No material used in subsequent years has matched this mimetic capacity, and perhaps this led to the return of bisque dolls as ornaments of girls' lives in the 1980s. The illusionistic potential of bisque was apparent in even in relatively cheap models, giving it a popularity that more than compensated for its capacity to shatter. Celluloid dolls were also produced around 1900. Like all early plastic items, they closely imitated more expensive and highly regarded materials; thus these plastic dolls, which resembled bisque dolls, were fixed to kid leather or jointed composition bodies as were bisque heads.
These German dolls were generally fashioned as images of little girls, frequently bearing a solemn, calm expression and a slightly slimmer, longer figure than was the norm for later dolls. The most favored body type was the ball-jointed composition and wood strung with elastic. Thus these dolls were both more fragile and far more flexible than typical dolls later in the century. The majority of these dolls came from two cities in east central Germany. The trade was split roughly into two parts: Sonneberg was known for the ordinary but thoroughly acceptable grade of doll, and Waltershausern produced the more expensive models, although Sonneberg also exported a small number of extremely fine dolls. The general quality level of the Sonneberg dolls is far superior to the cheap plastic dolls produced in the second half of the twentieth century. Although assembly and shipping were concentrated in factories, the majority of steps needed to complete a doll, including the modeling of individual components and limbs, wig making, shoe making, and box construction, were broken down into small segments and performed by thousands of home-based workers living around the main centers, who brought their items to a central factory and received pay and materials for the next week's work.
Porcelain head making required kilns and heavy equipment, and so it was generally concentrated in the factories. Doll production was engaged in by all family members to maximize the income stream. The sad irony that German doll producers employed girls who were the same age as the girls in othercountries who played with the exported dolls did not go unnoted in the press at the turn of the century. Even children nominally enrolled in public schools worked after hours on doll production. The trade was international in its scope, and prior to about 1940 most girls born into families from the prosperous end of the working class and higher in any urban center around the world, race and cultural context notwithstanding, owned at least one German bisque doll.
There were smaller numbers of bisque dolls made in other countries, including the United States, but most notably France, which had supported a luxury doll industry over the previous half-century. By around 1900 this industry was in serious decline due to German companies' ability to provide product of solid quality at much lower price. The French dolls' personae were elegant and overtly sensuous-even ecstatic-in expression, foreshadowing the imbrication of dolls and sexuality often attributed to Barbie and, more recently, Bratz, and blurring the adult/child boundary. The French doll look also predated the melding of provocative sophistication of grooming with children's physical proportions exemplified by the child beauty pageant queen by about a century, albeit in a far less tawdry context. This precedent may not excuse these sexualized, “prostitot” representations, but it does suggest that these cultural idioms have a far longer history in narratives of taste and styling than is usually assumed and are not expressions specific to late American capitalism.
The first significant change in the market was the appearance of baby and character dolls by around 1910. The character doll was modeled to express a certain emotion, from pensiveness to glee, depending upon the model. Some were actual portraits of living children, including relatives of the dollmakers and celebrities such as Princess Juliana of the Netherlands. On occasion notable sculptors, such as Levin-Funke, created the face model, and the design was publicly credited to them. The baby doll made its first substantial impact on the market at this time and reflected the gender roles that were standard in modern industrial-military states.
An urban myth claims that one doll is the portrait of a member of the German imperial family, although accounts differ as to which one, with the candidates spanning three generations. This so-called Kaiser Baby was among the most popular of the character dolls, while the sweet-faced My Dream Baby perhaps was the longest-surviving, widely produced throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Kammer and Reinhardt's mold 126 also established a doll type that remains highly visible 80 years later, that of a laughing, chubby baby or toddler (depending on the body configuration). A similar product is now produced in plastic rather than bisque, but the persona is identical. World War I prompted a major upheaval and shift of power in the doll world. German doll products became harder to find in 1914-1916, although dolls were still being produced as a major source of foreign income from neutral countries, often in the face of extreme supply shortages (dolls' eyelashes were made of sewing cotton rather than bristle or sable, for example). With the entry of the United States into the war in 1917, new German dolls became impossible to obtain. The United States came to the forefront as a new site for the mass production of dolls and there were dramatic changes to the formats available.
