It was a simple test. You give a child two dolls, one white, one dark-colored, and ask the child which one he or she likes best. Which one do they want to play with? Which one is the “nice” doll?

Back in the 1940s, Kenneth and Mamie Clark – a husband-and-wife team of psychology researchers – used dolls to investigate how young Black children viewed their racial identities. They found that ...

This month, Kmart began selling up to four dozen new ethnic dolls in its stores. Coincidentally, this is the year that Brown v. Board of Education was effectively overturned by the Supreme Court. A ...

WASHINGTON — A slip of the scissors and off comes a foot. A nick and there goes a finger. A wrong snip and a tab that would have held up her dress disappears. Paper dolls, fragile though they were, ...

Paper dolls, a vital part of children’s lives and fashion culture for generations, have always been meant to be instructive: to teach young women and girls how to look and behave. But, from the start, ...