At the 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality in New York City, some marchers asserted their independence with the chant, “I am not a Barbie doll!”Ī digital collage featuring a Barbie doll from Plastic Bodies, a 2013 series by photo artist Sheila Pree Bright. Many activists, though, took issue with the dolls. Barbie adopted progressive stances: The same year as the Fair Housing Act of 1968, Mattel introduced Christie, a Black doll with a mod swimsuit. The dolls are at once idealistic and materialistic, offering a characteristically American fantasy-for a price.īarbie soon became central to the cultural and political conversation, often scandalizing critics across the political spectrum. From the beginning, Barbie has been about allowing young girls to dream. In 2021, Mattel shipped more than 86 million dolls from the Barbie universe, which comes to about 164 dolls a minute. In 1963, she got a best friend, Midge, and, in 1964, a little sister, Skipper. In 1961, Barbie got a boyfriend, Ken, named, perhaps oddly, after the Handlers’ son.
The toy swiftly grew so popular she needed her own entourage. Three hundred thousand Barbie dolls were sold in the first year. “Til then, I know just what I’ll do: Barbie, beautiful Barbie, I’ll make believe that I am you.”ĭespite toy industry naysayers, who carped that nobody would want to play with a doll that had breasts, Barbie-with her tiny waist and changeable yet always idealized looks-became a global phenomenon. In Barbie’s first television ad, broadcast that same year, a woman sings from the point of view of a young girl, promising that one day, she’ll be just like Barbie. The first model went on display in March 1959 at the annual Toy Fair in New York City. (In another version of this origin story, Ruth got the idea from an adult novelty doll she’d seen while vacationing in Switzerland.) Ruth named the doll Barbie, after her daughter.
Ruth decided there should be a proper doll onto which girls could project their highest aspirations. Ruth Handler, who co-founded Mattel with her husband, Elliot Handler, and Harold Matson in 1945, noticed her daughter, Barbara, playing with paper dolls and dreaming about what kind of woman she would become.
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