In An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, Neal Gabler tells how the studio moguls—all immigrants and outsiders—created an America that was more American than the country ever could b...
Gilles Brougere, a French sociologist, has conducted an exhaustive study of French women and children to determine how different age groups perceive the doll.
Barbie Bazaar,
Celebrities who in the sixties had led Barbie-esque lives now forswore them. Jane Fonda no longer vamped through the galaxy as Barbarella, she flew to Hanoi. Gloria Steinem no longer wrote The Passion...
This is not to cast Barbie as a New Traditionalist. Even in retrograde times, she has never stayed at home against her will. The jobs on her 1989 resume—physician, astronaut, veterinarian, fashion des...
Barbie's combination of voluptuous body and wholesome image was precisely what Hugh Hefner sought in models for Playboy, which he founded in 1953.
The magazine has always existed to promote Barbie as a commercial product; but kids look to her as an oracle— a vivid, godlike presence in the landscape of childhood. And sometimes, with aching candor...
But if feminists had embraced Barbie when she stepped down from her high heels, her seventies persona might have been dramatically different. She was on the brink of a conversion. If they hadn't spurn...
This underscores another pattern in Barbie's universe. People project fears and prejudices onto her; when a person talks at length about Barbie, one usually learns more about the speaker than about th...
Began. A chief element in positioning the new Barbie was her promotion. In 1984, after a campaign that featured Hey There, Barbie Girl sung to the tune of Georgy Girl, Mattel launched a startling seri...
When it comes to parental ill will toward Barbie, I believe femininity is the toxin; Barbie is the scapegoat.
Like the kachinas, Barbie is both toy and mythic object—modern woman and Ur-woman—navelless, motherless, an incarnation of the One Goddess with a Thousand Names. In the reservoir of communal memory th...
Barbie's new face, fashioned by doll sculptor Joyce Clark, was the face of disco. The doll appears in the 1977 catalogue against a black background, as if on the edge of a cavernous dance floor. Light...
Barbie as a class role model, far more than Barbie as a gender role model, may, in fact, be the linchpin of many mothers' continued misgivings about her.
The whole idea of woman as temptress, or woman as subordinate to man, is absent from the Barbie cosmology. Ken is a gnat, a fly, a slave, an accessory of Barbie. Barbie was made perfect: her body has...
One factor was the Barbie group at Ogilvy & Mather, the ad agency that had, in the seventies, acquired Carson/Roberts. By 1984—a year after Sally Ride's landmark space flight, the same year as Geraldi...
On a recent HBO special, Roseanne Arnold, who, incidentally, collects Barbies, excoriated what she considered to be Barbie's middle-class-ness. Why didn't Mattel make, say, trailer-park Barbie? But to...
Nor was Hanson the only budding sex maven to fixate on the dolls. I definitely lived out my fantasies with them, Madonna told an interviewer. I rubbed her and Ken together a lot. And
It is a saga of mothers and daughters, men and women, hope, despair, passion, and the striving after an impossible American ideal. Barbie is an emblem of femininity, a concept quite different from bio...
I didn't like Midge because she didn't have a sexy face, Hanson said. The old Barbie looked dominant: sharp nose, sharp eyelashes—she was a dangerous-looking woman. And of course she had those symbols...