Toys for Girls?
As I was photographing my vintage toys (I guess I am old enough for my toys to classify as vintage) I inevitably thought about how much playthings have changed. Particularly, they way we think about gendered toys.
I compared my toys, with my daughter’s and my mom’s. How the message they conveyed to us, three generations of women, is so different.
My late mom was a kid in the 40’s and early 50’s, her favorite thing was her doll, a Madame Alexander. She spent hours playing with her, doing her hair and above all, making her clothes with her second favorite toy, a sewing machine. There were a lot more dolls besides this one and with many dolls, there were a lot of tea parties. My mom did become a fabulous seamstress and knitter, but as I see her doll with all her dresses I can’t help but think how predetermined the roll for her was as a woman.
Her brothers, of course, had an epic train set. Personally I prefer the train to the dolls, hands down.
I think that being a kid in the 70’s meant we were the transition generation to a new way of doing things thanks to the feminists of the 60’s and 70’s. Even my mom, traditional in so many ways, had her own business: selling flower arrangements.
Seeing my toys tells me so. I did not play with dolls, mostly because I preferred soft plushies and I disliked plastic things, somehow I knew early that plastic was bad for the Earth. My plushies were colorful, sometimes weird, like Manolo the redhead my grandma crochet for me. With them I played school but I also put them on a blanket that I pretended was the Millennium Falcon and we soared through the galaxies.
Sometimes we had tea, but mostly I made cakes in my Easy Oven or pizzas in a similar oven. While cooking used to be a girl’s toy, I recall some boys really loving these cooking devices. I also played that I had a cooking TV show where most of my recipes were made of mud and botanicals from the garden.
Eventhough Lego already existed, I don’t recall it being available in Mexico. Instead I had a made in Mexico, Castillo Exin, a huge medieval castle playset with beige bricks with deadly corners. That and my wooden blocks.
My mom tried to push dolls on me with no luck. She gave me a Juanita Perez, a Mexican precursor of American Girl, and would bring me to the boutique to buy her dresses. To her disappointment, I was just not interested. My dad, who raced cars in the 70’s, brought an Scalextric, race track playset one year. That was, by far, more popular than any doll or girly toy.
Nowadays, I see toys in a different way. I see them as extensions of a kid imagination, as props for storytelling and roll playing. I am happy to see that any kid, regardless of gender identification, is increasingly able to play with whatever they feel like playing with. My daughter’s favorite toys: her legos, her plushies and a train we set up every December along with wooden blocks and Lego towns (plus art materials, like me). She has an American Girl but was much more interested in Calico Critters with all their little play sets.
Granted, some girls will always prefer a doll and some boys a truck, but now they may also have a bunch of gender-neutral toys. And I strongly believe a good cardboard box will always be a great toy.
The toy arrangement photos Mom’s Doll, Tea Sets and My Plushies on this post are available as art prints.
For inquiries, please email me ana@analovescolor
©Ana Bianchi
