Barbie

Barbie was born during the golden age of American post-World War II prosperity with its lushly saturated Technicolor movies, tidy new suburbs and cars as large as beached whales.

In the early 1950s, Mrs. Handler got the idea of creating an adult doll after observing her daughter’s fascination with adult paper dolls, whose clothing she was able to change.

Mrs. Handler envisioned a doll onto which girls could project their desire to act like, and indeed become, grown women. But the designers at Mattel initially balked, saying the level of detail that she wanted would make the doll prohibitively...

Part of Barbie’s power is the kind of projection she invites. “I designed Barbie with a blank face so that the child could project her own dreams of the future onto Barbie,” Handler berkata in her book, “Dream Doll.” “I never wanted to play up the glamorous life of Barbie. I wanted the owner to create a personality for the doll.” Even the talking Barbies that appeared on the market never enjoyed the ascendancy that the mute, yet eloquent anak patung did.

Barbie was both a child of her time and completely cutting edge. As the historian and penulis Stephanie Coontz has written, “the marketability...