by M. G. Lord
The goddesses took Barbie's crystalline hardness one step further. They wore plastic breastplates and thigh-high dominatrix boots--outfits created by two female Mattel designers that evoke Camille Paglia's characterization of the Great Mother as "a sexual dictator, symbolically impenetrable." Yet despite their literal virginity, their powers were metaphorically linked to sex. To set the dolls' mechanism, their thighs had to be squeezed together until they clicked. To release it, their legs had to be parted; the box features a drawing of two juvenile hands clutching each foot. Vintage doll dealers speculate that the goddesses were removed from the market because their mechanism was too delicate. But between their lubricious leg action and pantheistic message, they strike me as having been too indelicate.
IF I HAD TO LOCATE THE POINT AT WHICH I BEGAN TO SEE the ancient archetype within the modern toy, it would be at the home of Robin Swicord, a Santa Monica-based screenwriter whom Mattel commissioned in the 1980s to write the book for a Broadway musical about the doll.
Swicord is not a New Age nut; she's a writer. And even after mega-wrangles with Mattel's management—the musical was sketched out but never produced—she is still a fan of the doll. "Barbie," she said, "is bigger than all those executives. She has lasted through many regimes. She's lasted through neglect. She's survived the feminist backlash. In countries where they don't even sell makeup or have anything like our dating rituals, they play with Barbie. Barbie embodies not a cultural view of femininity but the essence of woman."
Over the course of two interviews with Swicord, her young daughters played with their Barbies. I watched one wrap her tiny fist around the doll's legs and move it forward by hopping. It looked as if she were plunging the doll into the earth—or, in any event, into the bedroom floor. And while I handle words like "empowering" with tongs, it's a good description of her daughters' Barbie play. The girls do not live in a matriarchal household. Their father, Swicord's husband, Nicholas Kazan, who wrote the screenplay for Reversal of Fortune, is very much a presence in their lives. Still, the girls play in a female-run universe, where women are queens and men are drones. The ratio of Barbies to Kens is about eight to one. Barbie works, drives, owns the house, and occasionally exploits Ken for sex. But even that is infrequent: In one scenario, Ken was so inconsequential that the girls made him a valet parking attendant. His entire role was to bring the cars around for the Barbies.
In other informal interviews with children, I began to notice a pattern: Clever kids are unpredictable; they don't cut their creativity to fit the fashions of Mattel. One girl who wanted to be a doctor didn't demand a toy hospital; she turned Barbie's hot pink kitchen into an operating room. Others made furniture—sometimes whole apartment complexes—out of Kleenex boxes and packing cartons. And one summer afternoon in Amagansett, New York, I watched a girl and her older brother act out a fairy tale that fractured gender conventions. While hiking in the mountains, a group of ineffectual Kens was abducted by an evil dragon who ate all but one. He remained trapped until a posse of half-naked Barbies—knights in shining spandex—swaggered across the lawn and bludgeoned the dragon to death with their hairbrushes.
When the dragon devoured the Kens, the brother dismembered them. "More boys would buy Barbies if you could put them together yourself," he told me, adding that he enjoys combining the body parts in original ways. "That was the beginning of the downfall of Barbie in our house," his mother told me. "Once we saw one with three legs and two heads, it was hard to just let her be herself."
I also learned to ask children what their doll scenarios meant to them, rather than to make assumptions. Last summer, for example, I was playing on my living-room floor with a six-year-old, under the watchful eye of her parents—he a black television executive, she a white magazine writer. The girl had brought her own blond Barbie, and the doll—like the girl—was quite a coquette. Her "play" consisted of going on dates with five of my male dolls: a blond Ken, a G.I. Joe, and three members of Hasbro's Barbie-scaled New Kids on the Block. She completely ignored Jamal, a black male doll made by Mattel, leaving him sprawled facedown on the rug—troublingly evocative of William Holden at the beginning of Sunset Boulevard.
I was not, it soon became evident, the only one who was troubled. When Jamal had been neglected for what seemed like eons, the girl's mother finally grabbed him and asked, "Wouldn't Barbie like to go out with Jamal?" The child looked exasperated. "But she can't, Mommy," she said. "That's Daddy."
Scholars agree that for children, "play" is "work." Jean Piaget has grouped children's play into three categories: games of mastery (building with blocks, climbing on jungle gyms), games with rules (checkers, hide-and-seek), and games of "make-believe," in which play involves a story that begins "What if. . ." Make-believe play is concerned with the manipulation of symbols and the exercise of imagination—and it is into this category that Barbie play falls.
To some scholars, toys and games are the Lego bricks in the social construction of gender. "When kids maneuver to form same-gender groups on the playground or organize a kickball game as 'boys-against-the-girls,' they produce a sense of gender as dichotomy and opposition," University of Southern California sociologist Barrie Thorne writes in Gender Play. "And when girls and boys work cooperatively on a classroom project, they actively undermine a sense of gender as opposition."
But the role of make-believe play is less clear than that of games of mastery or games with rules because it involves entering the logic (and occasionally illogic) of the child's imaginary world. Children sometimes use Barbie and Ken to dramatize relationships between the adults in their lives, especially if those adults are a source of anxiety. In Sarah Gilbert's novel Summer Gloves, the female narrator's daughter mutilates her Midge doll and practically glues her Ken to her Barbie. This seems odd until the mother comments: "I married a Ken and he's about to run off with a Midge. And they may good and well deserve each other, the bores."
Children's therapists even use Barbie and Ken—or the Heart family, Mattel's Barbie-sized domestic unit—to help their young patients communicate. "A lot of them act out their own problems with the Heart family," Yale University psychologist Dorothy G. Singer told me. "One child whose parents were going to be divorced would constantly lock Mr. Heart out of the dollhouse—make him sleep in the garden."
Singer is the author of Playing for Their Lives: Helping Troubled Children Through Play Therapy, and, with her husband, Yale psychologist Jerome L. Singer, of Make Believe: Games and Activities to Foster Imaginative Play in Young Children. She says that although some children use Barbie for creative play, it's not because the doll has—as Mattel's commercials contend— "something special." "Imaginative kids take some toys and make them into anything they want," she told me. "But you have to ask: Where does that imagination come from and how does it start? What we found in our research is that if the parent sanctions that kind of play—starts a game, helps—then by the time the child is four or five, [he or she] doesn't need the parent. They now have ideas for scripts and they can make any world that they want."
Not every parent is quite so willing to disappear. In her short story "The Geometry of Soap Bubbles," Rebecca Goldstein dramatizes the efforts of a mother—Chloe, a member of the classics department at Barnard College— to teach the art of make-believe to her daughter, Phoebe. In defiance of her colleagues' "finer sensibilities," Chloe presents the child with an array of Kens and Barbies, "having felt the drama latent in their flesh." Then she uses the dolls to act out mythological tales. In one scenario, Ken, "clad in psychedelic bathing trunks," becomes "the shining god Apollo"; Barbie, the clairvoyant princess Cassandra. In another, a corybantic adaptation of Euripides's Bacchae, Ken portrays Dionysus. Unfortunately, Chloe's strategy works too well: Instead of playing with the dolls, the daughter, who prefers math problems, asks her mother to play with them 'for her."
Even when mothers don't intervene actively, they can influence what their children do with the doll. During her daughter's Barbie years, Ann Lewis, D
emocratic party activist and sister of Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank, spent her nights doing political work. One evening, before going out, she noticed that her daughter had dressed Barbie in a floor-length formal gown. "Where's Barbie going?" Lewis asked. "To a meeting," her daughter replied.
This is not to say that when daughters emulate their mothers in Barbie play, it's always a constructive experience. Mothers who believe in restricted roles for women transmit messages of restriction: of opportunities, behavior, even body size. "There are a lot of mothers who don't want their kids to be fat when they go to the country club and put on bathing suits," Singer told me. "I have in my own practice now a child whose mother is forcing her to diet. She goes to Weight Watchers for Children . . . and this kid eats this crazy stuff. She's a little plump but not in any way overweight or looking obese."
Sometimes mothers blame Barbie for negative messages that they themselves convey, and that involve their own ambivalent feelings about femininity. When Mattel publicist Donna Gibbs invited me to sit in on a market research session, I realized just how often Barbie becomes a scapegoat for things mothers actually communicate. I was sitting in a dark room behind a one-way mirror with Gibbs and Alan Fine, Mattel's Brooklyn-born senior vice president for research. On the other side were four girls and an assortment of Barbie products. Three of the girls were cheery moppets who immediately lunged for the dolls; the fourth, a sullen, asocial girl, played alone with Barbie's horses. All went smoothly until Barbie decided to go for a drive with Ken, and two of the girls placed Barbie behind the wheel of her car. This enraged the third girl, who yanked Barbie out of the driver's seat and inserted Ken. "My mommy says men are supposed to drive!" she shouted.
Her two playmates looked stunned. Fine and Gibbs looked stunned. Even the girl with the horses looked stunned. Fine finally shrugged his shoulders and said: "And they blame it on us?"
CHAPTER FIVE
THE BOOK OF RUTH
As a feat of engineering, the 1967 Twist 'N Turn Barbie is a marvel. Steve Lewis and Jack Ryan devised a doll that swiveled on a compound angle at its hips and neck. A compound angle is not perpendicular to the vertical axis of the doll; it is askew, and the resulting tilt gives the doll a human-looking contrapposto. A delicate new face with eyelashes made of real synthetic hair added the final touch. Lewis remembered the meeting at which he unveiled the prototype: "Everyone sat back and there was great silence. And one of the VPs, who is still in the toy business but not with Mattel, said, 'That is the most beautiful doll I have ever seen.' "
The doll's promotion was less attractive, however. In the Twist 'N Turn kickoff commercial, a swarm of girls stampeded to a toy store to trade in their old Barbies for a discount on the new one. So much for projecting a personality onto a beloved anthropomorphic toy, so much for clinging to Barbie as a transitional object, or, as in the case of the toy in Margery Williams's The Velveteen Rabbit, cherishing Barbie because she had been "made real" through wear.
Futurist Alvin Toffler condemned the trade-in as proof that "man's relationships with things are increasingly temporal." But he missed what was, for women, a more alarming message. It wasn't worn sneakers or crushed Dixie cups that the kids were throwing away; it was women's bodies. Older females should simply be chucked, the ad implied, the way Jack Ryan discarded his older wives and mistresses. Ryan, inventor of the Hot Wheels miniature car line that Mattel would introduce the following year, brought automotive obsolescence to Barbie.
In 1968, Mattel plunged Barbie deeper into social irrelevance. It gave her a voice—so she could declare her membership in the Silent Majority. "Would you like to go shopping?" the doll twittered. "I love being a fashion model. What shall I wear to the prom?" This may be what Tricia Nixon said when you pulled the loop at the back of her neck, but in my experience a young woman in 1968 had broader concerns.
In a world where the under-thirties had pitted themselves against the over-thirties, Barbie betrayed her peers. She had a passing familiarity with youthspeak—"groovy" modified an occasional outfit or product—but no affinity with youth culture. Barbie existed to consume at a time when young people were repudiating consumption. They moved to communes and wore lumpy, distressed work clothes. Synthetic materials fell into disrepute, and Barbie's very essence—not to mention her house, beach bus, sister, and boyfriend—was plastic. For Barbie to have endorsed the values of the young would have been to negate herself.
Between 1970 and 1971, the feminist movement made significant strides. In 1970, the Equal Rights Amendment was forced out of the House Judiciary Committee, where it had been stuck since 1948; the following year, it passed in the House of Representatives. In response to a sit-in led by Susan Brownmiller, Ladies' Home Journal published a feminist supplement on issues of concern to women. Time featured Sexual Politics author Kate Millett on its cover, and Ms., a feminist monthly, debuted as an insert in New York magazine. Even twelve members of a group with which Barbie had much in common—Transworld Airlines stewardesses—rose up, filing a multimillion-dollar sex discrimination suit against the airline.
Surprisingly, Barbie didn't ignore these events as she had the Vietnam War; she responded. Her 1970 "Living" incarnation had jointed ankles, permitting her feet to flatten out. If one views the doll as a stylized fertility icon, Barbie's arched feet are a source of strength; but if one views her as a literal representation of a modern woman—an equally valid interpretation— her arched feet are a hindrance. Historically, men have hobbled women to prevent them from running away. Women of Old China had their feet bound in childhood; Arab women wore sandals on stilts; Palestinian women were secured at the ankles with chains to which bells were attached; Japanese women were wound up in heavy kimonos; and Western women were hampered by long, restrictive skirts and precarious heels.
Given this precedent, Barbie's flattened feet were revolutionary. Mattel did not, however, promote them that way. Her feet were just one more "poseable" element of her "poseable" body. It was almost poignant. Barbie was at last able to march with her sisters; but her sisters misunderstood her and pushed her away.
Celebrities who in the sixties had led Barbie-esque lives now forswore them. Jane Fonda no longer vamped through the galaxy as "Barbarella," she flew to Hanoi. Gloria Steinem no longer wrote "The Passionate Shopper" column for New York, she edited Ms. And although McCalVs had described Steinem as "a life-size counter-culture Barbie doll" in a 1971 profile, Barbie was the enemy.
NOW's formal assault on Mattel began in August 1971, when its New York chapter issued a press release condemning ten companies for sexist advertising. Mattel's ad, which showed boys playing with educational toys and girls with dolls, seems tame when compared with those of the other transgressors. Crisco, for instance, sold its oil by depicting a woman quaking in fear because her husband hated her salad dressing. Chrysler showed a marriage-minded mom urging her daughter to conceal from the boys how much she knew about cars. And Amelia Earhart Luggage—if ever a product was misnamed—ran a print ad of a naked woman painted with stripes to match her suitcases.
Feminists followed up in February 1972 by leafleting at Toy Fair. They alleged that dolls like Topper Toy's Dawn, Ideal's Bizzie Lizzie, and Mattel's Barbie encouraged girls "to see themselves solely as mannequins, sex objects or housekeepers," reported The New York Times. The first two dolls were perhaps deserving targets. Dawn's glitzy lifestyle was devoid of social responsibility, a precursor, as collector Beauregard Houston-Montgomery has put it, of the "disco consciousness of the 1970s." And Bizzie Lizzie, who clutched an iron in one hand and a mop in the other, was a drudge. But if feminists had embraced Barbie when she stepped down from her high heels, her seventies persona might have been dramatically different. She was on the brink of a conversion. If they hadn't spurned, slapped, and mocked her, she might have canvassed for George McGovern or worked for the ERA. She might have spearheaded a consciousness-raising group with Francie and Christie, or Dawn and Bizzie Lizzie. But Barbie could not go where she was not
wanted. "Living" Barbie lasted only a year. She went back on tiptoe and stayed there.
Perhaps because of this bitter legacy, "feminist" seems to be an obscene word at Mattel. "If you asked me to give you fifty words that describe me, it wouldn't be on the list," said Rita Rao, executive vice president of marketing on the Barbie line. Yet when Rao discusses her career, she recounts experiences that might have made another woman join NOW, like her 1964 job interview at Levi Strauss where she was told, "We don't hire women"; and in 1969, her applications to various stock brokerage firms that, except for one to Dean Witter, were turned down for the same reason.
First hired in 1966, Rao left Mattel in 1970, returned in 1973, left again in 1979 to start her own company, and returned in 1987 as a vice president. Mattel must be a good place for a woman to work, she jokes, because she keeps coming back. "I know Ruth Handler absolutely doesn't think of herself as a feminist," Rao explains. "She's antifeminist, if anything. [But] when there's a woman at the top, it's illogical to say that a woman can't be capable. So even though she didn't really promote women or move them forward, her very being there made a statement."
Ruth Handler is almost too original for modifiers like "feminist" and "antifeminist" or even "good" and "evil." "Swashbuckling," "intrepid," "one-of-a-kind"—these are adjectives for Ruth. Conventional propriety has never seemed to weigh heavily upon her. It isn't so much that she sees herself outside the law, but that she is a law unto herself. This no doubt helped her to cope with breast cancer; unashamed, she diagnosed the shortcomings of existing mastectomy prostheses and founded a company to make better ones. But it may also have contributed to her being found guilty of white-collar crimes that, in the words of the judge who sentenced her, were "exploitative, parasitic, and . . . disgraceful to anything decent in this society."