Precise facts about their origins are rare, but as late as the 1950s, "Topsy and Eva" dolls were marketed by Sears, Montgomery Ward, and The Babyland Rag company (aka Bruckner).
Karen Sanchez-Eppler suspects that Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy in Uncle Tom's Cabin may have taken her name from the dolls, making for a "poignant and somewhat disturbing pairing with little Eva".
[4] Kimberly Wallace-Sanders addresses the controversial question of the possible meanings and uses behind the doll's design in her social history of the image and myth of the Southern mammy figure.
She writes: African American slave women may have given dolls like these to their daughters as a preparation for a possibility of a life devoted to nurturing two babies: one black and one white.
[7] Another in a red checked apron, "called a double ender because of the two opposite heads", is on view at the Philadelphia Doll Museum.