Won't You Dress This Doll?

  ©  Kathy Duncan, 2021

In the early 1900s, dolls mostly appeared in newspapers as line drawings rendered for store advertisements at Christmas time. They tend to be blurry and lacking in detail. 

A photograph of a doll in a newspaper was extremely rare. However, The Atlanta Georgian enthusiastically published photographs of dolls in connection with their pet project: The Empty Stocking Fund. The purpose of the fund was to raise money to buy toys for the underprivileged children of Atlanta. Dolls figured prominently in that effort. They were used in articles about fundraising endeavors, they were dressed and sold at auction, and they were given to poor children. The actual fundraising efforts ran the gamut from youth theater productions to what appears to have something bordering on burlesque shows to concerts to bazaars where doll clothes were sold. There seem to have been a couple of activities each week during the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The Fund purchased new unclothed dolls in bulk, which would have saved a substantial amount of money, and then prevailed upon the girls and women of Atlanta to donate their fabrics and time to make clothes for the dolls. This doll seems to have come with stockings and shoes, which would have made her a little pricier than a barefoot doll. 

This appeal to the women of Atlanta to rush to the newspaper to pick up a doll to dress was published in The Atlanta Georgian on 3 December 1914 and written from the doll's point of view. Its depiction of the dolls' possible fate is a bit drastic, but the call to dress the doll pulls at the heartstrings. 

Won't You Dress This Doll and Brighten Some Little Girl's Christmas?

Told To The Christmas Editor.

I am a doll--as yet undressed and unadorned. I am doomed to be forever the chattel and bond slave of some child. No thoughts of suffrage or equal rights ever come to me, for my lot is foreordained, and I accept it.

But I am content. I would not swap my fate to be Queen of the Carnival. For I was created that a child might be happy.

I will grow old early. My hair will disappear--not in single strands, one by one, but at one fell swoop, like the scalp of an Indian's victim. I expect that my nose will be cracked before long, and my eyes punched in.

But it will not be through neglect. No. I will be loved as tenderly as ever, in spite of my mishaps and mutiliation. I will be all in all to some little girl, who will hug me with a fierce devotion as long as there is a scrap of sawdust left to be hugged. I am glad.

I am the spirit of Christmas. I am happiness incarnate. And because I have been selected as a gift to one of the children of Atlanta's poor, I am likewise a symbol of charity. And again I am glad.

But it is not well that I go to my little mistress unclothed. It may be that I am destined for a home whose children themselves are cold for lack of clothing, and in which there is little brightness and attractiveness. Will you not clothe me?

Won't you please put a bit of ribbon at my throat and my waist, and make for me a little dress, perhaps with a scrap of lace here and there, so that I may go forth gloriously to my mistress on 
Christmas Day and make her doubly happy?

It will be indeed the finest charity if you will dress me and my sisters who are at The Georgian office. I do ot ask it through vanity, but I ask it because by making me more beautiful you lighten the gloom that has settled about the heart of the little girl to whom I am going, and that may taint her spirit forever. A little child is so sensitive, so impressionable. I who am only a doll know that. I know that when the soul and the heart of a child are concerned you must be more careful than you would with my fragile body.

Even as I am now, unclothed and ashamed of it, the little girl to whom I am going will be glad to have me. But dressed as the practiced hands of girls and women can dress me, I will transport my little mistress into a heaven of happiness, where she will remain for many blissful days and weeks, forgetting the poverty and misery about her, and thinking the wholesome, wonderful, fairy thoughts that all little girls should think.

So, won't you dress me?

I am at the office of The Atlanta Georgian, No. 20 East Alabama street, together with a great many other dolls that the Empty Stocking Fund is buying. Think of it, and if you are interested, send your check to the Christmas Editor.