![]() In the second half of the 20th century, Barbie and her myriad career (and sartorial) options provided girls with alternative aspirations, while action figures offered boys a socially acceptable way to play with dolls. In the early 20th century, right around the time that women were increasingly leaving the home and entering the workplace, infant dolls became more popular, inducting young girls into a cult of maternal domesticity. Dolls also have an instructional function, often reinforcing gender norms and social behavior: Through the 18 th and 19 th century, dressing up dolls gave little girls the opportunity to learn to sew or knit Hogan says girls also used to act out social interactions with their dolls, not only the classic tea parties, but also more complicated social rituals such as funerals as well. In turn, dolls’ faces took on a more cherubic, angelic look. For example, she says, by the end of the 19th century, many parents no longer saw their children as unfinished adults, but rather regarded childhood as a time of innocence that ought to be protected. “I think there is quite a tradition of using dolls to reflect cultural values and how we see children or who we wish them to be,” says Patricia Hogan, curator at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, and associate editor of the American Journal of Play. And by virtue of the fact that dolls are people in miniature, unanimated by their own emotions, it’s easy for a society to project whatever it wanted on to them: Just as much as they could be made out of anything, they could be made into anything. ![]() Over millennia, toy dolls crossed continents and social strata, were made from sticks and rags, porcelain and vinyl, and have been found in the hands of children everywhere. SEE ALSO: Read about the history and psychology of scary clownsĭolls have been a part of human play for thousands of years – in 2004, a 4,000-year-old stone doll was unearthed in an archeological dig on the Mediterranean island of Pantelleria the British Museum has several examples of ancient Egyptian rag dolls, made of papyrus-stuffed linen. And that is a different emotional state all together. Dolls – and it must be said, not all dolls – don’t really frighten people so much as they “creep” them out. Most people come down laughing and saying, ‘I hated that last room, that was terrible,’” Hoyt says. “I think people just dismiss them, ‘Oh, I’m scared of dolls’, almost humorously – ‘I can’t look at those, I hate them,’ laughingly, jokingly. But most of the people made uncomfortable by the doll room at Pollock’s Toy Museum probably don’t suffer from pediophobia so much as an easy-to-laugh-off, often culturally reinforced, unease. “It’s like you’d think they’ve gone through a haunted house… It’s not a great way to end their visit to the Pollock’s Toy Museum,” he says, laughing, “because anything else that they would have seen that would have been charming and wonderful is totally gone now.”Ī fear of dolls does have a proper name, pediophobia, classified under the broader fear of humanoid figures ( automatonophobia) and related to pupaphobia, a fear of puppets. And it happens more often during the winter, when the sun goes down early and the rooms are a bit darker. He says it’s usually adults, not children, who can’t handle the dolls. “It just freaks them out,” says Ken Hoyt, who has worked at the museum for more than seven years. Some visitors to the museum, however, can’t manage the doll room, which is the last room before the museum’s exit instead, they trek all the way back to the museum’s entrance, rather than go through. One glassed-off nook of a room is crammed with porcelain-faced dolls in 19th-century clothing, sitting in vintage model carriages and propped up in wrought iron bedsteads, as if in a miniaturized, overcrowded Victorian orphanage. Skinny Dutch wooden dolls from the end of the 19th century, dolls in “traditional” Japanese or Chinese dress. ![]() Dolls with cheery countenances, dolls with stern expressions. One-hundred-and-fifty-year-old Victorian dolls, rare dolls with wax faces. Dolls with porcelain faces, with “true-to-life” painted ragdoll faces, with mops of real hair atop their heads, with no hair at all. Dolls with “sleepy eyes”, with staring, glass eyes. Its small rooms house a large, haphazard collection of antique and vintage toys – tin cars and trains board games from the 1920s figures of animals and people in wood, plastic, lead paint-chipped and faintly dangerous-looking rocking horses stuffed teddy bears from the early 20 th century even – purportedly – a 4,000 year old mouse fashioned from Nile clay.Īnd dolls. Pollock’s Toy Museum is one of London’s loveliest small museums, a creaking Dickensian warren of wooden floors, low ceilings, threadbare carpets, and steep, winding stairs, housed in two connected townhouses.
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