March 9, 1959: Barbie

Barbie turns 65 today.  It’s unlikely the controversial cultural icon will need plastic surgery.  Barbara Millicent Roberts first appeared at the American International Toy Fair, wearing a zebra-striped maillot and stilettos.  In her birthday suit, Barbie had breasts, a tiny waist, and impossible proportions.  She was America’s first adult-looking doll, a blond, blue-eyed, white bombshell.  Her appearance generated decades of debate about beauty standards, gender roles, role models, and race. 

Parents initially responded so negatively that Sears refused to sell Barbie, but little girls loved her.  The doll cost three dollars.  Mattel sold 350,000 in year one, eventually converting it from the nation’s third largest toy company into a global powerhouse.  In 2021, Mattel made 86 million dolls annually, earning $1.7 billion in annual sales from 150 countries.  Ninety percent of American girls own at least one Barbie. 

Long before the Baby Boom that followed World War II, baby dolls had been the norm.  Girls pretended to be mothers, absorbing society’s expectations about their futures.  Baby dolls even played a key role in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court case overturning separate but equal school segregation.  Thurgood Marshall, arguing on behalf of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, asked Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark to conduct an experiment with Black children.  The Black psychologists offered them four identical baby dolls, with light and dark skin.  Because the children preferred to play with the white dolls, the Clarks concluded that segregation made Black children feel inferior.

Barbie was not a baby.  She was a grownup ready to be dressed up and become whatever a child imagined.  Her clothes and accessories tracked women’s changing roles.  Initially a “fashion doll,” the first Barbie had twenty-two outfits, for sorority meetings, date nights, and her modeling job.  Carol Spence, an art college graduate and NOW member, designed Barbie’s wardrobe for thirty-five years, outfitting her as a stewardess, nurse, secretary, dog walker, teacher, and later, as a pilot, surgeon, CEO (in a pink power suit), veterinarian, and politician.  She has had almost 250 careers.  Barbie became an astronaut in 1965, eighteen years before Sally Ride.  She has run for president every four years since 1992.  Her inaugural gowns sparkle with sequins. 

The only roles Barbie has not played are wife and mother, which disconcerted some moms.   She has a boyfriend (Ken Carson, 1961); a BFF (Midge, 1963); and younger sister (Skipper, 1964).  Midge once had a detachable baby bump with a baby inside; it was discontinued.  So was “Teen Talk Barbie,” who chirped “Math class is tough,” prompting protests from the American Association of University Women.  It organized in 1881 to disprove the claims of Edward Clarke, a Harvard medical school professor.  He asserted that using their brains made girls infertile and unmarriageable.  

Barbie’s first Black friend, “Colored Francie,” appeared in 1968.  The first Black Barbie, “black . . . beautiful . . . dynamite,” was introduced in 1979.  Latina and Puerto Rican Barbies followed.  Today Barbie comes in eight skin tones, twenty-three hair colors, twenty hair styles, eighteen eye colors, and several body types, some with thicker waists and flat feet.  In 2019, Mattel released gender-neutral dolls with no assigned sex and a variety of wigs and clothes.  Other Barbies have prosthetic limbs or are confined to wheelchairs. 

In partnership with the National Down Syndrome Society and medical professionals, a Barbie with Down’s Syndrome and different proportions was launched in 2023.  Her dress has blue and yellow butterflies, images associated with Down Syndrome awareness, and a pink necklace with three upward chevrons, representing the extra chromosome which causes the condition. 

“Sheroes” and “Inspiring Women” are special collections that include Ibtihaj Muhammad, a hijab-wearing American Olympic fencer; Black NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  Ken got an upgrade in 1978 (Superstar Disco Ken) and 1982 (Malibu Ken).  Magic Earring Ken (1993) was so much cooler that some fans thought he was gay. 

In 1962, Mattel built Barbie a Dream House, long before passage of the 1974 Equal Credit Act, before women could qualify for credit in their own names, apply for a mortgage, or finance a car without a man’s signature, even if they had jobs.  Nonetheless, Barbie acquired an Austin-Healey 3000, her iconic pink Corvette, an RV, a Jeep, a Porsche, and an EV.  (Barbie has recently worked as a renewable-energy engineer.)

The Aryan blond Barbie was the brainchild of the daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants.  Born in 1916, the youngest of ten children, Ruth Mosko Handler was raised by her oldest sister.  A summer job at Paramount Pictures prompted a move to Hollywood.  She married her high school sweetheart, Izzy Elliott Handler, in 1938.  While he fought in WWII, she cared for their children, Barbara and Kenneth.  In 1945, with a short-term partner, they formed Mattel (“-el” for Elliott), an industrial design company, making plastic products, including movie props and doll house furniture.  She served as its president and board chair until 1975.

Watching her little girl play with paper dolls, changing their clothes and acting out stories, Handler envisioned an adult doll, but the men at Mattel dismissed her idea.  On a trip to Europe in 1956, her teenage daughter discovered an adult-doll called Lilli, based on a comic strip character.  Created for adults, it was immediately popular with children.  Handler bought one for Barbara and two for Mattel, finally persuading her colleagues to produce an American version. 

After undergoing a radical mastectomy in 1970, Handler founded Ruthton.  The company manufactured prosthetic breasts called “Nearly Me.”  Betty Ford was a client.  In 1975, prosecution by the Securities and Exchange Commission for fraud and false reporting resulted in her conviction and forced her resignation.  She pleaded no contest, claiming her illness had made her inattentive.  Ruth Handler died in 2002, during surgery for colon cancer.

Rhea Perlman played Handler in the 2023 blockbuster, Barbie.  It was a phenomenon.  Women flocked to multiplexes:  mothers, daughters, sisters, singles, bachelorettes, of every background, resplendent in pink, including pink hijabs.  It was the first film directed by a woman, Greta Gerwig, to earn more than $1 billion at the box office.  Barbie, played by Margot Robbie, wants to escape being “put in a box” and become real.  Her human ally, played by America Ferrera, believes, “It’s literally impossible to be a woman.”  In the last scene, Barbie Handler is entering an ob-gyn office wearing pink Birkenstocks.

A 2018 documentary, Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie, assessed the effect Barbie had on American culture, on gender expectations and body image.  It interviewed feminists Roxanne Gay, Peggy Orenstein, and Gloria Steinem.  Gerwig’s movie recharged the conversation.  A review of the literature about Barbie and body image concluded that “the link between Barbie doll exposure and thin-ideal internalization has yet to be established.”  Other studies are outdated, unconvincing, or lack sufficient sample size.  The focus may need to shift from how Barbie looks to how she acts.

Loved or loathed, Barbie has become a symbol of female empowerment and the freedom to define oneself.  With Barbie, “a little girl could be anything she wanted to be,” wrote Handler in her autobiography.  “Barbie . . . represented the fact that a woman has choices.”  Barbie was not a sex toy but a tool for sex role socialization, becoming a reflection rather than a rejection of feminism, a plastic doll challenging patriarchy. 

Ruth Handler (photo credits: Mattel & Vanity Fair; see below)

SOURCES

Robin Gerber, Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her (Collins Business, 2009).

M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll (William Morrow, 1994).

Emily Tamkin, “Still Making a Big Splash,” Smithsonian (June 2023).

Karin Tanabe, “Spencer Tailored her Career Around Barbie,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/07/16/dressing-barbie-carol-spencer-interview/

https://driving.ca/car-culture/vintage-collectible/evolutionary-barbies-cars-through-the-decades

Sarah Marsh, “Barbie Down with Down’s Syndrome Launched by Mattel,” (April 25, 2023), https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/25/barbie-doll-with-downs-syndrome-launched-by-mattel

Ruth Handler and Jacqueline Shannon, Dream Doll: The Ruth Handler Story (Longmeadow Press, 1994).

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/29/arts/ruth-handler-whose-barbie-gave-dolls-curves-dies-at-85.html

Anthony Breznican, “Ruth Handler: Sex Toys, Financial Crimes and the Origin of Barbie,” Vanity Fair (July 2, 2023), https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/07/ruth-handler-barbie-true-story

Sarah Krouse and Anne Steele, “Women Own This Summer. The Economy Proves It,” Wall Street Journal (August 12-13, 2023).

Andrea Nevins, Tiny Shoulders:  Rethinking Barbie (2016), https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7259104/

Alyssa Rosenberg, “I’m a Feminist Mom.  Barbie Is Welcome in My Dreamhouse,”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/20/barbie-movie-feminism-parenting/