Like many ladies of my generation, I first learned about World War II from a plucky ten-year old girl living in suburban Illinois named Molly McIntire.
For dudes, and others who may have missed out on the glory of the American Girl dolls and books: Pleasant Rowling was a businesswoman and historian who founded the Pleasant Company in 1986 with the plan to teach different aspects of American history to little girls through character dolls and matching books. (She sold the company to Mattel in 1998, and it’s gotten a little more consumptive and less historic since.)
The original three dolls were Kirsten Larson, Samantha Parkington, and Molly McIntire representing 1854, 1904, and 1944 respectively. For all their fancy hair and piles of little clothing, these dolls were friends to be played with—neither baby dolls to be mothered nor scary-breasted fashion dolls to be aspired to, but solid play-dolls, modeled on the normal proportions of little girls. The books followed about a year in each girl’s life through an introductory book, a challenge at school, a Christmas, a birthday, a summer adventure, and then the closing book sent the girl off on a new adventure.
Each book came with different outfits and accessories so that, if financially feasible, you could dress the doll up for each of her ensuing adventures. My mother, being an amazing seamstress, made copies of the outfits for dolls we already owned so we skipped the official dolls and went straight for the books.
I remain in awe of all of the history that was woven into both in the stories themselves and in the “A Peek into the Past” section at the end of ever book. Truly, by high school when we got around to learning about immigration and Manifest Destiny, class inequality and labor conditions at the turn of the century, and the World War II homefront, I felt strangely prepared by these dollies. Because Molly was my particular favorite—I liked her argyle sweater and that she had grey eyes and brown hair like me—I absorbed more of her history than that of either Kirsten or Samantha.
What I learned later as history was just the normal shape of this story-book girl’s life. I knew what a Victory Garden was and about ration books and scrap metal drives and Rosie the Riveter and English kids shipped out of London before I knew about the Blitz or Hitler or Anne Frank. (Granted, it is a sanitized history: Molly is a white doll and doesn’t have an American girl pen-pal writing to her from internment camps.)
Molly’s was a life that seemed as if it should have felt shaped by absence, by lack. Her father is away in the army, the whole family is vaguely on tenterhooks as gold stars replace blue in their neighbors’ windows, the stern housekeeper—Gladys Gilford—feeds Molly and her mother and siblings on the unpleasant vegetables from their Victory Garden, and there is frequently talk of not having, not getting, of saving and of having to make do with this and do without that. Yet, her life was just her life. Perhaps that is what happens when History is telegraphed through the eyes of little girls—wartime is not battles and dates, but more often, slightly grumpy kids who miss their parents and eat cold turnips in between Halloween costumes and homework and head colds.
These necessary actions of daily life in wartime don’t come across as brave or patriotic, just the reality of what needed to be done. No character questions taking cars off the road to keep more rubber free for the war effort, for example.
When I heard President Obama mention universal, national childcare in the State of the Union address—referencing Molly’s WWII era as a time of national sacrifice and solutions—I wondered why we were once, as a nation, capable to living smaller in service to higher, communal challenges, and now we are driven so much more by individual gain, even as the world becomes more clearly connected.
The threats of today are not as clear-cut as Hitler, but culturally ingrained racism, sexism, and classism—to say nothing of climate change—are no less daunting. In so many arenas, we need a both a seismic and personal shift in how we are in this world. We need to, again, take cars off the road and plant Victory Gardens to mitigate climate change. We need to, again, instill national programs to provide quality childcare to allow both women and men of all colors the opportunity to pursue their professional and economic passions. We need to re-learn how to think not just for ourselves and our own, but for the greater good. We need to remember to see our daily actions as the vitally necessary drops in the larger bucket that they are. I don’t imagine that Sir Isaac Newton imagined his laws being translated into ecology and sociology, but every action, everywhere, does have an equal and opposite reaction. The question is, where do you want the reactions to your actions to pile up—remembering that inaction is an action itself, with as many ripples and repercussions as a bolder act.
My history, it is true, does come largely from childish picture books with happy endings. Molly’s dad comes home, as did both of my grandfathers. I could be accused to assuming that the simple solutions from those stories are sweetly imaginative and unequal to the challenges before us now as a people and a world. Yet, the responses and solutions of that era—put in place with aggressively effective propaganda and an up swelling of questionably nation-wide patriotism—worked. Gardens were planted, carpools organized, gasoline rationed, resources willfully limited, paradigms of the workplace shifted, personal sacrifices made for ideals, and voila, an enemy was vanquished.
Reading Molly, I learned the daily-life shape of solutions before I learned what the overarching problems were. This is the same—if we look backwards, solutions are there in storybooks and old propaganda posters and grandparents’ skills. Everything, including the courage needed to live these changed lives, is waiting in the past to remedy the problems before us now.
Bethany Taylor lives in New England, blogs and blogs at Granite Bunny and Hothouse Magazine, works as a farmer and a librarian, and generally tries to have a good time saving the world and writing about it.
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