so letโs talk about Barbie
because I see these two vastly different takes around a lot, and as a Doll Person(TM), I have my own thoughts on the matter
Barbie was created by a toy developer named Ruth Handler. a toy developer who was constantly being told by the men who dominated her field that little girls only wanted baby dolls they could mother. no matter that sheโd seen her own preteen daughter eschewing baby dolls for paper dolls of adult women- girls must want to play at mothering, because that was all they were going to do when they grew up, right?
my own mom had a first-issue Barbie in 1959, when she was six years old. to her, Barbie was revolutionary.ย โHere was a doll,โ sheโs told me,ย โthat you werenโt playing Mama with. Here was a doll who had a life and a career outside of the home. Iโd never seen anything like that, and I loved it.โ
the career was modeling, and Barbie did indeed look more like a fashion illustration than a human woman. all of these things were true at the same time- the independence and the traditionally feminine trappings thereof
Barbie was far from the first fashion doll intended for children- that honor went to the French lady dolls of the 1850s-90s, another type pioneered by a woman in a male-dominated field. and like Barbie, her great-grandmothers were fraught with controversy. but thatโs a topic for another day
Barbie has been many things over her half-century of life. an astronaut, a president, a doctor- and a beauty pageant queen. a character who appears in videos about coping with depression- and a toy that once came with aย tiny diet book that simply saidย โDonโt eat.โ sheโs come in a variety of races, but it took until 1980 for Barbies of color to actually BE Barbies, not just โBarbieโs friends.โ she was created by a woman who saw that her daughter wanted to play out an independent future for herself, but that future took the form of a modeling job (not inherently bad, but not particularly challenging to the status quo of womenโs employment at the time)
Barbieโs legacy cannot be neatly summed up as good or bad, empowering or oppressive. sheโs complicated, as is our cultural relationship to her
but hey, what do I know? Iโm just a dumbfuck solipsistic girly-girl
germansingergirl
tangentwithtanner
janainaart
titsay
