August 2026 Madame Alexander – Queen of American Dolls
I have been a doll lover all my life. Living in New Jersey, just across from NYC, and the highlight of the year in the 1940’s and 50’s was a trip to Manhattan with my brother and mother at Christmas time to visit Santa at Bamberger’s and F.A.O Schwarz on 745 Fifth Avenue to look at the latest Madame Alexander dolls (my brother looked at the Lionel
trains!) in hopes Santa would bring us something. There was also a toy store in Red Bank, my hometown, where I would check out the Madame Alexander dolls on my way home by bus from school which I did with my brother from the age of five. Childhood was a safer place in those days. I still have my beloved Madame Alexander dolls.
Bertha ‘Beatrice’ Alexander Behrman was born in 1895 in Lower East Side Manhattan to Jewish parents who had escaped from the pogrom in Russia. Her father died when she was a baby and her mother remarried another Jewish immigrant, a toy dealer, who also opened the first doll hospital in the U.S. She married a hat maker in 1915, making her first hand-sewn doll during WW1 as German dolls were no longer available. It was a cloth Red Cross nurse with hand-painted three-dimensional facial features. They became popular and she and her sisters sold them in the doll hospital. In 1923, with a $1,600 loan, she began ‘The Alexander Doll Company’ with 16 workers – her sisters were among the employees. Her husband became the company manager and the rest is history. She was a born
businesswoman and very innovative. By 1936 the company was one of the 3rd largest doll manufacturers in the country, eventually becoming the largest doll manufacturer with factories in NYC employing 1,500 workers. During the 1980s they sold more than a million dolls annually.
Beatrice was very innovative and during her career she went from cloth dolls to hard plastic and eventually vinyl plastic in the 1960’s. She introduced eyes with lashes, fingers with knuckles, rooted hair that could be styled. She was noted for creating dolls based on famous people, film stars, characters from books and history. Of course, German, French and English makers had been making dolls like this for years! She released Cissy, the first fashion doll, with a wardrobe four years before Barbie. I believe she was a very formidable woman to work for from accounts I have read! She died in 1990 aged 95. The main doll factory was in Manhattanville, the Harlem area of NYC and Columbia University in the old Studebaker building, employing local residents, many of whom were from the Dominican Republic. It shut down not that long ago. The company was sold in 1988 and eventually merged with Kahn Lucas in 2012 retaining the name. Madame Alexander Dolls are still popular dolls perhaps more for collectors and probably made in China.
I love the Little Women dolls they were my mother’s favourite and are still made
today.