Participation Type
Poster
Presentation #1 Title
Playing Grown-Up: Girls’ Toys and the Habitus of Housewifery at Coal Towns, 1910-1940
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Developments in manufacturing and distribution during the Consumer Revolution of the early 20th century placed myriad mass-produced household goods within the reach of middling American families. The consumer revolution strongly promoted gendered and racialized toys. Children were a booming new market sector in the 1920s and 1930s. Advertisers realized the potential of marketing gender-specific toys, which reinforced separate spheres of work and play for women and men. Boys’ toys favored science, sports, and tools, while girls’ toys were staggeringly domestic (Blaszczyk 2009), including elaborate replicas of cook stoves, cabinets, sewing machines, toy dishes, and laundry sets. Toy dishes were meant to be used in conjunction with white-skinned porcelain and plastic dolls in order to mimic bottle-feeding, crib care, and dinner and tea services during play, inculcating young girls into the proper etiquette and form for cooking and serving their families, as well as reinforcing whiteness as the American norm. I argue girls' toys taught proper infant care, a concern at the turn of the century, as medical reformers in Appalachia’s coalfields actively sought to reduce infant mortality by instructing mothers and young children in proper crib care and feeding (Barney 2000). Kitchen toys and dolls not only visibly courted the new child consumer, but prepared young girls for the challenges of housewifery and child-rearing. Toys were entangled in the constitution of gender through daily practice, the embodiment of increasingly stratified gendered divisions. Girls’ habitus (Bourdieu 1984), or bodily competence and social know-how, developed through domestic play. Archaeologically-recovered doll parts and toy ceramic dishes from the coal town of Jenkins, Kentucky are used to explore gender and race in the early 20th century through play, arguing toys were bound in the active construction of women as “naturally” domestic creatures during the Industrial Age, while simultaneously racializing the new woman consumer as “naturally” white.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Zada Komara is a full-time Lecturer at the University of Kentucky's Lewis Honors College. Her focus is historical archaeology in Central and Southern Appalachia, and her work explores the intersection of gender, race, class, and persistent stereotypes about the Appalachian region through household material culture in the early to mid-20th century.
Playing Grown-Up: Girls’ Toys and the Habitus of Housewifery at Coal Towns, 1910-1940
Developments in manufacturing and distribution during the Consumer Revolution of the early 20th century placed myriad mass-produced household goods within the reach of middling American families. The consumer revolution strongly promoted gendered and racialized toys. Children were a booming new market sector in the 1920s and 1930s. Advertisers realized the potential of marketing gender-specific toys, which reinforced separate spheres of work and play for women and men. Boys’ toys favored science, sports, and tools, while girls’ toys were staggeringly domestic (Blaszczyk 2009), including elaborate replicas of cook stoves, cabinets, sewing machines, toy dishes, and laundry sets. Toy dishes were meant to be used in conjunction with white-skinned porcelain and plastic dolls in order to mimic bottle-feeding, crib care, and dinner and tea services during play, inculcating young girls into the proper etiquette and form for cooking and serving their families, as well as reinforcing whiteness as the American norm. I argue girls' toys taught proper infant care, a concern at the turn of the century, as medical reformers in Appalachia’s coalfields actively sought to reduce infant mortality by instructing mothers and young children in proper crib care and feeding (Barney 2000). Kitchen toys and dolls not only visibly courted the new child consumer, but prepared young girls for the challenges of housewifery and child-rearing. Toys were entangled in the constitution of gender through daily practice, the embodiment of increasingly stratified gendered divisions. Girls’ habitus (Bourdieu 1984), or bodily competence and social know-how, developed through domestic play. Archaeologically-recovered doll parts and toy ceramic dishes from the coal town of Jenkins, Kentucky are used to explore gender and race in the early 20th century through play, arguing toys were bound in the active construction of women as “naturally” domestic creatures during the Industrial Age, while simultaneously racializing the new woman consumer as “naturally” white.
