On a hot August evening in 1935, many of the six hundred residents of Inwood, Iowa, watched as nearly twenty little girls paraded around the town’s brightly lit baseball diamond. Wearing their nicest dresses or more elaborate costumes, they pushed buggies displaying their favorite and best-dressed dolls. Three girls were awarded small cash prizes; the winner was Muriel Leivestad, daughter of Olaf, a plumber, and Lucille, a former teacher and homemaker. Muriel’s striped buggy, with five hot water bottles hanging from its sides, showed off five identical dolls modeled after the famous Dionne Quintuplets, who had turned one just over a year earlier. Muriel was dressed as a nurse, while a neighbor boy donned a dark suit and carboard top hat to portray Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe, who took exaggerated credit for the babies’ survival.
Just over a year earlier, the birth of the first known surviving set of quintuplets in a remote part of Ontario, Canada, had captured the world’s attention. The five little girls had soon moved into their own small hospital, with round-the-clock care from three nurses and Dr. Dafoe. They grew up with their every activity, medical checkup, and schooling logged by experts and observed by crowds of tourists. The Dionne Quints’ constrained, even tragic, lives have been well-documented.
The Leivestads never made the pilgrimage to Ontario to see the Quints, but magazines and newspapers all over the world—including small-town weeklies in Iowa—closely followed the miracle in Ontario. Sometime in 1935, perhaps on her third birthday in January, Muriel had been given a set of Dionne dolls. And within months she had earned a little celebrity of her own as winner of her little town’s annual doll competition. Such events were common during the first decades of the twentieth century. Just as the “best baby” contests earlier in the century had encouraged mothers to dress and feed their babies more scientifically, doll parades encouraged little girls to imagine their future responsibilities as mothers. Although Muriel would be a loving aunt to Doris’s two daughters, she never had children of her own. She developed multiple sclerosis in the early 1950s and died in 1989.
James Marten is professor emeritus of history at Marquette University and the founding secretary-treasurer and a past president of the SHCY. He is author or editor of more than a dozen books on the history of children and youth, most recently the Oxford Handbook of the History of Youth Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023) and A Very Short Introduction to the History of Childhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
