Entry · catalog no. 2413
baby dolls
/ /ˈbeɪbi dɑlz/ /BAY-bee dahlz
noun · New Orleans, Louisiana · 1910s
✓ Verified
1.
Groups of Black women in New Orleans — and, later, men and children alongside them — who mask on Mardi Gras day and other Carnival occasions in short satin dresses, ruffled bloomers, garters, stockings and poke bonnets, then parade through their own neighborhoods dancing, chanting, smoking cigars and flashing or throwing money. Also the organized clubs that carry the practice year to year, of which the first was the Million Dollar Baby Dolls.
“The Baby Dolls came up the avenue in green satin with the cigars already lit, and the whole block turned to watch.”
Origin & Attribution
The practice began in 1912 among Black women working in the uptown red-light district New Orleans called Black Storyville, the blocks around Perdido and Gravier, separate from the white-serving Storyville downtown. Beatrice Hill, Leona Tate and Althea Brown were among the founders; they called themselves the Million Dollar Baby Dolls, took the name from what men already called them, and turned it into a claim on the street. Hill told the story herself to Robert McKinney, a Black New Orleans journalist working for the Louisiana Writers' Project in 1940, and McKinney's field reports fed Gumbo Ya-Ya in 1945. Kim Marie Vaz assembled the full account in The Baby Dolls in 2013, and the tradition, nearly gone by the late twentieth century, has been rebuilt since 2004 by groups including the Ernie K-Doe Baby Dolls. Carnival coverage still treats them as photogenic filler or as a costume choice. They were and are an organized women's masking tradition, the first of its kind in the city, made by women who had almost no other public standing.
1912
Women from Black Storyville mask as the Million Dollar Baby Dolls on Mardi Gras
1940
Beatrice Hill gives the founding account to Robert McKinney of the Louisiana Writers' Project
1945
Gumbo Ya-Ya prints Baby Doll material drawn from McKinney's reports
2013
Kim Marie Vaz publishes the first book-length history
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
New Orleans, Louisiana · 1910s
Spoken by
Black women of uptown New Orleans, later Black New Orleanians generally; carried today by Baby Doll clubs across the city
$BABYDOThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Rising114 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
35/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1912
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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New Orleans, LA
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Citations & Sources
■
Kim Marie Vaz, The Baby Dolls: Breaking the Race and Gender Barriers of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Tradition (Louisiana State University Press, 2013)
book
■
Lyle Saxon, Edward Dreyer and Robert Tallant, Gumbo Ya-Ya: A Collection of Louisiana Folk Tales (Houghton Mifflin, 1945), compiled from Louisiana Writers' Project fieldwork including Robert McKinney's 1940 interviews
book
■
Kim Vaz-Deville, ed., Walking Raddy: The Baby Dolls of New Orleans (University Press of Mississippi, 2018)
book
■
+ Cite a sourceBaby Dolls, 64 Parishes, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities
glossary
See also