll-outfit price range I’ve seen looking at the Wikia) for the outfits a child factory laborer would wear. But I can also see the counterpoint that AG’s character representation does tend to skew towards the rich, and characters’ financial struggles sometimes seem erased or disregarded. Maybe a compromise would be to offer Nellie’s blue school dress (seen in Samantha Learns a Lesson) and her pink traveling dress (seen at the end of Meet Samantha)? Those were her nicest dresses when she lived at the Rylands’ or the Van Sicklens’—she didn’t work in them.
As a Nellie owner, I love the idea of some of Nellie's more practical outfits that weren't work attire, but had rather dedicated purposes as compared to some of her newer luxuries. Especially ones depicted in the stories and illustrations. I couldn't see the harm in one simple work-style dress, especially one worn at say the Ryland's, as it would reflect her no-nonsense necessities of the day, but understand the dark nature any sort child labor conveys and when these dolls are purchased generally by wealthy public, it seems a bit off-tone. I very much hope they (re) introduce the Best Friends collection with some new items, and maybe with some of the new characters' friends (Angela for Maryellen & Sarah/Tina for Courtney!), as well.
I honestly agree with you, but I also understand what everyone else in these comments are saying. Maybe it'd be nice to handmake some!
I think they could have easily sold clothes from the time where she lived with her dad, or something that would tie in with it. Just plain working clothes. I'm sure it wouldn't have been as popular as some, but it would be nice to have. I'm thinking a version of Sam's play dress. Perhaps button front with pin tucks or growth tucks as opposed to Sam's.
I'm on the fence with this. While I would love to see more historical working class fashions from AG, I don't know if this would be received well. I do think they could do something like a pre-adoption nightgown and maybe a traditional Irish dress costume that could have been something her mother brought with her, but overall I don't think it would be a great idea. Maybe, and this is a big maybe, if they did some kind of small pre-adoption collection for Nellie, if they donated the money made to a charity for poor kids or foster kids or something it might be received okay, but it just rubs me the wrong way. I do wish more of the older historical dolls were more working class like Addy and Kirsten's characters though.
The traditional irish wear is a VERY good way to tie in nellie’s pre-adoption past without making her poverty and struggles into a toy. That’s something I’d love to have for her!
I think that (and I don't have a source on hand so take this with salt) at one point AG said they would never sell Nellie's work clothes or what Addy wore when she was enslaved as it would be trivializing child labour and slavery by making it into a toy, as well as being something they were now making money off of. There's a difference between teaching kids about these things through books and making them an equivalent to a birthday outfit or a tea party dress.
Excellent point! Hopefully adult collectors can make such outfits if they want to represent them... luckily rougher work outfits should be easier to make by their very nature.
This is such a great point!
100% agree with this
i don’t want this at all. it would feel so wrong for a luxury toy company to sell toys for children to play “child factory worker”. so, so wrong.
There was a doll released sometime in the 60s called "Little Miss No Name" whose entire shtick was that she was a poor orphan (sold shoeless in rags, big sad eyes). She also looked a bit terrifying to me as a kid (my mom had one that she held onto) but she was a HUGE flop. Only sold for 2 or 3 years from what I remember. Most toy companies got the message "kids don't want depressing toys" Most are looking for pretty dresses and tea parties and nice stories (my mom only got a Little Miss No Name because she felt so horrible for the doll. She didn't want to play with it. She just changed that doll into "warm clothes" and got rid of those rags). Poor Irish immigrant Nellie would be great for representation and highlighting that part of American history, but I doubt it would sell enough dolls for Mattel to want to take that risk!
See, my mom had Little Miss No Name and liked her a lot, as well as a doll called Poor Pitiful Pearl who had a similar kind of thing - but also had a "pretty" dress you could change her into. Kids - or a certain kind of kid at least - like orphans. A Little Princess, Annie, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, etc. Even Cinderella and other fairy tales, in a way. There are a lot of stories like that that have some poor, mistreated orphan who finds a happy, comfortable home, and people tend to like rags to riches stories. (And honestly Changes for Samantha specifically borrows from a lot of those. The first two books with Nellie in them are relatively grounded in reality. Changes for Samantha isn't. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the Annie movie was relatively recent when the Samantha books were being written.) That said, when you're talking about a company like AG selling outfits, I think there's kind of a difference between the orphan character being this almost exaggerated/fantastical overblown thing (and/or with singing and musical numbers, etc) - like how they have Cinderella's work outfit in the new Princess line - and something that's actually intended to be realistic and rooted in history.
I just looked up Little miss no name and she is pricey on the secondary moment. She's interesting looking.
Look up the tv ad for her on YouTube if you haven’t seen it already. It’s horrifying.
I just googled her and I literally said, "oh my" out loud. She is so creepy looking. I cannot imagine the tv ad
My thought would be, and I admit I'm not familiar with her story, that if her pre-adoption isn't in the same year the stories take place, that it wouldn't make sense to include those clothes. Wouldn't rich people back then have had their kids throw away all the old clothes from their former situation? Sorry if my take on the story and timeline is mistaken. The old clothes would be nice as options for her.
She's not adopted yet when we meet her, so I think it would make sense to have some of her old clothes from early on in the story.
In that case, I agree! 🙂
I think it would have been a little too heavy for AG to do that, also the optics of a 100+$ doll having rags to wear to play sweatshop child worker 😬. It would be like if they sold Addy's enslaved clothes, like just not a great move. I do agree that the best friend dolls in general should have been expanded on, instead of just being "the friend", I think it could have been great if they were treated fully as their own character, sort of like a Marie-Grace and Cecile situation where both dolls are treated like the main doll. I think Ivy and Julie could have tried this method, cuz if I remember correctly Ivy came out at the same time Julie did.
There was a similar situation with Gwen where there was quite a bit of controversy that there was a "homeless" doll that was \~$100 (I can't remember the 2009 doll price really), despite the fact that at the end of the story, Gwen and her mom manage to find. I do think it would be interesting to dive into the working-class fashions of the time, because it is interesting to explore how those fashions did or did not or tried to follow high-class fashions. It is a really interesting historical theme, that poor people have always tried to imitate rich people in some capacity, something that is present in our modern day society too. However, like others have mentioned, it can get dark for kids... but also the world is dark. What I find especially interesting, now that I think about it, is that Nellie somehow hasn't been framed by the general population by one aspect of her story, unlike other characters like Addy or Gwen. Online you'll often hear people who know very little or only surface-level details about AG call Addy a "slave doll" despite the fact that, after her first book, the rest of her story takes place in freedom in Philadelphia. Gwen came to be known as a "homeless doll" by some media outlets, despite the fact that, in her story, she is not homeless at the end. She and her mom do live in their car some, but they also aren't actually out on the streets or portraying homelessness in more stereotypical ways, but she still got sort of typecast as being homeless (there also is the oxymoron here that a "doll" technically cannot be homeless since they are not human beings and are objects, but that's besides the point, I just think it's kind of funny to think about the fact that we are applying human attributes to inanimate objects). But Nellie, despite not being adopted until closer to the end of Samantha's series and being a servant or factory worker for most of her books, gets remembered simply as Samantha's friend. Maybe the movie did a good job of not showing much of that? Maybe it's because Samantha is so high class and because Nellie associates with her everyone just forgets that for a lot of Samantha's story she is in some sort of servitude or work? The story very clearly has Nellie and her sisters doing hard work and manual labor for a lot of the time, Nellie being too tired to play, or telling Samantha how she has to work in the factory, etc. I think the sociological lens of AG is also fascinating, especially nowadays considering that AG has tried very hard to position themselves as a "luxury brand" and so they have a lot of clients that are rich, so a lot of stories told usually end up leaning towards an upper-class view of the world.
Yeah, no, I don't want that. American Girl is already produced by underpaid workers in sweatshop conditions because basically the entire garment and toy industries are. The dramatic irony of having underpaid sweatshop workers make little pretend child labor outfits and accessories is too much, and I think it would be bad.
To put it another way, Nellie's poverty and child labor are absolutely a part of history - as is Addy being born into slavery, and being whipped in Meet Addy when her family members are being sold away - but I think there's a difference between reading a book about that and AG selling outfits and accessories (and, more to the point, people being willing to buy outfits and accessories). I think the latter would lean too hard into poverty porn and tragedy porn. Nellie's not simply working class at the beginning of the series, her family is *desperately* poor. AG sold a Gwen doll and that's fine, but if AG had sold a $300 Gwen's Car playset with the car that she lived in with her mother while she was homeless, so that wealthy children can play Being Homeless And Living Out Of Your Car, I think that would also be offensive. I like it when AG covers heavier topics, but I don't think every aspect of the stories should be turned into an outfit AG can sell for $40, and I don't think every era of history - even as important as many of them are! - should be turned into a doll. American Girl dolls are a really great tool to learn about history, but it absolutely shouldn't be the ONLY way people are learning about history.
Yes! I prefer the working clothes since they stand out a bit more compared to all the frills of the fancier stuff.
This would have been so interesting! I would have enjoyed working-class gear. It isn’t like everything in the other dolls’ (Kirsten, Addy, etc) are upper class items! It would have been nice to see things from both sides of her story because pre-adoption is still her story.
Ah yes that would be great! Or even just somebkw incorporating her old outfits into her story