What Children’s Literature Teaches Us About Money: Susan S. Adler’s ‘Samantha Learns a Lesson’

It’s all about who you know.

In Meet Samantha, we learn how important it is for a child to own a doll that costs roughly the same as an American Girl doll costs today, after adjusting for inflation; in Samantha Learns a Lesson, we learn how these dolls should be treated:

Nellie was carrying Lydia. The beautiful doll was no longer quite so fine. Her dress was wrinkled and worn because she had been held so often. Her hair was mussed because Nellie hugged her so tightly at night. Her china hands and feet were dirty because Nellie took her with her wherever she could. Samantha looked at Lydia and knew she had been loved.

Today’s children can go to an American Girl store and get their doll’s hair professionally brushed and braided—but before American Girl figured out how to monetize that, this paragraph must have read as a comfort to both girls and their parents. It’s okay that this expensive doll has messy hair and dirty feet. That just proves she’s been loved.

The Cost Of An American Girl Doll Experience

Here’s what else we learn in Samantha Learns a Lesson: it’s all about who you know. Nellie’s family gets a better position—and is able to move out of the tenements and into a carriage house, which is a huge deal—because Grandmary advocates on their behalf. Samantha, meanwhile, wins the Young People’s Speaking Contest because Nellie is able to tell her the truth about factories and child labor.

American Girl’s Beforever rebranding no longer includes those “A Peek Into The Past” sections at the end of every story, but I can still visualize the photograph of the young girl standing on the factory floor. I believed Nellie’s description of what it was like to work in a factory, but that picture made it real. Nellie was a blatantly fictional, almost two-dimensional character, but the girl in the photograph was not.

So yes, in this story Samantha and many of her young readers learn the truth about mass-produced commercial goods: they’re built by low-paid workers in factories that are too cold or too hot, where the risk of personal injury is always present. Sometimes, they are built by children.

This is still happening today, after adjusting for inflation.

Samantha’s speeches—both her original and her revised version—are terrible. They are literally 40 seconds long when read aloud (I know, because I read them both), and it’s not like they have any kind of structure besides “factories are good” (speech 1) and “factories are complicated” (speech 2).

But what could Samantha have said, in her second speech? She says that factories make things better for people and then she says that factories hurt children. She cannot offer a solution because to do so would require radically reconfiguring our economic system and/or increasing workplace oversight and applying harsher penalties to companies that fall short—which is something we haven’t managed to do in the 112 years since the Young People’s Speaking Contest of 1904.

Factories are complicated. Cheap thread benefits Nellie’s family as much as it benefits Samantha’s—possibly more, given their disparate income levels. There’s no good solution besides the obvious and idealistic solution to treat workers well and pay them a living wage, which is so idealistic that Samantha does not even state it as a possibility.

Samantha is also performing her own form of “child labor,” although I am sure that this was not an intentional parallel. Since the crowded public schools are not interested in providing individual instruction to Nellie and her sisters, Samantha decides to take on the role of unpaid tutor. This is presented as a good and noble thing for Samantha to do—as well as another way for Samantha to insert herself into Nellie’s life—but it’s hard not to read Samantha’s volunteer labor as a devaluing of both teaching and work performed by women. (Or, in this case, American Girls.)

Not that the other women in Samantha’s life aren’t earning money. Mrs. Hawkins, who makes cookies for the girls to eat while Samantha teaches, gets paid. Jessie, who doesn’t appear in this story despite the fact that one of the main plotlines in Meet Samantha was about ensuring she could keep her job as the family’s seamstress, gets paid. But tutoring is different—and that hasn’t changed in 112 years either.

At the end of the book, we learn that Nellie has been able to move up to third grade, thanks to Samantha’s (unpaid) help. We also learn that she has the desk next to Eddie Ryland.

This discovery, which ends the book, is presented as a joke. Nobody wants to sit next to Eddie Ryland because he’s a bully and he’s a boy. What’s left unsaid is that Eddie Ryland is the son of Nellie’s former employer. Nellie used to wash Eddie Ryland’s clothes. It could be seen as a sign of progress—perhaps fodder for Samantha’s next speech—that she now gets to sit next to him in a classroom.

But I do not believe for an instant that Eddie Ryland goes to public school. I know he does, because it’s in the text, but a “real” version of Eddie would go to private school just like Samantha, right? The Eddies and Samanthas of the world pay extra so they don’t have to sit next to the Nellies. That’s how it’s always been.

So much of this book is still exactly the same as it is today, from the expensive dolls to the cheap consumer goods to the discomfort well-meaning people feel about buying products created by workers who aren’t earning a living wage and might, in some cases, be children.

If nothing’s changed, then what lessons have we actually learned?

Previously:

What Children’s Literature Teaches Us About Money: Susan S. Adler’s ‘Meet Samantha’

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