“They Gave the Children China Dolls”: Toys, Socialization, and Gendered Labor on American Plantations

ABSTRACT

Play has long been understood to be a key aspect of childhood socialization into gender roles, including gendered labor. Yet, some have reasonably assumed that enslaved children on plantations in the United States had little time for play and that any toys owned by them would have been homemade and thus difficult to later identify archaeologically. Evidence from slavery-related sites in the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS), however, demonstrates that formal toys in the form of porcelain dolls, toy dishes, marbles, and military toys were not uncommon possessions for enslaved children in the American South. The recovery of formal toys in living quarters used by enslaved people is especially surprising given that their intended socialization messages did not align with the future gendered labor roles of enslaved children. These toys thus reveal the complicated socializing forces and messages about gendered labor that enslaved children encountered through play.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood
• toys
• socialization
• labor
• gender
• slavery
• plantations
• play

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jillian Galle, Lynsey Bates, Elizabeth Bollwerk, and Leslie Cooper at the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery for all of their help and advice in using the database. Thank you also to all of the various researchers who worked at the sites contained within the DAACS database and to those who cataloged the sites into DAACS, without whom this article would not have been possible. I would also like to thank Anna Agbe-Davies for her advice and comments and Christine Mikeska, Mary Bryant, and Ashley Fidler for their feedback on an earlier version of this article, along with two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The quotation in the title for this paper (“they gave the children china dolls”) is taken from a Works Progress Administration (WPA) interview with Susan Castle, who was formerly enslaved (Hornsby 1941b, 181).

2 This paper capitalizes White and Black to emphasize the social and cultural construction of both racial identities.

3 The quotes from Works Progress Administration interviews have been adapted from the original. The spelling has been standardized as the original editors of the interviews often used racialized spelling to exaggerate stereotypes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Colleen Betti

Colleen Betti is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on childhood and socialization in the historic-period American South. Currently she is working on a project excavating late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Black schools, specifically Rosenwald schools in Gloucester County, Virginia.