Buy Alexander Collectible Dolls Online
Welcome to Bestmadamealexanderdolls.com - your source for collectible dolls.
History Of Madame Alexander Dolls
The woman who would become known as “Madame Alexander” was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 9, 1895. She was named Bertha but later adopted the more sophisticated “Beatrice.”
Alexander’s mother, Hannah Pepper, was born in Austria but arrived in the United States from Russia, where she had escaped vicious pogroms. Shortly thereafter, she met and married Maurice Alexander, who had left his native Odessa as a young man and spent several years as an apprentice in Germany before coming to America.
According to some of Alexander’s descendents, Hannah was already pregnant with Beatrice when she came to the United States, after her first husband and older children died in a pogrom in Russia. Others believe that the couple came together to New York and that the husband died when Beatrice was about a year and a half old. Regardless, Beatrice adored her step-father Maurice and always considered him her real father.
Beatrice and her sisters Rose, Florence, and Jean grew up on Grand Street on the Lower East Side, in the heart of New York’s teeming immigrant community. Poverty was often extreme in this neighborhood, where a myriad of different languages and different cultures existed side by side. Like most of their neighbors, Hannah and Maurice had come to the United States filled with expectations, and they had even higher hopes for their children’s future than they did for their own. The Alexander girls were encouraged to work hard, do well in school, and aim high.
“Madame”. Beatrice Alexander knew how to dream big.
Madame Alexander is the business name of Beatrice Alexander, who was born Bertha Alexander, later changed her name to Beatrice, married Philip Behrman and then started her doll business. She was an American entrepreneur who created the first “collectible” dolls based on a licensed character - Scarlett O’Hara from the book and movie Gone with the Wind.
She also is credited with making the first mass-produced dolls in honor of living people, with dolls of the famous Dionne quintuplets in 1936 and a set of 36 Queen Elizabeth II dolls to commemorate the 1953 coronation celebrations in Britain. This set is kept at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum in NY. Most recently, in 2002 two Judy Garland portrait dolls were introduced. Other popular dolls have been pussycat baby dolls dressed in fine coat and dress and a Mary, Queen of Scots Portrait Doll as well as Heidi, the characters from Little Women, and a series international dolls in native costumes.
She has created many topical doll series. “The First Ladies of the United States” depicting each in her inaugural gown as well as “The Opera Series”, “Fairy Tale Series” and many more. Her 8″ Wendy doll, was introduced in 1953, and is still being made today, and is considered collectible. Vintage and new Madame Alexander Dolls may be viewed at the company’s museum, The Heritage Gallery.
The Doll Hospital
Alexander’s association association with dolls began the year she was born, when her stepfather opened the United States’ first Doll Hospital. Before the invention of plastic, most dolls were made of china and were highly breakable; by restoring their shattered dolls to health, Maurice earned the gratitude of countless children. “I remember a father coming in the middle of the night because his little girl was sick and had broken her doll and needed it right now - a difficult task when the poor doll’s head was shattered into dozens of pieces,” Beatrice said in 1983.
The contrast between the wealth of many of Maurice’s customers and the poverty of the neighborhood made a deep impression on the young Beatrice, and like many other children of immigrants, she became highly motivated to achieve a better future. “When I was 11 or 12,” she remembered, “I realized that there were poor people and there were rich people, and I leaned towards the rich. I wanted to have a carriage and a hat with ostrich feathers.” Hannah assumed her daughter would achieve these goals by “marry[ing] well” and joked that it would take three husbands to support Beatrice in the manner she desired.
Alexander’s early surroundings also accustomed her to seeing women working at least as hard as men. Because few immigrant families could afford to conform to middle-class ideals of leisured ladies, the mothers and older sisters of most of Beatrice’s playmates would have contributed to the family income. If they did not work outside the home, then immigrant women helped in family businesses, took in boarders, or did piecework in the home. Beatrice’s own mother worked with her husband in his shop, as well as having full responsibility for the home. “I can truthfully say,” Alexander asserted, “that my mother worked harder than my father.”
Career Beginnings
On June 30, 1912, a few weeks after serving as valedictorian for her high school graduation, Alexander married Philip Behrman. While Philip worked in the personnel department of a hat factory, Beatrice took a six-month commercial course and then worked as a book-keeper for the Irving Hat Stores. In 1915, she gave birth to a daughter, Mildred, in what she would later refer to as “the happiest moment of [her] life.”
World War I, which broke out two years after Beatrice and Philip’s wedding, changed Beatrice’s future dramatically.
While untouched by the immense physical destruction of the “Great War,” the United States was not immune to the massive economic disruption of the war. Many of the dolls that filled Maurice Alexander’s shop and hospital came from Germany, and Hannah and Maurice’s livelihood was soon threatened by Allied embargoes of German goods.
Beatrice and her sisters, determined not to allow their parents’ business to fail, quickly decided to produce homemade dolls for sale. Beatrice - recalling the despair of the young customers of the Doll Hospital, and in any case deprived of more exotic materials - proposed that they made a cloth dolls. Inspired by the women involved in the war effort, she chose a Red Cross Nurse for her model. Under Beatrice’s exacting but effective direction, the Alexander sisters gathered around their parents’ kitchen table to sew the cloth dolls, which then flew off the shelves of Maurice’s store and saved the family business.
Source: The Jewish Women’s Archive Exhibits. Photo Alexander Doll Co., Inc.
Home | About | Contact | Privacy Policy | Sitemap
