Topsy-Turvy Dolls

My topsy-turvy doll named after Spring and Winter. Spring is a white doll with
China-blue eyes wearing a lively floral print. Winter is a black doll with textured
braided hair, wearing a felted blue coat, a plaid wool scarf and red print skirt.
At the top, Winter's red print skirt is featured and at the bottom, Spring's blue 
and orange print is pulled in front. The faces are painted canvas.

       A Topsy-Turvy doll is a double-ended doll, typically featuring two opposing characters. They are traditionally American cloth folk dolls which fuse a white girl child with a black girl child at the hips. Later dolls were sometimes a white girl child with a black mammy figure. Precise facts about their origins are rare, but as late as the 1950s, "Topsy and Eva" dolls were marketed by Sears, Montgomery Ward, and The Babyland Rag company (aka Bruckner).

• Interview by A Local Press 
• Topsy-Turvy Historical Background
• The Topsy-Turvy Dolls at The African American Museum of Iowa
• A unique Babyland rag doll topsy-turvy 1905 
• The Racial Symbolism of the Topsy-Turvy Doll

      As objects of material culture, Topsy-Turvy dolls have provoked a great amount of interpretive controversy. Karen Sanchez-Eppler suspects that Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy in Uncle Tom's Cabin may have taken her name from the dolls, making for a "poignant and somewhat disturbing pairing with little Eva".

       Doll collector Wendy Lavitt writes, "It has recently been suggested that these dolls were often made for Black children who desired a forbidden white doll (a baby like the ones their mothers cared for); they would flip the doll to the black side when an overseer passed them at play." 

       Alice Taylor echoes this idea. “Scholars and doll enthusiasts continue to speculate about their original purpose and how children would have used them. The dolls likely were produced for slave children and perhaps as 'maid dolls' for white children. The issue of how children played with these dolls remains hotly debated”.

       Kimberly Wallace-Sanders addresses the controversial question of the possible meanings and uses behind the doll's design in her social history of the image and myth of the Southern mammy figure. She writes:

African American slave women may have given dolls like these to their daughters as a preparation for a possibility of a life devoted to nurturing two babies: one black and one white. Topsy-turvy dolls are designed for children to play with one baby at a time, and this accurately reflects the division of caregiving that African American women encountered, having to care for white children during the day and their own children at night. These handmade dolls are important, creative expressions of those otherwise silent women we know only as "mammy."

       Wallace-Sanders also disagrees with the "forbidden white doll" theory, arguing that the idea of a secret doll that would be forbidden to own makes Black mothers seem extremely irresponsible.

       The topsy-turvy doll design, although a particular invention of the old Southern culture, has been lovingly stitched and transformed by many generations of doll makers in America since the Civil War. Double-sided dolls have been produced with a variety of fairy tale characters like: red riding hood and the wolf or her grandmother. Cinderella as a poor housemaid versus Cinderella as a princess has also been produced as a double-sided doll very often as well. 

       Our extended family has many examples of tupsy-turvy or flip dolls featured in our collections. I will include some of these below as they are slowly unpacked in the future.

St. Lucia travel doll is also a topsy-turvy type. One of the dolls is married and the
other unmarried according to the folk tradition in the islands.

Afrocentric sisters attached for life in
 a topsy-turvy design by grimm.

        Two Afrocentric rag dolls at either end of this topsy-turvy handmade doll were made back in the early 1990s for a class I taught on the topic. The darker doll is dressed in a green, red and gold plaid. Her hair is braided into one piece. She wears beaded earrings and also has seed beads woven into her pony tail.

       The other half has a widow's peak, a bold striped dress and her hair is braided with permanently attached tile beads at each end.

• 1901 Bruckner Babyland Rag Doll Topsy Turvy Lithographic Face
• Topsy Turvy pattern with directions
• Human Nature Wears Bright Colors at Montclair Art Museum: Philemona Williamson

Topsy-Turvey dolls have shorter arms than anatomically correct dolls so that when the skirt is
 flipped to the alternative side, the hidden doll half's arms are kept from view.

Both of these sisters have hair styles that are permanently sewn in place. Their clothing is also bright
 and bold and their facial features are copied from earlier black rag dolls sewn for the children of 
slaves. However, these sisters are playmates.

An example of a modern day topsy-turvy doll for a child who loves ballerinas.

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