Why I'm Reading the Original American Girl Books to my Sons
Virtue knows no sex (even when the manifestation of it does).
#Boymom is a natural fit for me. In many ways, I was a tomboy growing up. But not when it came to books.
So, with four sons and no daughters, I have to pick spots to introduce my own literary favorites wisely. (To my great chagrin, Marguerite de Angeli’s Thee Hannah was met with blank stares: The central tension over what dresses the protagonist, a 19th century Quaker girl in Philadelphia, could and could not wear held zero interest for my listenership, leaving the story essentially bereft of any plot or narrative tension).
But American Girl has been something else. About two years ago, I read several of the original series to my oldest two sons. This year, we started them over and added son number three.
I am coming, once again, to appreciate anew how the books subtly and clearly militate toward adulthood. That is, toward an aspirational, Tocquevillian understanding of American womanhood as possessing uncommon reason, courage, strength, and firmness.
Which is, not coincidentally, exactly the kind of manhood that my husband and I want our sons to inhabit.
I want them to have a countercultural, mature reality principle sufficient to recognize that, no, the average man and the average woman are not typically disposed or called to exhibit courage, strength, and firmness in exactly the same ways. (I have some different thoughts on what I would argue is the more strictly unisex imperative of reason, which I will save for another day).
Equally importantly, though, I want my boys to grow into mature humility and grace sufficient to expect that, yes, the average man and the average woman are disposed and called to exhibit courage, strength, and firmness in the same amounts.
So below is an essay, lightly updated, that I originally published at FemCatholic, extolling the virtues of the original American Girl stories (for boys as much as for girls).
For nearly twenty-five years, my well-worn copies of the original American Girl books sat untouched on bookshelves at my parents’ house. Sometimes, when the beloved old books caught my eye, I imagined reading them again one day, with my future daughter. The flaw in that plan: I now have four children, and none of them are girls.
But it turns out that my typical, sports-and-fighting-obsessed boys are riveted by these “girl stories.” This delights me, and not just because I love the stories, too.
As I read through the books again, I see that they are not only good in themselves, but also bulwarks against both an undue focus on the myopic lens of the present to look at the past and an undue focus on the monolithic lens of identity to look at each person (past and present).
Too often, we assume that girls and women were, long before our own existence, so primitive or so oppressed that their lives contain no active lessons for our own. To the limited extent that we engage history at all, it becomes a blur of dates and events that can be hard to relate to emotionally, even if we understand them intellectually. But it is important for kids to understand that the colonial boycott on tea or the underground railroad are not just definitions to memorize, but rather the backdrops against which children just like them had their own wants, needs, and agendas.
Kirsten, a Swedish immigrant, misses the rag doll that her family had to leave in town for many months, even as she shares her family’s broader concerns about winterizing the farm and surviving the season.
Addy, an escapee from ante-bellum slavery, alights in my family’s own Philadelphia and experiences the trials and joys of learning to read alongside rank injustices, including Northern racism and the continued enslavement of family members remaining in the South.
Identifying with the peaks and valleys in these heroines’ personal stories and their character development as they grow up teaches young readers that, while historical context changes, the human condition (in God’s image, and also fallen) is eternal.
For my sons, the books are also a lesson in the understanding that girls have just as much interiority – that is, just as much to offer, and just as much room to grow – as boys do.
Each American Girl story takes girlhood and femininity for granted. Each story centers the thoughts, feelings, and virtues of girls that are so busy living full lives that they never pause to consider their relationship to their femininity, nor to harp on it. Their girlhood just is; it is not experienced as either a presumptive limitation or a presumptive strength – because they, just like my sons, are individuals first.
Each girl has her own virtues and flaws, and is learning to demonstrate strength, regard for others, and responsibility of exactly the kind that my husband and I are trying to instill in our boys. We want them to understand that those virtues – while they may often be manifested differently by women than by men – are not gendered.
I consider it unfortunate that American Girl started making “Truly Me” dolls and publishing the accompanying books in more recent years. Of course, the point is for each child to identify with a girl that shares her own era, not to mention her hair color, skin tone, style, and so forth. But the whole point of the original American Girls was that a shared identity as an American girl (not to mention as a human being) was constitutive of all individual identities.
My sons are not even American girls, since they are boys. They are certainly not Swedish immigrants or Victorian heiresses. Yet, as they listen to these stories (as to all others), they assume empathy and identification, not the absence thereof. I pray that continues, and that they will be stronger and better men for it.
We already assume that worthwhile stories about boys belong to everyone. As I read the American Girl books to my sons, I hope they are learning that worthwhile stories about girls are their stories, too.