CHAPTER 1

The Spur of Humiliation

Ruth Barbie Doll Handler

Her 40th birthday party in 1999 was held at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York, and the guest list was as stunning as the posh surroundings. Hosted by music legend Dick Clark, the attendees included Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the Olympic gold medalist; Vera Wang, the famed fashion designer; Ann Moore, president of People magazine; entertainment executive Geraldine Laybourne, creator of Nickelodeon; Muriel Siebert, the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange; and Sylvia Earle, called Her Deepness by the New York Times , a Living Legend by the Library of Congress, and a Hero for the Planet by Time magazine for her pioneering work in oceanography; there was even an unveiling of special artwork by acclaimed photographer Annie Leibovitz. The entire event, which included a tribute to each of these Ambassadors of Dreams who encourage and inspire young women of the new millennium, teaching them that no goal is unattainable, was living proof of how successful the women’s movement had been in nurturing and acknowledging achievements by women. And yet, the honoree whom these women leaders had gathered to celebrate was the American icon most hated by feminist activists, an idol accused of everything from spurring sexism, consumerism, and body dysmorphic disorders to destroying self-esteem in young girls. The object of their scorn was puny and plastic but oh-so powerful: the 11½-inch birthday girl, Barbie.

Barbie’s creator, Ruth Handler—who started the Mattel toy company with her husband and a partner in 1945 and who launched Barbie in 1959—never accepted this pejorative, anti-woman interpretation of her famed doll. In fact, Ruth saw Barbie as a female pioneer and early feminist of sorts, as a confident, single woman whose endless career possibilities (some 150 to date) taught young ladies that they had choices and didn’t need a husband to define their worth or role in life. This sense of self-sufficiency was a revolutionary notion in the gender-restrictive days of the 1950s, as first-generation Barbie owner M.G. Lord noted in Forever Barbie (1994):

[Barbie] didn’t teach us to nurture, like our clinging, dependent Betsy Wetsys and Chatty Cathys. She taught us independence. Barbie was her own woman. She could invent herself with a costume change: sing a solo in the spotlight one minute, pilot a starship the next. She was Grace Slick and Sally Ride, Marie Osmond and Marie Curie. She was all that we could be . . .

The idea of an adult doll for girls dawned on Ruth while watching her daughter Barbara (for whom Barbie was named) play with her friends. Ruth noticed that, as the girls grew older, they began to shun the baby dolls in diapers and infant clothes and to gravitate toward paper dolls, which they could dress in adult outfits and imagine in more grown-up situations. They were using the dolls to project their . . . own futures as adult woman, noted Ruth. But paper dolls were flimsy and uninspiring, which meant one thing to the ever-entrepreneurial Ruth: a market opportunity. If only we could take this play pattern and three-dimensionalize it, we would have something very special, she said, and that something very special would be Barbie—the most successful toy in history.

Ruth’s idea of an adult-proportioned doll for kids seemed outrageous in its day. Ruth, no mother is going to buy her daughter a doll with breasts, said her husband, and the other male executives at Mattel agreed. But a non-shapely doll seemed ridiculous to Ruth, especially for the market she was aiming for. Every little girl needed a doll through which to project herself into her dream of her future, argued Ruth. "If she was going to do role playing of what she would be like when she was 16 or 17, it was a little stupid to play with a doll that had a flat chest. So I gave it beautiful