Critics complained that the Huxtables weren’t realistic, but some say that have-it-all, do-it-all Claire realistically reflected the spirit of the times. The notion of the modern woman succeeding was celebrated, and Claire’s seemingly impossible achievements gave us something to strive for.
Fun Fact: Credited as Phylicia Ayres-Allen, Phylicia Rashad played a munchkin in the 1978 film The Wiz.
Barbie Doll’s Mom
It takes a mother of invention to create a great gal.
In her long career as one of America’s most popular toys, the glam Barbie doll has been a teacher, a singer, a stewardess, and even an astronaut—but never a mother. Too bad, since Ruth Handler was one of the world’s most creative entrepreneur moms.
BARBIE’S IMMIGRANT ROOTS
Barbie’s creator had few toys when she was growing up in Denver, Colorado. Ruth was born in 1916 to Jewish immigrants who’d fled persecution in Poland. As the youngest of ten children, Ruth’s family situation wasn’t exactly easy. Her mother was illiterate and in such poor health that Ruth had to leave home to live with her older sister.
When she was in high school, Ruth fell head over heels for a guy named Elliot Handler. She eventually moved to California and the two were married there in 1938. The Handlers’ marriage wasn’t only a love match that lasted 63 years, but also a strong business partnership. Elliot became an expert at creating giftware, while Ruth was a whiz at marketing and merchandising his products. By 1944 the successful couple could afford a house that Elliot designed for Ruth, himself, and their two children, Barbara (nicknamed “Barbie” or “Babs”) and Kenneth (nicknamed “Ken”). Barbie and Ken sound familiar, right?
In 1945, Ruth and Elliot formed a company that would become one of the largest toy companies in the world—Mattel. The first Mattel products were wooden picture frames, but the company branched out into toys when Elliot started making dollhouse furniture from leftover frame scraps. For the next decade Mattel grew exponentially, with Elliot and a partner creating toys and Ruth successfully marketing them.
RUTH’S OWN LITTLE DOLL INSPIRES HER
As a mom in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Ruth noticed that her daughter Barbara didn’t have many types of dolls to play with—mostly baby dolls; dolls that looked like little girls; and paper dolls. Ruth noticed that Barbara preferred paper dolls, which looked like fashionable young women and had multiple gorgeous outfits that could be changed frequently. This observation gave Ruth an idea. She wanted Mattel to create a teenaged doll or a career woman doll for her girls to play with, but Mattel’s male executives discouraged her until she gave up.
A BARBIE IS BORN
Then in 1956, the Handlers went on a European vacation. In a little store in Lucerne, Switzerland, Barbara finally saw a three-dimensional molded plastic doll that interested her. It was a Lilli doll made in Germany. A mature German lady, Lilli had an alluring female shape and face. She was actually created as a takeoff on a bawdy comic strip character and designed to appeal to the male bar crowd, but little Barbara didn’t know that, and Ruth didn’t much care. She bought Lilli dolls for her daughter and herself. Based on her daughter’s reaction to the doll, Ruth became convinced that this idea for a new type of doll would be a runaway success.
Ruth used Lilli as a prototype for her own doll, Barbie, named after Barbara Handler. With Barbie, a little girl could act out the fantasy of growing up and having beautiful clothes to do it in. “My whole philosophy of Barbie was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be,” Ruth wrote in her autobiography. “Barbie always represented the fact that a woman has choices.” Barbie would be a fashionable young woman with a fashionable wardrobe that could be changed and varied.
BARBIE TAKES OFF
Ruth presented her idea to the suits at Mattel. At first they resisted the doll’s zaftig figure and the idea that any mother would buy a doll with—well—large breasts. Ruth insisted that the doll would sell, so Barbie made her first appearance at the 1959 Toy Fair in New York City, wearing a zebra-striped bathing suit and costing all of three dollars. The male buyers didn’t like the doll themselves, but the little girls sure did. Mattel was deluged with orders and sold more than 350,000 dolls that year.
Five years later, Barbie was a million-dollar doll. Ruth used all her marketing skills to keep Barbie current and on top of the latest trends. As women took on more varied careers, Barbie took them on too, including becoming an astronaut in 1965. Barbie’s social circle began to expand with the introduction of the Ken doll, which was named after Ruth’s son. Then came Midge and Skipper. And eventually Stacie, Todd, and Cheryl, who were named for Ruth’s grandchildren.
Despite big earnings, Barbie’s figure remained controversial. The National Organization for Women argued that Barbie gave girls an unhealthy body image. If she were five foot six instead of 11 inches tall, her measurements would be “unrealistic” and rather top heavy. An academic expert once calculated that a woman’s likelihood of being shaped like Barbie was less than one in 100,000. Feminists, concentrating on Barbie’s chest, missed the fact that her creator—who by now was a grandmother—had become one of the top executives in the male-dominated toy industry. Ruth liked to point out that successful women—and feminists—would come up to her and admit they’d loved to play with Barbie. Today a new Barbie doll is sold approximately every three seconds. Barbie is a $1.5 billion business for Mattel, so tomorrow’s feminists probably have Barbies as well. All in all, Ruth’s creation has become an icon of American life.
Mother Knows Breast
Ruth Handler’s life took a new entrepreneurial turn after a battle with breast cancer and subsequent mastectomy. Finding an acceptable breast prosthesis proved difficult, so Ruth developed her own and founded Nearly Me, a company that manufactures breast prostheses for cancer survivors. Summing up her career, Ruth liked to say, “I’ve gone from breast to breast.”
Labor Pains
Could you afford a mom’s services if you had to pay for them?
What would it cost to pay someone to do all the jobs that mom does during the day? What would it cost to hire a mom to cook for you, keep your house clean, help solve your personal problems, and nurse you when you’re sick—not to mention walk your dog? Get ready for sticker shock.
WHAT IS WORK, ANYWAY?
In 1934, economist Margaret Reid developed a way to measure the value of unpaid labor—the third-person criterion. If a third person could be hired to do a job, then the job would qualify as work. So technically, the hours Mom spends cleaning the house, balancing the checkbook, and acting as a taxi driver for her kids can be considered work.
DETERMINING MOM’S NET WORTH
Ric Edelman, chair of Edelman Financial Services, put together a list of all the different job tasks and titles that seems to come close to all the stuff moms do every day. Then Edelman tried to quantify a mom’s market value in the 2002 job market based on all these job descriptions.
Here are just a few positions and their annual salaries:
Animal caretaker
$22,256
Chef
$25,110
Child-care worker
$18,179
Computer systems analyst
$60,860
Financial manager
$70,366
Food service worker
$14,710
Housekeeper
$15,410
Management analyst
$52,457
Psychologist
$56,576
Registered nurse
$45,614
And that doesn’t even begin to consider her transportation and property management services. Or making sure that the species continues. When Edelman Financial Services added up all of Mom’s salaries (which included more than the ones listed above), her total deserved pay came to a hefty $635,000.
Not everyone agrees with this nice six-figure salary. Economic journalist Ann Crittenden, author of The Price of Motherhood, ha
s a more conservative estimate of Mom’s market value, putting it at about $60,000. Crittenden sees motherhood as a very skilled, mid-level management job. Whether worth $600,000 or $60,000, getting two economists to agree on anything is about as easy as attaching an accurate price tag on all that Mom does for us.
The Real Migrant Mother
The portrait of a weary migrant mother and her hungry children struck America’s heart and made Florence Thompson an American icon.
The famous photograph shows a tired mother staring into the distance, her fingers nervously touching her cheek. Two of her young daughters huddle against her for comfort and a baby rests in her lap. Taken as part the National Farm Security Administration’s (NFSA) photography project during the Great Depression, “Migrant Mother” put a human face on the hardships of that era. The powerful image became so symbolic that people tended to forget that the subjects of the photo were not just symbols. They were real people: Florence Owens Thompson and her three daughters, Katherine, Ruby, and baby Norma.
THE LEGEND
On a miserably cold, wet afternoon in March 1936, photographer Dorothea Lange drove into a migrant camp near Nipomo, California, after seeing a sign advertising pea-picking work for farm laborers. For over a month, Dorothea, a staff photographer for NFSA, had been documenting the plight of migrant farmer workers. Because of an early frost, most of the pea harvest had been destroyed, and she knew the workers were down on their luck.
Near the entrance to the camp, Lange saw a woman and her children in a ragged tent. As Lange later described:
I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet...I did not ask her name or her history. She told me that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.
She snapped six images and hurried home to develop them. She rushed her prints to the San Francisco News, along with the story of starvation in Nipomo. The News ran two of the photos with the story, which was picked up and syndicated nationally with the headline “Ragged, Hungry, Broke, Harvest Workers Live in Squalor.” As a result of the coverage, 20,000 pounds of federal food supplies were sent to the hungry in Nipomo within a week. But the food never reached Florence or her children because, by that time, they had moved on to Watsonville, California.
NO OKIE FROM MUSKOGEE
Though Lange never asked the woman her name or her history, most people assumed her to be a typical Okie. In the mid 1930s, drought had turned the Midwest into what became known as the “Dust Bowl.” The drought and lack of jobs resulted in small farmers (particularly those from Oklahoma) losing their farms and homes. Many packed up their cars and headed to California, where there was seasonal work picking the harvest.
Florence Owen Thompson’s story was unique. Most Okies were of European descent, but Florence was a Native American, born in 1903 in Oklahoma’s Indian Territory. Most Okies were new to California, but Florence had been living there for ten years before she was photographed. The death of her first husband in 1931, not the Dust Bowl, had forced her to work in the fields in order to support her six children.
As for the pea-picker camp, according to Florence’s son Troy Owens, they had only stopped in Nipomo because the car broke down. Florence set up their tent near the entrance to the camp and waited while the boys went into town to fix the car. Florence’s family wasn’t starving, although many in the camps were. As for selling tires for food, they had no extra tires to sell. Their car, once it was running again, certainly wouldn’t get very far without tires.
After they had moved on to Watsonville, one of Florence’s sons happened to see a copy of his mother’s photo in the San Francisco News and rushed home to see her for fear she was dead. He couldn’t think of any other reason why his mother’s picture would be in the newspaper and was relieved to find her very much alive. He showed her the photo, but she just looked at it in silence and remained silent about it for many years. Perhaps she even forgot about it. The photo’s popularity never helped her family to survive the hard times. Florence and her family continued to move from town to town, harvesting crops and taking odd jobs whenever they could.
In the 1940s Florence took a job at a state hospital and eventually married her second husband, George Thompson, a hospital administrator. She settled down in Modesto, California, having finally made it along with her family (make that ten kids now) into the middle class.
TIME TO SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT
Florence had moved past those bleak moments in a cold, wet camp in Nipomo, but her photo remained frozen in time. Time, in fact, only increased the popularity of “Migrant Mother”. Finally in the 1970s, after seeing her own face reproduced continually and after hearing her story told incorrectly, Florence wrote to the Modesto Bee.
She complained that Dorothea Lange had promised that the photos would only be used to help the people in the camp. She had never been consulted about the use of her photo, nor had she made a dime from the many reproductions of the picture. Florence might have believed that Lange profited from the photo, but the photographer never received money for the reproductions either, since the photo belonged to the NFSA.
But Florence did admit that she had lived the hard times Lange tried to capture in photographs. “When Steinbeck wrote in The Grapes of Wrath about those people living under the bridge at Bakersfield—at one time we lived under that bridge. It was the same story. Didn’t even have a tent then, just a ratty old quilt.” Florence remembered how she walked miles to work at a diner for scant wages and leftovers to feed her family. And in Fireball, California, she harvested cotton and received only 50 cents for every 100 pounds she picked. Florence summed up those years up by saying, “We just existed . . . we survived.”
Maybe because she was hardworking and proud, Florence disliked what she saw as the photo’s portrait of her as a victim, a woman who sat still in the face of starvation, almost paralyzed with despair. Only that impression isn’t what most viewers took away from that powerful image.
MIGRANT MOTHER’S POWER
In 1983, Florence suffered a stroke and needed around-the-clock medical care. Her children, unable to afford the cost, issued a public plea for help. From across the country, letters of good will poured in, along with $15,000. Many grateful people had been helped by the strength and dignity they had seen in “Migrant Mother.” Rather than making her an object of pity, the image made Florence an inspiration and a comfort to people struggling with adversity. Roy Stryker, the head of the NFSA photography project, probably summed it up best: “She has all the suffering of mankind in her, but all the perseverance too. A restraint and a strange courage . . . She was immortal.”
Did You Know?
A psychological survey from Mount Holyoke compared Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Though fathers got less attention (3.5 hours for dads as opposed to 5.5 for moms to be exact) they found their day more enjoyable than moms did.
Can’t We All Judd Get Along?
The Judds didn’t always have it easy. The road to country music success was sure paved with hardship for this mother-and-daughter team.
At age 17, Diana Judd was pregnant and worried. Diana and the baby’s father were already having problems—their future didn’t look too bright. And her own parents were coping with Diana’s brother Brian, who was dying of Hodgkin’s disease. How, Diana wondered, could she possibly care for a child with a not-so-great husband and limited support from her family?
On May 30, 1964, Diana, now Mrs. Michael Ciminella, forgot her worries when she held the baby girl she named Christina Claire. As Diana soothed the crying infant with a song and their voices blended, history was being made. One day those voices would create a diva duo that enchanted millions.
SINGLE MOM STRUGGLES
Michael and Diana left Kentucky for college and a brighter future. In time they made it across the country to Los Angeles, where they had another daughter, Ashley. Unfortunately, their rocky marriage foundered and the two divorced, leaving Diana a single mother with no college education and two children to support. For a time she took advantage of her good looks to do modeling work, but the money was too uncertain. So Diana enrolled in nursing school while she worked at other jobs to earn money.
Diana once described her life on the edge: “I was a pay-check away from the streets all the time with a minimum-wage job . . . I was traipsing around with two young children, alone. That film of desperation coats everything when you have no emotional support.” Despite hunger, cold, and constant worry about paying for school clothes and braces, the divorced mom kept searching for a solid future—not realizing it was sitting in the backseat of her car.
SINGING AND HOLLERING
Mom and daughters were united as a team against the world. But within their little clan, tempers often exploded, especially between Diana and her oldest daughter, Chris. Both feisty and quick tempered, they’ve been described as “two cats with their tails tied together and thrown over a clothesline.”
Uncle John’s Presents Mom’s Bathtub Reader Page 16