“Someday I’m gonna be, exactly like you,” a wispy little voice sang out in Barbie’s first television commercial in 1959. “Till then… I’ll make believe that I am you.”
This was Ruth Handler’s aspirational vision when creating the world’s most popular toy: a three-dimensional fashion doll through which the daughters of postwar America invented their future selves – wife, mother, oceanographer, astronaut, dentist, attorney – a tomorrow full of possibilities and choices; all extraordinarily well-dressed.
Mattel’s Barbie played an unmatched role in shaping postwar girlhood. And like G.I. Joe – her boyhood counterpart – she faced fierce and complicated cultural crosswinds in the Vietnam era. But Barbie’s extraordinary capacity for reconciling radically changing ideas about what it meant to be an American women made her a cultural icon, and Ruth Handler a capitalist genius.
For countless girls, Barbie imagined a future embracing traditional female stereotypes. At eleven-and-one-half inches she was the consummate consumer, encouraging a natural association between adulting and conspicuous consumption. Children embraced the gendered world of affluent consumerism Barbie represented and she inspired daydreams of femininity, marriage, and privilege. Playtime taught them about shopping with her seemingly infinite line of accessories ranging from wardrobes to dune buggies, ski cabins, and a United Airlines “Friend Ship” airplane. In 1967, Mattel even offered a special trade-in promotion with Barbie herself, allowing owners to swap out used Barbies for the newer models, not unlike how adults buy a car. So, maybe it was all about the clothes?
Still, Barbie obviously leaned into emerging feminist values too. Whereas Hasbro’s G.I. Joe succumbed to ambivalence over the Vietnam War, Mattel never wavered from Barbie’s commercial concept. Instead, Barbie’s meaning evolved as the ideal of modern womanhood changed in the 1960s and 1970s, dependent on what each little girl projected onto her. Sure, many rejected the heavy emphasis on materialism in favor of career aspirations. But to remain glamorous and cool, Barbie’s environment required continual replenishing with new clothing and playset purchases that Mattel updated in accord with cultural trends – all sold separately. Just like her clothes, even Barbie’s circle of friends reflected the changing times – and Mattel’s marketing to promote sustained parental spending. She ostensibly gained a boyfriend Ken in 1961 (updated with contemporary hair a decade later), a playful best-friend Midge in 1963, younger sister Skipper in 1964, cool Mod cousin and friend, Francie and Stacey, respectively in 1966 and 1968, and African American Christie that same year.
While it is far too simple to characterize Barbie as a feminist, or feminist role model, she, nonetheless, did not invite little girls to become mommies. Her dazzling life was never predicated on June Cleaver. And thus, Barbie reshaped nurturing doll play while animating a rebellion, perhaps an unconscious one, against domesticity. Barbie – whose long legs and impossibly exaggerated breasts looked neither childlike nor motherly – tapped easily into an idealized teenage lifestyle: popular, carefree, unsupervised, and single.
Such versatility is what makes Barbie so special. And all those individualized memories and make-believe are what makes Barbie something close to a universal presence in women’s lives. Although, to be fair, these were some of the very same reasons mothers never liked Barbie nearly as much as their daughters did.
