Some time back in the early 1950s—that so-called golden age of American post-war affluence with its lushly saturated Technicolor movies, spanking new suburbs, and cars as large as beached whales—an observant mother watched her daughter’s fascination with a group of paper dolls. Unlike the girl’s three-dimensional playthings—bald babies or chubby toddlers—the paper dolls depicted attractive young women.  The girl posed them, animated them with stories and snippets of dialogue, and changed their paper dresses.  Her enjoyment in them, and the potential they held for dynamic, dramatic play, seemed limitless. If only, the mother mused, there were a more substantial version of these flimsy dolls; wouldn’t her daughter just love them even more?

Another mother might have breathed a sigh, put the thought aside and gone about her business.  But the mother in this little scenario was none other than Ruth Handler, one of the founders of the fledgling toy and novelty company, Mattel; the girl was her daughter Barbara.  Ever since Handler had watched Barbara with her paper dolls, the idea of creating an adult doll— onto which girls could project their desire to act like, and indeed become, grown women, she was determined to turn her vision into a petite, plastic reality.

At first, no one else at Mattel seemed to share Handler’s enthusiasm; the designers balked, claiming that the level of detail she wanted—among other features, she asked for fingernail polish and eyelashes—would make the doll prohibitively expensive. “That was the official reason my idea was rejected,” recalled Handler. “But I really think the squeamishness of those designers—every single one of them male—stemmed mostly from the fact that the doll would have breasts.”
It wasn’t until 1956, when Handler and her family took a trip to Lucerne, Switzerland, and stumbled upon a shop window filled with eleven-inch adult style dolls—all with identical faces, but each wearing a different, cunningly rendered ski outfit—that her idea got the jump start it needed.  Handler actually didn’t like the faces, which she deemed “hard” and “cartoonish.”  But the body was just right. Here were, “the breasts, the small waist, the long tapered legs” she had been looking for.  Eagerly she went into the shop to learn more.
The object responsible for her excitement was not a toy, at least not in the conventional sense.  Rather she was a familiar, at least to German-speaking Europeans, fraulein known as Bild Lili, a blonde, pony-tailed character that appeared regularly in a comic strip published in the German newspaper, Bild Zeitung (a lowbrow periodical whose journalistic aspirations were on par with those of the National Enquirer.) Lili, the comic strip character, was often seen in high heels and tight clothes; her chief occupation seemed to be getting money out of the hapless men with whom she cheerfully and rather wantonly consorted.

In her three-dimensional incarnation, Lili was sold mostly in tobacco shops and at newsstands. She was marketed to men, not children, and a newspaper ad from the time showed a beaming suitor presenting his girlfriend with both a Lili doll and a bouquet of flowers.  What the original recipients of this quasi-pornographic offering thought is something we will probably never know.  But even then, that was immaterial. Barbara’s manifest delight in the doll was all the proof Handler needed; her hunch had been right. 
She asked her daughter if she wanted one of the dolls.  The answer was a resounding yes, though the girl had trouble choosing which outfit she preferred.  When Handler wanted to know if she could if she could purchase one fully dressed doll and another outfit separately, the salesperson responded with a rude, “Only-a-stupid-American-would-ask-such-a-question” look.  So Handler bought two dolls.  The next day, when the family flew to Vienna, they found Bild Lili waiting there to greet them. This time, she was wearing yet another outfit.  “Oh, that’s the prettiest,” said Barbara with a sigh. “I wish I’d gotten that one.”  Handler later said something inside her clicked when she heard that wistful remark. Clearly, separating the dolls from the outfits had an importance she inchoately grasped, even back then. The doll + outfits equation would become an essential part of the larger Barbie calculus. 
Handler brought several of these dolls back in her suitcase and this time , she was able to persuade Mattel’s designers to produce a prototype. (Early examples kept coming back with nipples, which had to be filed down; even Handler wasn’t ready for that degree of naturalism.) She named the doll Barbie, in honor of her daughter, and in February 1959, presented her at the Toy Fair in New York City. For the occasion, Barbie wore a black and white striped bathing suit, shoes and sunglasses. Her price, three dollars, was modest even back then. A handful of outfits, packaged and sold separately, as Handler had envisioned, were displayed along with her; these cost between one and three dollars.

Barbie appeared on the scene at a cultural moment that was split right down the middle.  Demure television wives and mothers like those on Leave it to Beaver and the Donna Reed Show coexisted with smoldering, big-screen sex pots like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield.   Women were sexless behind their dainty aprons, or pouring out of their skin-tight sheaths. There seemed to be little middle ground. Toy buyers may well have been flummoxed by Barbie, not entirely sure in which camp she belonged.  She radiated sex, but she was, after all, a toy.  One mail order company placed a big order; a few others ordered a token number of dolls.  But at least half of the buyers, most of them men, wanted nothing whatsoever to do with Barbie. She made them uncomfortable.  There were those breasts, for one thing. The slender, endless legs for another. And then there was her expression: sullen, knowing and strangely covert. Her eyes were thickly rimmed with dark eyeliner; her lips, a glossy, candy-apple red. 
“Ruth, little girls want baby dolls,” said one dismissive buyer. “They want to pretend to be mommies.”
“No they don’t,” Handler shot back. “Little girls want to pretend to be bigger girls.”
Bingo. Handler, the keen-eyed mother whose aha! moment came from watching the way her own child played, turned out to have been prophetic in her understanding of what America’s—and eventually the world’s—, young girls would want. Despite the initial coolness of her reception, by the summer of 1959, Barbie was flying off the shelves, and stores could not keep the dolls in stock.  A mere eight months
after Barbie’s debut, Handler was, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times, driving a pink Thunderbird and running a half a million-dollar business. A star had been born, and Ruth Handler was her able midwife.

Barbie continued strong throughout the early 1960s; her clothing, her accoutrements, and her Dream House adding to her skyrocketing success.
In 1961 Mattel brought out the ultimate Barbie accessory: Ken, Barbie’s square-jawed, crew cut sporting, steady beau, named for the Handler’s son.  In the late 1960’s, though, the Women’s Liberation movement caused Barbie to seem out of step with the new social reality, and she faltered a bit. In 1968, Mattel gave her a voice, but, as M.G. Lord, author of “Forever Barbie” noted, it did little more than allow her “declare her membership in the Silent Majority.”   With phrases like “I love being a fashion model,” and “Would you like to go shopping?”  Barbie sounded like a relic from another age.  By 1971, NOW had launched a full frontal assault on Barbie, condemning Mattel, along with several other companies, for its sexist advertising.  But that was the least of Mattel’s troubles. After a period of diversification—the company now manufactured hamster cages, aquariums and other pet supplies—the toy behemoth experienced a downturn, showing losses in quarter after quarter. Stock prices tumbled and in 1973, Ruth Handler was forced to resign as president; she was also, in Lord’s words,  “publicly repudiated” and “stripped of her power.”

But though Barbie’s world may have been rocked by these developments, it didn’t crumble and by the 1980s, when Jill Barad came on board at Mattel, Barbie moved back into the limelight, bigger and better than ever.  Barad, who had had a brief stint in the movies, was something of a wunderkind; she had come from Coty Cosmetics, where she rose from trainer of department store demonstrators to brand manager of the entire line in three gasp-inducing years.  Barad’s new tag line was “We Girls Can Do Anything.” As Lord says, the doll was clearly “…positioned as a career woman by career woman who knew what it took to achieve in the business world.”

In her rich, varied existence, Barbie has had stints as a baby sitter, model, astronaut, paleontologist, Army medic, figure skater and NASCAR driver.  She’s also been a rap artist, Air Force jet pilot, surgical nurse, surgeon, dentist and pediatrician. She’s sung on the Grand Ole Oprey, joined Operation Desert Storm, played basketball with the WNBA and run for president—three times.
By now, on the eve of her 50th birthday, Barbie is not only the single most successful doll ever produced, she’s morphed into a legend and an icon, with all the highly charged and complex meanings that such terms imply.     Representations of Barbie abound in popular culture; numerous artists, including pop-culture prince Andy Warhol, Maggie Robbins, who studded Barbie’s body with nails, and photographer Cindy Sherman, who captured Barbie in some decidedly not G-rated positions, have incorporated Barbie into their work.  Scratch any woman old enough to have owned a Barbie, and you unleash a Proustian stream of memories: these women can tell you what dolls and clothes they had, how they used them, what complicated stories they wove for them to act out.
Of course, there’s always been a Barbie backlash, and the poor doll has had to defend herself from an onslaught of attackers that would have done in a lesser piece of plastic. There were mothers who refused to buy her, women who actively bashed her, writers who weighed in against her. Journalist-turned-novelist Anna Quindlen fantasized about driving a “silver lamé stake” through Barbie’s plastic heart; Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Carol Shields says that her expression, with “its dumb shine of self-absorption, its trippingly tartish look of one who is out for all she can get,” is “eerily disturbing.”
Barbie has been held responsible numerous eating disorders and charged with offering girls a wholly unrealistic body image.   A typical Barbie doll is 11.5 inches, which, at a 1/6 scale, would make her 5 feet 9 inches tall. Her vital statistics have been estimated at 36 inches (bust), 18 inches (waist) and 33 inches (hips). According to a study done by the University Central Hospital in Helsinki, Finland, she would lack the 17 to 22 percent body fat required for a woman to menstruate. Slumber Party Barbie, who made her debut in 1965, came with a book entitled How to Lose Weight; one of its more succinct but pertinent tips was Don’t eat. The doll also came with a pink bathroom scale reading 110 lbs.  At that weight, Barbie would be around 35 lbs. underweight for a woman of her height.   But all this fuss over the doll’s proportions seems a little beside the point.  If we understand Barbie not as an actual person, but as hyper-real, a necessary exaggeration of the female form through which the complex process of identification and projection can take place, her no-way-in-the-world human form begins to make a different kind of sense. Anorexia is a grave and deeply troubling medical condition, but ascribing its complicated constellation of causes, meanings and motivations to Barbie is overkill. After all, does anyone complain that the action figures (dolls, every last one of them) so beloved of boys are offering distorted male body images? Somehow the tree-trunk like thighs and necks of these plastic pals never get called into question.
Interestingly enough, Mattel has said that Barbie’s waist was originally made so tiny because the waistbands of clothes that she wore, with their seams, snaps, and zippers, added bulk to her figure.  The small waist, then, was a compensation for this perceived problem rather than an effort to erode the confidence of girls. In the late 1990s, Mattel introduced Really Rad Barbie, a doll whose waist was wider and bust smaller, thus reflecting a more “real” female body type.  But real, we have to remember, is in the eye and mind of the beholder and when, if ever, have children demanded that their toys be “real”?

Barbie has also been branded as a bimbo, an airhead, an insatiable consumer who teaches little girls that there is nothing in life quite so exciting as changing their clothes. Then there is the complicated issue of race. The Barbie clan began its life as white and remained so until 1967, when Colored Francie made her debut. But this Francie doll was produced using the existing head molds for the white Francie, and, other than her dark skin, lacked any other distinguishing African features. The first African American doll in the Barbie circle is usually regarded as Christie, who appeared in 1968. It wasn’t until 1980 that actual” Black and Hispanic Barbie dolls hit the market. Yet despite Mattel’s attempt to take a more racially sensitive stance, Ann DuCille, professor of American and African-American Literature at the University of California, contends that  “…white Barbie dolls [are] the norm. Black Barbie is toyland’s ‘but also’ just as black people are society’s ‘but also.’”   DuCille quotes a black mother who says that although her daughter played with a black Barbie, she still asked for “the real Barbie.”  Real in this sentence still means white. (Nor has the racial issue disappeared. In 1997 Mattel and Nabisco embarked on a cross-promotion of Barbie and Oreo cookies. Oreo Fun Barbie offered little  girls the chance to play while sharing “America’s favorite cookie.” As had become the norm, Mattel manufactured both a white and a black version of the doll, apparently unaware that in the African American community Oreo is a derogatory term meaning for a person who is “black on the outside and white on the inside,” like the chocolate sandwich cookie itself. Black critics took the doll to task and she did very poorly in the marketplace;  Mattel recalled the unsold stock, making it highly prized by collectors.)
Yet for that, Barbie endures. Part of her formidable power is the kind of projection she invites.  Pulitzer prize-winning author Jane Smiley enthusiastically welcomed the doll into her home; in her view, Barbie was, “…meant to be fiddled with, thought about, manipulated, done to,” which is no small thing in a world of toys that talk, walk, and even attempt to think for the children who play with them. In contrast, Barbie does nothing—and everything. She must be animated by the girl—or occasional boy—who picks her up; it the heart and mind of the child that brings her to compellingly to life.  “I designed Barbie with a blank face, so that the child could project her own dreams of the future onto Barbie,” said Handler.  “I never wanted to play up the glamorous life of Barbie. I wanted the owner to create a personality for the doll.”   Even the talking Barbies that appeared on the market never enjoyed the ascendancy that the mute, yet wholly eloquent dolls, did.

Barbie was both a child of her time and yet completely cutting edge. Yes, she seemed emblematic of the status quo, intent on fitting into existing structures, not questioning or dismantling them. Historian and author Stephanie Coontz notes, “The marketability of toys like Barbie…was a logical, though ironic extension of 1950s gender roles, marital norms and consumerist values.”   Early outfits produced by Mattel had names like Theatre Date, Movie Date, Party Date, Friday Nite Date and Sorority Meeting, all of which suggest that Barbie was not about to challenge anyone’s idea of traditional femininity.  But wait—what about Tennis Anyone, Ski Queen, Icebreaker, Career Girl and Graduation, also offered in the early days? Such names begin to crackle with the sparks of an alternative narrative; clearly there was something beyond dating on Barbie’s agenda. Even back then, Barbie was longing to break out of her gender confines, and into the larger world.

But even more interesting is the familial construct from which Barbie emerged.  She has younger sisters (Skipper, Stacie, Kelly, Krissy, the short-lived twins, Tutti and Todd) cousins (Francie and Jazzie) friends  (Midge, Miko, Whitney, Nikki, Devon, Kira, to name a few) and of course, the steadfast Ken.  But her parents play a minimal—and totally off- stage—role; no parent dolls were ever produced. Instead, Barbie seems to have sprung, fully formed and Athena-like from the head of Zeus.  She is an agent on her own behalf, a singular sensation, living her own life, forging her own destiny.  She may have been chased, but she wasn’t caught.  In all the Barbie-spawned scenarios in which she has played, the one role Barbie never, ever takes on is that of wife. Ken, for all his virile good looks and affable charm, really is an accessory. Barbie might don the white dress——Mattel has made numerous bridal ensembles for her—but she has, and will always continue, to fly solo.

In recent years, Barbie’s gone haute couture, with clothing and accessories designed by the likes of Roberto Cavalli, Yves St. Laurent, Pierre Cardin, Christian Dior, Jean-Paul Gaultier, and Giorgio Armani.  Through the mini-miracle of computer animation, she’s become the star of several features films, including Barbie In The Nutcracker, Barbie As Rapunzel, Barbie Of Swan Lake and Barbie As The Princess And The Pauper.  And she’s staked her claim on the Web with the wildly popular Internet Barbie make-up game, which allows girls to alter her hair, make up and overall look.
And Barbie’s reach has extended still further, to the vast sub-cult of adult Barbie worshippers, those grown-ups who collect, display, buy, and sell, and for whom the words “mMint in box” have a freighted, even holy significance.  Right now, Mattel estimates that there are well over 100,000 active Barbie collectors. Ninety percent are women and their average age is 40. Forty-five percent of them spend more than $1000 a year on their dolls. Vintage Barbie dolls from the early years are the most valuable; a mint-in-box Barbie from 1959 sold for $3552.50 on eBay in October 2004. On September 26, 2006, a 1965 Barbie in Midnight Red set a world record at auction of £9,000 sterling (US $17,000) at Christie’s in London.
To address the avid demands of these collectors, Mattel has in recent years created a wide range of Barbie dolls, including porcelain versions and depictions of Barbie as characters from classic television series such as The Munsters, I Love Lucy, I Dream of Jeannie and Star Trek. In 2004 Mattel introduced the Color Tier system—pink, pink, silver, gold and platinum—to rank the dolls in terms of their scarcity.    
What lies ahead for Barbie as she marches proudly into her second fifty years? What new challenges await her, and into what new territory will she boldly go?  For Barbie is both mirror and model, reflection and avatar.  As long as there is a need for the kind of magically liberating, open-ended fantasy she not allows but inspires, Barbie will be with us.  Happy birthday, Babs, you diminutive dazzler, you.  Happy birthday and many happy returns of the day.