The Public Life of a Private Doll

     Have you ever had that experience, when, after years of keeping someone in the rear periphery of your mind, they surprise you by having a personality of their own?  Maybe its someone at the office who you like but hardly ever talk to. Or maybe its someone you grew up with, and keep in touch out of force of habit, even when adult life has moved you so far apart your paths never cross in daily life. 

     Either way, suddenly you are forced to realise that this comfortable window dressing in your life has a personality all its own, and would disagree with you on pretty much any subject you discussed other than the weather. Its heady. 

      I first had this experience at the tender age of 8. My mother and I were in a crowded area waiting for a number to be called (passport office?) so I took out my Barbie doll. A woman sitting next to us looked at my mother and me, sizing us up, and said,

     "I can't believe you actually let her play with those things."

     My first thought upon hearing this was that this waiting room was a serious place, and I was getting us in trouble by bringing a toy.

      My second thought was, What's this person got against Barbie?

      Mom, to her credit, basically ignored the woman, so she kept talking. "Its an awful message to send to girls. Be tall, be skinny, be blonde, have a boyfriend. You're just teaching her to buy lots of clothes and live in a dream house."

      I didn't speak. I'm sure my mother said something, but I was perplexed. It seemed the inanimate objects living in a duffel bag under the stairs were more active politically than I had originally thought. 

         I wish I'd cleared the air: "Ahem, my barbie is a mountain explorer and her name is Cora. She always dresses well, but I cut her hair off last week, and for the sake of my pride I'll keep playing with her until I accept that I was not meant to be a stylist." If I owned a Ken, he might have been her boyfriend. But at the time Barbie was living the Sapphic lifestyle in a tent with Theresa, and they were very happy.

        Now I wasn't stupid enough to think my 12 inch doll was a real friend. But she was the vessel through which I did most of the talking to my real friends, and the notion that there was some kind of secret agenda behind her perfect, unmoving eyes was positively galling. It upended my world in a big way for as long as I was sitting in that waiting room (Forever. We were there forever)

         This essay isn't about determining whether the Barbie doll is a force for good or evil (stay tuned for part II!). I'll get to that later. Right now I'm mystified by how she became a way for people of different social and political backgrounds to relate to each other. Now, if two children talk to each other about prom and boyfriends through their dolls, that much is to be expected. But when a grown-up uses the doll to criticise a complete stranger's parenting, that's something else entirely. 

     So without further ado, I give you part one of my two part series on Barbie: The Public Life of a Private Doll: How Barbie turns consumerism into culture.

       

      Ahem,

When Mattel celebrated the 50^th anniversary of its “Barbie” doll in 2009, she was the most successful toy ever to hit the market, and the bestselling doll in history. Other manufacturers have tried to scale the “wall of pink” that Mattel has established in toy stores around the world, but none have come close to equalling Barbie’s impact. In 1999, Mattel claimed that “Barbie” had an unprecedented one hundred percent name recognition among American women with daughters between three and ten years old. Her popularity, backed always by rigorous ad campaigns and licensing deals, has transformed the Barbie doll from a children’s distraction to a symbol of Americana, rife with all the paradoxes and complications that entails. Why would a toy that promotes a life of adventure over domesticity be a target for feminists? How can a doll that represents strict gender stereotypes also be a symbol of hope for the gay community? Her unprecedented popularity makes Barbie a focal point around which people organize to reject or co-opt the status quo, and a shining example of how consumerism has become culture in modern America.

Barbie was born into a world of harsh gender stereotyping, which she cannot be blamed for creating. In fact, when viewed in the cultural context of 1959, Barbie’s original incarnation seems downright revolutionary. Case in point, this copy came from a 1959 advertisement in Vogue:

 “Pink, most feminine of colours; pink, so naive...so disarming. Pure Pink, newest of Elizabeth Arden’s new lighter make-ups. Emphasizing the fragile look.” (Rogers, 69)

Another reads, “The moment a man walks into his home, he should be made to feel that he is lord of all he surveys.”  Compared to these advertisements, Barbie—the single doll living a life of personal satisfaction rather than domestic duties--is certainly a step in the right direction.

However, Mattel’s aggressive marketing of Barbie to girls has made her an indicator, even an enforcer, of gender categories. In their study of young adolescents’ experiences of Barbie, Kuther and McDonald found that often boys were prohibited by their parents from playing with Barbie because she was deemed a gender-inappropriate toy, regardless of the kind of play they wanted to engage in. Others denied having any experience with the doll, though subsequent responses showed they had. Thus, even if Barbie redefined femininity, her omnipresence in popular culture has arguably reinforced “female” as a category: in the post-Barbie world, women don’t have to be reminded that pink is their signature colour.

So how did this happen? None of this would be possible if it weren’t for Mattel’s integration of Barbie into the social world around her. Barbie fully established her cultural omnipresence in the 1980s through licensing. In this decade, Barbie drank Coca-Cola and, until it was deemed racially insensitive, loved Oreo cookies. In doll form, she appeared with or as other pop-culture figures which were licensed to Mattel, including Elvis Presley and various Disney characters. The image of Barbie herself was licensed out to a diverse set of corporations including (but not limited to) Hallmark Cards, Thermos, Franklin Mint, and Simplicity Pattern Company. As a result of these licensing agreements, Barbie was more visible than ever in the real world, while the hallmarks of American consumer society were reproduced in miniature as her accessories. The result is that after 1980, Barbie was sold as an integrated part of American culture. This integration, though, would always present a paradox: The McDonald’s employee who owns a Corvette and spends time with Scarlett O’Hara may incorporate real cultural entities, but always in a surreal, impossible to equal way. Thus the more Barbie was marketed as a part of the culture, the sharper her contrast to its reality.

The feminists’ demonstrations of the 1970s qualify this association slightly, and show that Barbie was used as a vessel through which individuals commented on social order at large, prior to the aggressive licensing and marketing of the 1980s. In the early 1970s, “NOW” – “National Organization for Women” condemned Mattel’s advertisements featuring boys playing with educational toys and girls playing with dolls. Though this ad was not as sexist as the others they pinpointed from the same era, NOW chose to leaflet the Toy Fair in 1972. More interestingly, this protest coincided with the release of “Dramatic Living Barbie”, the first Barbie doll with flat feet, and less restricted movement than her predecessors. “Dramatic Living” was developed largely as a response to criticisms of Barbie’s unrealistic and largely immoveable figure, yet because of the feminist protest against the Barbie brand in general, she was discontinued quickly, and future dolls were made with the old immovable torsos and permanently arched feed. This episode indicates a paradox which seems to permeate most cultural critiques of Barbie. Mattel was far from the worst offender among the advertisements targeted by NOW (one for Chrysler depicted a mother advising her daughter to conceal her knowledge about cars to seem more appealing to boys), and “Dramatic Living” Barbie represented a step in the right direction towards a more useful depiction of women’s bodies. Yet Barbie was targeted to such an extent that to this day none of the high ranking female executives at Mattel (and there are a fair few) self-identify as “feminists”. This may be explained by Barbie’s prominent role as a representative of consumer culture. As a symbol of consumerism and the American way of life, Barbie symbolically contains the broader social climate. Though this episode indicates that the association was made prior to the 1980s, it was intensified by the marketing changes and increased licensing which made Barbie into the icon she is today.

Prior to 1980, Barbie’s popularity fluctuated, leading to near financial ruin for Mattel and her creator Ruth Handler. It’s no coincidence that in this period, Mattel was struggling to dissociate her from the politically charged real world context. In the early sixties, Jackie Kennedy was considered a “risk free” figure which inspired Barbie’s fashions, but this ended when she married Aristotle Onassis. By the late 1960s when the United States was politically and socially polarized, Barbie’s clothes became entirely self-referential. What once may have been called “Goin’ Fishin’” or “Sorority Meeting” were now named for their fabrics: “Snug Fuzz” and “Knit Hit”. It was not until the 1980s that Mattel began consistently and aggressively integrating Barbie into pop culture by associating her with commodities available for the consumer’s own use. This development went hand in hand with a dramatic increase in her sales and prominence.

Between 1959 and 1979, the Reader’s Guide shows only four articles about Barbie. There were that many in 1996 alone, and between 1990 and 1996 there were twenty two. Licensing was certainly not the only mediating factor in this increase. Intensified marketing, the introduction of collectibles such as “Holiday Barbie”, and Mattel’s decision to target three types of play: hairstyling, lifestyling, and collecting, proved very profitable. However, the practise of licensing pervaded all these areas of play, and was the main factor in transforming Barbie from a popular toy to a cultural juggernaut. Though she always embodied the American dream as a conspicuous consumer, she was now frequently consuming things that Americans could as well—Mcdonalds, Oreo cookies, Coca-Cola.

As Barbie functions to connect consumers to the social world around them, she can be appropriated as a symbol for that world, a focal point around which both individuals and groups organize to enact social change. There is a consensus among detractors and supporters alike that Barbie represents a cultural ideal. She is a wealthy, independent woman of leisure (unless she chooses to take up any of a variety of socially accepted careers). In light of this, it may be unsurprising that she has become the vessel through which people criticize or comment on society. Beyond the myriad criticisms and affirmations of the doll itself, individuals and organizations have used Barbie to comment on social order at large.

So when the lady at the DMV criticised my mother for letting me play with my dolls, it really had nothing to do with me. How could it? She didn’t even know us. In her eyes, the Barbie doll connected me to a culture which she already had some very strong views about.
 After some research I know why. In Part II I’ll look at how this makes a difference to the individuals playing. So stay tuned!

Bibliography

Gary Cross, The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Forman-Brunel, Miriam, “Barbie in ‘LIFE’: The Life of Barbie.” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth  2 (2009): 303-311.

Kolmar, Wendy, “Remembering Barbie Nation: An interview with Susan Stern.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 30: ½  (2002): 189-195.

Kuther, Tara L., and Erin McDonald, “Early Adolescents’ Experiences With, and Views of, Barbie.” Adolescence 39:153 (2004): 39-51.

M. G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll. New York: Morrow and Co., 1994.

NBC. “Schoolgirl becomes unlikely feminist icon in Russia:15-year-old sweeps online poll for Miss Universe spot in ‘anti-Barbie’ protest vote.” Last modified April 15, 2004. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4749107/ns/world_news/.

Ockman, Carol, “Barbie Meets Bougereau,” in The Barbie Chronicles: A Living Doll Turns Forty, ed. Yona Zeldis McDonough, 75-90. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999.

Paris, Leslie, “Teen Idol,” in The Barbie Chronicles: A Living Doll Turns Forty, ed. Yona Zeldis McDonough, 65-74. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999.

Mary F. Rogers, Barbie Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Ltd, 1999.

Stern, Susan. Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour. DVD, 1998. San Francisco, CA: New Day Films, 2003.