Chase, Martha
Martha Chase, who was married to a doctor, created dolls with a white cotton cloth body and a head without a wig to make them easily cleanable. Some of her special child dolls were used in hospitals to train nurses.
Original WAC form indicated a death date of 1926; this has been revised due to information found at the following sources:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/28366626/martha-jencks-chase
Martha Jencks “Mattie” Wheaton Chase
BIRTH 12 Feb 1851
Pawtucket, Providence County, Rhode Island, USA
DEATH 25 Aug 1925 (aged 74)
Pawtucket, Providence County, Rhode Island, USA
BURIAL
Swan Point Cemetery
Providence, Providence County, Rhode Island, USA
MEMORIAL ID 28366626 · View Source
"This is the Martha Chase famed for inventing "Chase Dolls", which today command extremely high values on the antique doll market. She founded the M.J.Chase Company at 156 Broadway in Pawtucket,RI.
She was first married for just over three months to Dr.William Penn White by whom she apparently had twin girls after his death. They were married Sept 18,1870.
Her second husband, married Apr 30,1874, was Dr.Julian Augustine Chase.
Children(by second marriage): Elizabeth Kimball Chase, Anna Margaret Chase Sheldon, Julian Clement Chase, Ruth Chase Howland, Helen Burr Chase, Hazel White Chase, and Robert Dexter Chase."
and
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1dszzwv:
Which references the book "Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830-1930" by Miriam Formanek-Brunell (published by Yale University Press).
The Jstor stable link has an except from Chapter 3 of the book:
"Although a wax doll in a contemporary children’s story boasted that she was “modelled to perfection after the most approved forms of(Victorian feminine] beauty,” in contrast, dolls hand-painted with rougher brush strokes at the M.J. Chase Company provided an intentionally realistic texture.¹ Martha Jenks Wheaton Chase (1851–1925), descendant of early New England settlers, sewed dolls for her own children and those of neighbors and friends in the years before she converted the small cottage behind her home into the M.J. Chase Company."
