M. G. Lord, author of Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll, also wrote Britannica’s entry on Barbie. She kindly agreed to the following interview on the occasion of Barbie’s 50th birthday.
Since 1995 Lord has been a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review and The New York Times Arts & Leisure section. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Discover, Travel + Leisure, ARTNews, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and The New Yorker. In 2005, she published Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science, a social history of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a family memoir of aerospace culture during the Cold War. She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California.
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Britannica: So today is Barbie’s 50th birthday — she was introduced this day in 1959 by the Mattel company of Southern California. Despite the glam and glitter traditionally associated with her, Barbie’s origins are actually rather low-brow, aren’t they? And her curvaceous figure immediately became a controversy. Tell us about her origins and how Mattel got around this controversy.
Lord: Barbie was closely modeled on the Bild Lilli doll — a plastic version of a sleazy cartoon character published during the middle 1950s in the Bild Zeitung, a downscale German newspaper. All the jokes in the Lilli comic involved Lilli taking money from jowly fat cats for sexual favors. Mothers hated Barbie (three original Barbies pictured right) the moment they saw her — or at least that was how it appeared to Ernst Dichter, Mattel’s market researcher. They felt intimidated by her voluptousness; one mother called Barbie “a Daddy doll.” Dichter, however, realized that if he could convince mothers that Barbie would teach their daughters “good grooming,” the mothers could be won over. And Mattel — through its advertising — did exactly that.
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Britannica: Wasn’t there a 1994 study that analyzed Barbie’s figure and the healthiness of a woman with her proportions? How does Barbie feed into our perceptions of feminine beauty and issues of weight in particular, especially in the age of “size zero” models and actresses?
Lord: Almost since her inception, Barbie has been accused of causing eating disorders in young girls. But what I learned interviewing therapists for my book is that there will always be societal ideals of beauty, which, by definition, are difficult to achieve. What matters to a girl’s healthy development is how her family feels about those ideals. If her family sends her a strong message that she is lovable regardless of how she looks, she will likely not have problems. But if they convey the idea that to be lovable she has to look like a size-zero model, she could develop an eating disorder.
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Britannica: You’re a first-generation Barbie owner. What attracted you to her when you were a child, and have your views of her changed over the years? What accounts for Barbie’s lasting appeal?
Lord: When Barbie was introduced, she was a revolutionary toy. She didn’t teach us to nurture, like our clinging, dependent Betsy Wetsys and Chatty Cathys. She taught us independence. Barbie was her own woman. She could invent herself with a costume change: sing a solo in the spotlight one minute, pilot a star ship the next. She was Grace Slick and Sally Ride, Marie Osmond and Marie Curie. She was all that we could be and — if you calculate what at human scale would translate to a 39-inch bust — more than we could be. And certainly more than we were — at six and seven and eight when she appeared and sank her jungle-red talons into our inner lives.
Today the talons are gone; Barbie is kinder and gentler, no longer a revolutionary toy but a traditional one — one that Boomer moms give to their kids.
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Britannica: One would assume that feminists would naturally be critical of Barbie and her obsession with consumer culture and her personal relationships, especially with boyfriend Ken. But hasn’t there also been a pro-Barbie feminist interpretation of her as well, especially with the doll breaking certain stereotypes about women and “homemakers” that were popular and prevalent in the 1950s and early 60s? Barbie is, after all, a career women. She’s never been a mother, correct?
Lord: In my book Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll, I position Barbie as a proto-feminist. She was highly sexual and unmarried — far from the norm in the nuclear-family-obsessed 1950s. From the get-go, she had outfits for a career — first as a fashion designer, next as a registered nurse. The message that her playsets conveyed to little girls was very similar to what Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 landmark book, Sex and the Single Girl, conveyed to their older sisters. Despite its breathy prose, Brown’s book was very much an anti-marriage manifesto and an argument for women’s financial and sexual autonomy. To this day, Barbie has never been a mother. When consumers clamored for a Barbie-scale baby doll in the 1960s, Mattel issued “Barbie Baby Sits.”
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Britannica: Finally, how has the rest of the world received Barbie over the years — especially, say, the Muslim world — and what do you think of the proposed bill last week by a lawmaker in West Virginia to outlaw sales of Barbie in her state?
Lord: Barbie has been outlawed in Saudi Arabia — yet her sales are boominLihat Blogg in other parts of the world. In the 21st century, Barbie asserted herself as a powerful global brand. Just last week in Shanghai, a six-story Barbie store opened. It features a spa, a beauty salon, and an alcohol bar that serves pink Barbie cocktails. The idea is that women will buy clothes and services for themselves, their daughters and their daughter’s dolls. You could almost call it a teaching tool for Western patterns of consumption.
I don’t advise anyone to thwart children who want a Barbie — in West Virginia or anywhere else. Kids denied the doll often grow up to be major collectors. If you don’t want your son or daughter to have a Barbie at age five, do you want him or her to have 4,000 Barbies at age 50?
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