Meet Samantha Parkington. She's a 9-year-old orphan living with her wealthy grandmother in the fictional town of Mount Bedford, N.Y., in 1904.
And her hair is a mess.
Emily Friedrichsen, a stylist at the American Girl salon in New York City, buckles Samantha into a magenta-colored, doll-sized salon chair, affixes a pink cape around her neck, tilts her back and gets to work.
"Before brushing your doll's hair, always make sure that you spray some water," says Amanda Holder, another stylist. "No water into the eyes, OK? And then we start brushing the hair from the bottom, the middle and then the top."
Samantha Parkington is, of course, both a children's book character and a doll — one of the most popular American Girl dolls sold in the 1990s. My Samantha doll arrived on my birthday dressed in a checked taffeta dress with a velvety pink purse, a pair of black Mary Jane shoes, a golden locket and a big bow in her shiny, brown synthetic hair.
After declaring her tangle-free, Friedrichsen turns to Samantha's bangs, which after many years of brushing, have stretched out a bit. "She can't quite see right now," Friedrichsen laughs. "So let's take care of that." Friedrichsen picks up some scissors — "Do you mind if we give her bangs a little trim? Is that OK?"
In the salon chair next to my Samantha doll is another, newer, Samantha, with her hair up in clips. Holder is using a tail comb to recurl her hair — "or you can use a crayon or a pencil" — before braiding and styling it into a twist.
The other Samantha belongs to author Fiona Davis, who was asked to write a historical fiction book for adults about Samantha Parkington to mark American Girl's 40th anniversary. It's called Samantha: The Next Chapter. "I got my doll soon after I got the job," Davis says. "She watched over my shoulder as I typed." Davis is the author of several other novels set in New York, including The Stolen Queen and The Lions of Fifth Avenue.
"In the [Samantha] book, she's 25 in 1920, and she learns that her grandmother's inheritance has been stolen," Davis says. "She basically goes from socialite to shopgirl overnight. And in her quest to find out what happened to it, it takes her to these glamorous nightclubs and to the headquarters of criminal empires."
In the café downstairs from the salon, Davis, who's 59, says that while she didn't grow up with an American Girl doll, she knew about the character from her niece.
"She explained to me that because the doll came with these stories, when you had a doll, it wasn't just playing with the doll. You became the doll," Davis says. "[My niece] talked about how she was very shy when she was a young girl and by becoming Samantha, who is a very tenacious young girl in all those stories, she was able to adopt those characteristics as well." Plus, Davis says, it made her niece a big history nerd, "which, of course, I appreciate." To write Samantha's next chapter, Davis did what she does with all her books — and dove headfirst into Samantha's history.
A marketing machine
Pleasant Rowland launched Pleasant Company with three dolls — Samantha, Molly and Kirsten — in 1986. Her vision was a series of books and dolls "for girls about girls." It became an empire — a catalog, a magazine, a book about puberty called The Care and Keeping of You, plus stores and movies. Today, about one American Girl doll is sold every minute, according to the company.
"Pleasant Rowland is beyond brilliant," says Amanda FitzSimons, author of the new nonfiction book An American Girl: How a Billion-Dollar Doll and Its Unlikely Founder Changed Girlhood Forever. She says Rowland understood something that almost no one else in the toy industry did, "which is that girls that are between the ages of, like, 7 and 12, they want to feel important and they want to feel catered to, and there wasn't a whole lot out there that was doing that." In fact, FitzSimons says, a lot of marketers at that time were trying to make girls feel older. Rowland, she adds, "met them exactly where they were."
Each doll came with a story, which took place over six illustrated, middle-grade books. "The idea was that, you know, I'm looking at this girl and she's going through a lot of the same things I am," FitzSimons says, "and if this girl is interesting enough to write about and to learn about, then I'm interesting enough too."
Maxine Rose Schur wrote one of those original chapter books — Samantha's Surprise: A Christmas Story. "I did a lot of research in those days about Victorian Christmas — how people would decorate their homes, how they would celebrate," says Schur. She got a rough outline of the characters from Rowland but says it was up to her to add in the details.
"At that time in my life, I was watching the BBC show Upstairs, Downstairs," Schur explains. "There's a very cranky cook — I think her name was Mrs. Bridges — I kind of fashioned the cook in Samantha's Surprise a little bit after Mrs. Bridges. So, I had a lot of fun with it."
There was also a "Look Back" or a "Peek into History" at the end of each book. Readers of Samantha's series, for example, could learn more about the suffragist movement, the role of household servants in 1904 or then-President Theodore Roosevelt's work adding land to America's national forests.
The first Pleasant Company catalog launched on Sept. 15, 1986. Two months later, FitzSimons writes in her book, the first 110,000-print run of the chapter books had sold out. Two years later, the company's annual revenue was $17 million. Part of the early success of the American Girl brand was timing — in 1987, Congress declared March Women's History Month — but Rowland was also the daughter of an advertising executive and she knew what she was doing.
"Pleasant wanted to create little toys and auxiliary materials that could be sold to complement the sale of the book and the doll," says Schur, who remembers intentionally writing ideas for accessories into Samantha's Surprise. "A certain type of little handkerchief or a little music box or other things that could be duplicated in a kind of Victorian fashion and sold."
FitzSimons says Rowland and American Girl were positioning their dolls as the anti-Barbie. "She was also marketing to parents," FitzSimons says. Nothing was pink or plastic. Samantha's table and chair set was real wicker. Her ivory tablecloth was trimmed with Battenberg lace. Her lemonade goblets — not cups — were made by a family-owned glassware company in Ohio. "The idea was really that these were things of quality for your children," FitzSimons explains. "This was an investment."
Expanding the collection
But the scope of the history covered in the American Girl books was limited, for the most part, to white, Christian, middle- to upper-class America, FitzSimons notes. In 1993, the company tried to rectify that lineup with Addy Walker, the company's first nonwhite doll, whose backstory was that she was an enslaved person who escaped to freedom in 1864.
Aisha Harris begged for an Addy doll that Christmas. "It was so cool to have this doll who kind of looked like me," she says. She remembers that Addy's hair, unlike that of a lot of the other Black dolls she played with, actually felt like her own hair. "It was kind of coarse and not as straight," Harris says.
Harris is co-host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour and the author of the 2016 Slate essay "The Making of an American Girl." She says that Addy Walker's historical background was meaningful and that she appreciated that the doll was a fully realized and researched character. Pleasant Company convened an advisory board for the doll that included Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.
"There's a great detail about, like, making sure that she had sort of a space between her teeth, like a gap between her teeth, because that's common for certain cultures, especially if you're coming from western Africa," Harris explains.
The problem, Harris writes in her essay, is that for nearly two decades, Addy was the only Black doll to choose from. "It's a very heavy burden to carry," she says. "Why is she the only? Why is she the only enslaved person? And why is this the only representation that I have from this company?"
Today, there are more than 50 characters in the American Girl brand, which is now owned by Mattel. They come from all different backgrounds.
According to market research company Circana, adult-only households made up 55% of toy sales in the first half of this year. Deena Taylor, senior director of global brand marketing for American Girl, says today, in addition to marketing to kids, the company is also trying to tap into that intangible, priceless quality: nostalgia. "Millennials right now, we're in that spot of, you know, wanting that familiarity of what we grew up with," Taylor says.
Millennials like me. I'm part of that generation of American Girl fans who have grown up. Who stored her doll in her mom's basement, waiting to pass her on to the next generation. Maxine Rose Schur, who wrote part of Samantha's original story, says she never previously considered what Samantha might be like as an adult. But, Schur says, "I hope she marches for women's suffrage. I think she's a feisty girl, so I don't see her as taking a back seat to a man, for example. I hope not."
No big spoilers for Samantha: The Next Chapter, but in a way, it picks up right where we left Samantha in the sixth and final book in her original series. At the end of Changes for Samantha, she attends a rally with her aunt Cornelia, a suffragist. Fifteen years later, in 1920, the 19th Amendment has just been ratified. In the very first pages of Fiona Davis' new book, we meet Samantha and her aunt discussing how they can best assist the League of Women Voters.
Davis promises that adult Samantha will be recognizable to longtime fans, but new and exciting adventures are ahead for her too. "It's fun that she's not frozen in time. She's not in amber and, you know, fossilized," Davis says. "She's out there living her life just as her readers are. And what I wanted it to be is like you were taking a long journey with an old friend but going somewhere new."
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