No material used in subsequent years has matched this mimetic capacity, and perhaps this led to the return of bisque dolls as ornaments of girls’ lives in the 1980s. The illusionistic potential of bisque was apparent in even in relatively cheap models, giving it a popularity that more than compensated for its capacity to shatter. Celluloid dolls were also produced around 1900. Like all early plastic items, they closely imitated more expensive and highly regarded materials; thus these plastic dolls, which resembled bisque dolls, were fixed to kid leather or jointed composition bodies as were bisque heads.

These German dolls were generally fashioned as images of little girls, frequently bearing a solemn, calm expression and a slightly slimmer, longer figure than was the norm for later dolls. The most favored body type was the ball-jointed composition and wood strung with elastic. Thus these dolls were both more fragile and far more flexible than typical dolls later in the century. The majority of these dolls came from two cities in east central Germany. The trade was split roughly into two parts: Sonneberg was known for the ordinary but thoroughly acceptable grade of doll, and Waltershausern produced the more expensive models, although Sonneberg also exported a small number of extremely fine dolls. The general quality level of the Sonneberg dolls is far superior to the cheap plastic dolls produced in the second half of the twentieth century. Although assembly and shipping were concentrated in factories, the majority of steps needed to complete a doll, including the modeling of individual components and limbs, wig making, shoe making, and box construction, were broken down into small segments and performed by thousands of home-based workers living around the main centers, who brought their items to a central factory and received pay and materials for the next week’s work.

Porcelain head making required kilns and heavy equipment, and so it was generally concentrated in the factories. Doll production was engaged in by all family members to maximize the income stream. The sad irony that German doll producers employed girls who were the same age as the girls in othercountries who played with the exported dolls did not go unnoted in the press at the turn of the century. Even children nominally enrolled in public schools worked after hours on doll production. The trade was international in its scope, and prior to about 1940 most girls born into families from the prosperous end of the working class and higher in any urban center around the world, race and cultural context notwithstanding, owned at least one German bisque doll.

There were smaller numbers of bisque dolls made in other countries, including the United States, but most notably France, which had supported a luxury doll industry over the previous half-century. By around 1900 this industry was in serious decline due to German companies’ ability to provide product of solid quality at much lower price. The French dolls’ personae were elegant and overtly sensuous-even ecstatic-in expression, foreshadowing the imbrication of dolls and sexuality often attributed to Barbie and, more recently, Bratz, and blurring the adult/child boundary. The French doll look also predated the melding of provocative sophistication of grooming with children’s physical proportions exemplified by the child beauty pageant queen by about a century, albeit in a far less tawdry context. This precedent may not excuse these sexualized, “prostitot” representations, but it does suggest that these cultural idioms have a far longer history in narratives of taste and styling than is usually assumed and are not expressions specific to late American capitalism.

The first significant change in the market was the appearance of baby and character dolls by around 1910. The character doll was modeled to express a certain emotion, from pensiveness to glee, depending upon the model. Some were actual portraits of living children, including relatives of the dollmakers and celebrities such as Princess Juliana of the Netherlands. On occasion notable sculptors, such as Levin-Funke, created the face model, and the design was publicly credited to them. The baby doll made its first substantial impact on the market at this time and reflected the gender roles that were standard in modern industrial-military states.

An urban myth claims that one doll is the portrait of a member of the German imperial family, although accounts differ as to which one, with the candidates spanning three generations. This so-called Kaiser Baby was among the most popular of the character dolls, while the sweet-faced My Dream Baby perhaps was the longest-surviving, widely produced throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Kammer and Reinhardt’s mold 126 also established a doll type that remains highly visible 80 years later, that of a laughing, chubby baby or toddler (depending on the body configuration). A similar product is now produced in plastic rather than bisque, but the persona is identical. World War I prompted a major upheaval and shift of power in the doll world. German doll products became harder to find in 1914-1916, although dolls were still being produced as a major source of foreign income from neutral countries, often in the face of extreme supply shortages (dolls’ eyelashes were made of sewing cotton rather than bristle or sable, for example). With the entry of the United States into the war in 1917, new German dolls became impossible to obtain. The United States came to the forefront as a new site for the mass production of dolls and there were dramatic changes to the formats available.

U.S. doll makers preferred unbreakable materials and favored a chubby toddlerinfant form with simplified jointing and hair and eye detailing. Many dolls had cloth toddler bodies with swinging legs that gave the effect of walking when the doll was swung from side to side. Other dolls from the United States referenced early newspaper comics characters such as the Yellow Kid and the Katzenjammer Kids. They featured the exaggerated shapes and characterizations of these cartoon characters. France, Italy, South Africa, and Australia also were forced to make substitute products during the war. North American dollmakers’ chosen formats also were more in keeping than were European doll formats with changes in the cultural placement of dolls. The emerging disciplines of psychiatry and psychology made pronouncements upon dolls and endorsed dolls that were unbreakable and allowed for hands-on training in “mothering” activities, such as washing and feeding. Rubber and celluloid were now seen as more suitable for doll production than porcelain as they allowed for practical mothering activities in play.

Advertisements for dolls in 1920s North America offered quasi-psychological literature to assist adult buyers in making the correct doll purchase. One advertisement suggested that the baby doll was an antidote to “race suicide” (Peers 2005), a reference to Oswald Spengler’s theories about the growing power of inferior races with higher birth rates over whites. According to pseudo-scientific discourse, the white races were also being depopulated by selfish feminists refusing to have babies. This change in doll usage reflected middle-class women’s changing roles in the home after the war, when servants for housekeeping and child rearing duties were less affordable than in the early 1900s, and domestic drudgery was therefore represented as essential rather than as insulting to the female image. As dolls were becoming closely identified with medicalized norms of girls’ behavior, many adult doll-type products began production in the 1920s and 1930s. Some of these, such as the Lenci felt dolls from Italy, crossed over from adult mascot or living room decorations into the realm of children’s toys.

Others-such as the pincushion dolls and porcelain dolls in the shape of hair tidies, bookends, perfume bottles, vases, powder bowls, powderpuffs, lamp bases and face brooches-would have been familiar items to the younger teen at least in their personal home environment and their mother’s room, if not standing on the girl’s dressing table or decorating her bedroom. During the 1920s, it was trendy for adult women to carry dolls in public, especially in urban areas, as a fashion accessory, and perfume flasks, purses and handbags were produced with doll or teddy bear faces. The Nancy Ann Story Book Company of California produced small dolls in series that encouraged young girls to collect the whole set. The Nancy Ann dolls crossed over from the younger play audience to a young adult audience, who regarded them as mascots and ornaments. Because the Nancy Ann dolls were extremely popular, the company had to switch to locally produced dolls when the supply sources in Axis countries became unavailable during World War II.

German bisque dolls continued to be produced into the war years, and the industry remained a crucially important one to the national economies of the Second and Third Reichs as well as the Weimar Republic. The doll trade halted due not to lack of infrastructure, but to lack of manpower because of military conscription. Despite popular belief, the doll factories were neither bombed by the Allies nor substantially looted by the Russians for plant and equipment in the postwar years. Only after the post-1989 reunification were the production lines stripped and the buildings razed for property speculation and other newly arisen opportunities for short-term capital gain, and only then was the capacity for doll production rendered apparently unfeasible. There is a persistent myth that some factories resumed production-even during the Eastern bloc years-with their output directed to the adult collector market, not to girls, which now floods eBay and antique auctions and fairs in the United States and elsewhere.

As these items are sold as “antiques,” their corporate and craft network origins are generally denied, with the products claimed to have emerged from pre-World War II “hidden storehouses.” Thus the seemingly irrelevant child’s doll has become part of the complex, unstable experience of the Eastern bloc’s adaptation to capitalist processes and values. If the old doll factories were manufacturing “antiques” for cash-laden United States buyers, then the doll played its part in economically supporting the East German state, just as it did the previous German regimes. Likewise, the extensive cultural and economic capital contributions of the doll and toys generally to the United States throughout the middle and late twentieth century should not be overlooked.

During World War II, dolls in military dress reflected the times and notably included the new female service personnel. In the United States dolls again performed functions in adult as well as in play cultures as they featured prominently in domestic “shrines” to service personnel on active duty overseas, serving as a more tangible, three-dimensional touchstone to the absent relative than a photograph. Paper dolls became popular due to wartime shortages of materials. Just as in the Depression when their price made paper dolls the only dolls that poorer families could afford for their daughters, they were often the only new doll product that was freely available. In both Allied and Axis countries, older nineteenth-century porcelain dolls, with or without fashionable makeovers such as shorter haircuts and modern dress, were given to girls as compensation for the lack of new product or the limitations on purchases due to rationing. Small dolls also were used as good-luck mascots to protect against injury, as they had in the previous world war by both civilians and combatants. In World War II such dolls as well as teddy bears were favored by pilots and rode in many a warplane.