Mom, What Were the '70s?

By Mary Kane
Sunday, November 4, 2007; B02

I'm not much of a history buff, but my 7-year-old daughter is. For the past few years, we've spent bedtime following the travails of Mary and Laura Ingalls as they settled the open prairie in the "Little House" series.

Then last winter, Annabeth turned to uncharted territory: the "American Girl" books. Whether the result of her budding interest in history or of the fact that she's not allowed to get an American Girl doll until she's 8, Annabeth readily devoured this fictional series, from Irish servant girl Nellie's escape from the city orphanage in the early 1900s to Depression-era Kit spotting her father at the soup kitchen.

So when Annabeth raced from the front door recently with an American Girl catalog and begged me to look at the latest doll, I prepared to give it a quick glance. She spread the catalog out on the dining room table and pointed with excitement to American Girl Julie -- circa 1974.
That's right, a historical doll younger than me.

Annabeth quickly put this into context. "So you're younger than the 1944 doll but older than the Julie doll, right, Mom?"

Yes. Well. Let's move on. Julie lives in San Francisco, sports bellbottoms, a purple crocheted hat and a "far-out" room with cascading beads. Like all the American Girls, she's supposed to be an archetype of her generation. While 1850s pioneer Kirsten dealt with a fire that left her Swedish immigrant family homeless, Julie faces the "trials" of the 1970s: Her parents get divorced and she fights to play sports with boys, post-Title IX.

The American Girl creators, acknowledging the relatively recent history of their latest doll, say they hope that she sparks remembrances that moms can share with their daughters. Taking their advice, I guess I could point out to Annabeth that Julie's problems, while real, pale a bit in comparison to working in a sweatshop, having no food or losing your home. I could note further that Julie was born at the tail end of the baby-boom generation, a privileged cohort that wielded undue cultural influence and spent much of the '70s doing things you don't necessarily want to share with children.

I can't imagine that the American Girl folks expected moms to snuggle next to their daughters and detail the changes wrought by the sexual revolution or explain what all those people were up to in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district.

But what to say, exactly? Here's what I remember: a heated argument at our dinner table the day my 16-year-old brother slapped a George McGovern sticker on our Ford Pinto, the one with the red, white and blue trim. My friend Gayle's house, where a picture of her brother Fred, in a military uniform, hung on the wall. (Fred's room was empty, Gayle's mother never mentioned him, and I knew by the way her father sat in a corner chair, buried in the newspaper, that I was not to ask.) President Richard M. Nixon delivering a speech on television one summer day, with my brother patting the set and saying, "It's about time, buddy."

Given that the dolls are supposed to be 9 years old and that girls who are much younger covet them, I questioned, at first, the wisdom of marketing young Julie. But then I realized that the American Girl people might be on to something. Maybe the closer history gets, the more we distance ourselves from it. Insulated by the years gone by, young girls can enjoy learning about the hardships of pioneer life and the disgrace of child labor. But they -- and their moms -- may not be ready to ruminate on events too freshly recalled. It's easier to give our history a makeover, dress it up and dance around its edges, and then share the results. What more fitting a time period for this exercise than the '70s?

I sported a Secretariat poster on my wall back then. I had my thick, wavy hair cut into a Dorothy Hamill wedge, a particularly disastrous move. I wore gauchos. Only Dan Fogelberg could understand me. And we haven't even touched on lime-green leisure suits and disco balls.
Yes, Julie has a furry foot-shaped rug in her room and a "Brady Bunch" poster on her locker. But there's more to her story, according to the American Girl folks. Julie eventually learns to handle change and "to become more hopeful about her family's future."

Well then, hats off to Julie. Maybe she ends up with the kind of '70s memories she can pass along, even if our own histories tell us that's not always so easily done.