A little while back, I gave away the boys’ Fisher-Price dollhouse to my niece, who will be two in March. Liam had seen this dollhouse at a friend’s house when he was about two, fallen in love with it, and so miraculously, Santa brought it to him.

There were a few other things that I passed along to my niece that made me sad – parting with the little wooden stove and all the dishes, for instance (that stove and Liam’s three-year obsession with pots, pans, and cooking is a story for another day) – but giving away the dollhouse didn’t bother me.

The ads for this dollhouse claim it as “a girl’s first dollhouse…” If you put batteries in this house, you get noises: “with the phone ringing, the kitchen timer dinging and much more, this friendly Fisher-Price home is full of activity.” Given that level of dinging and ringing, sounds like there should have been a “girl’s first martini” in the box, too.

What I found particularly galling about this house – into which we never put batteries, duh – were the figures that came with it. Not the Fisher-Price wooden dowels with bowling-ball shaped heads and plastic hair of my youth. I guess too many kids swallowed those.  No, instead the house came with “realistic” molded plastic figures, squat and pink, too big to fit in all but the greediest of mouths. 

The inhabitants of this pink-roofed, faux-Victorian dream house are probably molded in the same pressurized chamber (they are essentially the same shape) but they are finished with a clear eye towards who does what: Daddy, with brown hair and a sweater vest, holds a cellphone, and resembles either a television evangelist or a dot.com dude who made millions and is quasi-retired. Mommy, also brown-haired, wears a cardigan and holds … a baby-bottle. Note the separation of fiefdoms in this picture from the FP website: Dad upstairs on the computer, Mom downstairs … in the kitchen. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose, eh? 

Perhaps I shouldn’t have let my niece have the doll-house; maybe instead I should’ve roamed on ebay for that paragon of alternative doll families, The Sunshine Family.  When I was a little girl, I loved the Sunshines: the mom wore a long calico dress and sandals; the baby was blonde and indeterminately sexed; dad had tan pants, workboots, and a red turtleneck – a sure sign of a counterculture lifestyle (they probably smoked a little weed when the baby was sleeping). I’m sure they lived in the woods outside Boulder or maybe Berkeley.

You could also get the Happy Family, who were the Sunshines’ black neighbors, and even, eventually, Sunshine grandparents. I find myself deeply curious about the marketing meeting that produced that: “the Sunshines are a big seller….let’s make old people!”  But hey, it was the mid-seventies, with its peculiar brand of “Free to be … You and Me” idealism.

 
I’m not saying that Mrs. Fisher-Price is a plastic version of Ibsen’s Nora, or that my niece will be brainwashed by a two-inch man holding a cell phone; I guess I’m asking if it’s possible to escape their faux-Victorian conventionality.

Maybe we all should go live in the woods with the Sunshines.