Barbie Essays - Barbie, Mattel, Ken, Ruth Handler, Doll, BookBarbie

Barbie Since the beginning of time, toys have often been an indicator of the way a society behaves, and how they interact with their children. For example, in ancient Greece, artifacts recovered there testify that children were simply not given toys to play with as in the modern world. The cruel ritual of leaving a sick child on a hillside for dead, seems to indicate a lack of attention to the young (Lord 16). The same is true of today's society. As you can see with the number of toy stores in our society, we find toys of great value to our lives and enjoy giving them to children as gifts. Ask just about any young girl what she wants for Christmas and you'll undoubtedly get the same answer: ?A Barbie.? But what exactly has caused this baby boomer Barbie craze, and how did the entire world get so caught up in it? The answer lies in Ruth Handler's vision for the first children's adult doll. Mrs. Handler's eleven and one-half-inch chunk of plastic began causing problems even before it's public debut in 1959, yet has managed to become one of America's favorite dolls. Ruth Handler and her two young children, Barbara and Ken, were merely sightseeing in Lucerne, Switzerland, when Mrs. Handler first saw the doll she herself had been trying to create (Lord 29). In the window of a small gift shop was an eleven and one-half-inch tall plastic doll with a slender woman's body and a long blond ponytail. Her name was Lilli (?Bad Girl? 1). She had been created from a cartoon character in a West German tabloid similar to the National Inquirer (Lord 8). Dressed provocatively, and with a seductive look in her eye, Lilli had become a ?popular pornographic gag gift for men? (?Bad Girl? 1). Excited to see her long-time idea a reality, Mrs. Handler bought three of the dolls and hurried home to begin work on her own doll (?Bad Girl? 2). It was 1956, and within three years, Mattel Creations began marketing the ?teenage fashion model? as ?a new kind of doll from real life? (Tosa 30). The new doll, deemed ?Barbie?, was named after her own daughter Barbara, who's many y ears of play with paper dolls had actually inspired her to begin designing the three-dimensional adult doll (Lord 30). Though Mrs. Handler's version of the doll was not as racy or alluring as Lilli, her imitation of the ?German streetwalker? would come back to haunt her many years later (?Bad Girl? 2). But for now, the Barbie doll would launch Ruth Handler and her company, ?Mattel Creations?, into what was soon to be a successful national corporation. In fact, the Barbie doll was so popular that three years after her release in 1959 Mattel was still filling orders from her first year (Long 17). It wasn't until the late 1960's that critics began ?comparing Barbie to a Playboy Bunny and calling her a corrupter of youth? (?Bad Girl? 3). One woman commented, ?She's an absurd representation of what a woman should be? (?Bad Girl? 3)-?and that's exactly what many others thought she was, too. With such impossible real-life measurements of 5'9? tall, 36?-18?-33? bust, waist, and hip (Benstock and Ferriss 35), it's easy to see why mothers across the country banned the doll from their homes and refused to let their impressionable young daughters be influenced by a piece of painted plastic (Bestock and Ferriss 35). Since dolls have often been responsible for teaching children what society deems important or beautiful, many concerned parents wondered why Mattel did not design a doll that taught more valuable lessons than dressing pretty and being dangerously skinny (Edut 19)? Who said a runway model was best suited for teaching a child what is beautiful anyway? ?According to a Mattel sp okesperson, a Kate Moss figure is better suited for today's fashions? (Edut 19), and that is one reason why Barbie must be so disproportional. Actually, another reason for Barbie's anorexic figure can be traced back long before Kate Moss and the fashion runway. Barbie was originally designed as a doll with a body one-sixth the size of a real person, who would wear clothes made from