A build-it-yourself, wire-it-yourself, modular dollhouse toy for encouraging little girls to play more in the realm of engineering, math, science, and architecture from an early age. Found thanks to the wonders of Pinterest.
Oh lord I would have fucking died and thought I'd gone to heaven. (I used to design and sew not only doll clothes, but I used to squirrel away cardboard and tape to construct doll houses and furniture--but when I went to school, inevitably I came back to find it tossed into the trash.)
Aaaawww! Sympathetic head-pats for your childhood self. My parents, bless them, had their share of faults, but failing to support my creative and artistic efforts when I was small are not among them. I had masses of Lego when I was small, and various other building toys, some of which I shared with my brother. And while my mother did encourage me to give the extremely elaborate frontier trading post diorama I built for my social studies class to the teacher when he asked, when I decided to keep it, she dutifully stored it away for me. (Of course, she later told me I shouldn't pursue engineering in college because I wasn't "practical" enough -- the woman had obviously not met a lot of engineers -- so with the good, also some not so good. But no one in my family ever told me I shouldn't or couldn't try something because I was a girl.)
My folks were both very, very young, and very conventional. I don't blame my mom--she wasn't even out of high school yet when I came along, so she didn't exactly have much practice! But in that time in the fifties, especially in blue collar neighborhoods like mine, being conventional was a big deal, and I was always such a weirdo.
Yeah, it probably helps some that I'm a bit younger than you (grew up in the '60s and '70s), but mostly I think it helps that my family were Swedes, and especially on my mother's side, pretty unconventional. I'm like a third generation atheist/agnostic. Maybe fourth -- I'm not sure about my great-grandmother. I don't remember anyone in the family regularly attending church, that's for sure. We were working class folks too, and my grandparents kept a tidy house and garden, but in many ways my grandmother was quite the freethinker, and my mother even moreso
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