The idea of the Barbie doll was conceived by Ruth Handler under her executive partnership at the company Mattel. She began the project of creating a realistic doll for girls in 1945 with her husband Elliot Handler as the designer and her colleague Matthew Maatson as the producer.

The company got its start in the garage of the Handler’s Hollywood home, first as a design company, then expanding to build and design dollhouses and picture frames, and later, toys. Although Ruth’s statement behind the doll’s conception was not documented during the development of the idea, decades later her recollection recounts her early motivations.

While it is widely assumed that as a businessperson, Ruth “found a hole in the market,” her motivations were driven by her daughter’s fondness to play with adult paper dolls. Ruth felt that a three dimensional doll with an adult body would allow little girls to “ease their feelings about themselves and their breasts” (Stern 1998). 

The Cultural Affirmation of Barbie

From the beginning of her entrance into American culture and her rising popularity, Barbie was marketed as a real person: Barbara Millicent Roberts. 

She was first announced in the 1959 Mattel as a new teen fashion model.

In order to accomplish Barbie’s identity as the next top model, her clothes were based on actual haute couture of the fashion world. At a time when "teenager" became a household word, namely in the postwar era of consumerism, Barbie’s marketed representation as the average American teenager was prone to judgment from very early on in her career.

The debates surrounding her breasts and perceived sex appeal found among Mattel employees were also present in the American public, and her figure remained at the locus of deliberation. Some condemned Barbie and her iconic black and white swimsuit of 1959 for being “sleazy and scary” with her heavy eyes and sharp side-glance that contrasted with the typical baby doll of the time (ibid). Others saw her array of options as a “…sunshine, tomorrow land, the future made of plastic" (Lord 1994: 43). 

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Regardless of the strategic economic marketing behind her representation, Barbie’s early transition from fashion model to average teenager contested the boundaries of Ruth’s desire to help girls dream and Barbie’s ability to model what it means to be an ideal American girl. 

Furthermore, despite Ruth’s intention to allow young girls to create their own personalities for the doll, Barbie began to have much more of an identity of her own.

A Changing Social Context

At the core of debates surrounding Barbie’s developments is an interaction of different social understandings about what it means to be a woman in American society. Barbie’s image, and the discourse about her representation, took shape and changed within the social and political unrest of the 1960s and 1970s. As a doll with which young girls could emulate an ideal womanhood, Barbie quickly became an object of cultural criticism.

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The feminist movement was unfolding and gaining strong and widespread momentum. Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl was published in 1962, just as Barbie was becoming a household name. Brown’s was one publication that signaled a paradigmatic change in social attitudes...

The contention formed around Barbie as a social being was not limited to her relationship with others but also directed toward her identity as an individual and the activities and values she was deemed to imbue.

While she began to take on once male-dominated careers, critics shifted to question Barbie as an impossible ideal, including on the meaning of her bodily figure.

Experts on body image have claimed that her unrealistic appearance destroys a healthy self-image for young women. Others have stated she is simply a doll. Still others have attempted to characterize Barbie as a symbol of empowerment and “the first feminist that pointed the way out of kitchen” (Stone 2010: 7). 

Before Barbie became an icon, she had to become a person, one that her audience could relate to and consider as part of their American home.

The popular discourse published in recent decades is largely historically focused with informative background about Mattel, her genesis, and the original construction of her physical appearance and personhood. 

Barbie's critics rarely bother to explain just how she exerts her influence, how girls glean particular meanings from playing with Barbie.

Second, in celebrating slenderness, Barbie hardly stands alone. Many aspects of contemporary culture present slenderness as an ideal for women: the fashion industry, movies and television, advertising, beauty pageants, the fitness and diet industries, pornography, and who knows what else. Even if girls who play with Barbie-and most girls do--grow up to value slenderness, how are we to weigh Barbie's relative influence in this process? (Best 1998: 204). 

As the feminist movement has remained actively engaged in the cultural debates surrounding the impact of the Barbie Doll, and popularly tend to support the notion that the object is at the forefront of socialization, historical critiques spurred by feminist groups have become connected to the discourse surrounding the movement as a whole. Indeed, the discourse makes clear that the doll’s “most ardent critics are women.”

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Despite our traditional subordination under patriarchal institutions, it is women that deliberate which representations of femininity should be made accessible to young girls.

As the movement maintains that culture like Barbie works to organize social life, feminists appear to be the socializing agents that construct the boundaries of appropriate feminine performances.

Barbie's critics rarely bother to explain just how she exerts her influence, how girls glean particular meanings from playing with Barbie.

Second, in celebrating slenderness, Barbie hardly stands alone. Many aspects of contemporary culture present slenderness as an ideal for women: the fashion industry, movies and television, advertising, beauty pageants, the fitness and diet industries, pornography, and who knows what else. Even if girls who play with Barbie-and most girls do--grow up to value slenderness, how are we to weigh Barbie's relative influence in this process? (Best 1998: 204). 

As the feminist movement has remained actively engaged in the cultural debates surrounding the impact of the Barbie Doll, and popularly tend to support the notion that the object is at the forefront of socialization, historical critiques spurred by feminist groups have become connected to the discourse surrounding the movement as a whole. Indeed, the discourse makes clear that the doll’s “most ardent critics are women.”

Despite our traditional subordination under patriarchal institutions, it is women that deliberate which representations of femininity should be made accessible to young girls.

As the movement maintains that culture like Barbie works to organize social life, feminists appear to be the socializing agents that construct the boundaries of appropriate feminine performances.

Discourse of this type expects that as the first adult doll, Barbie will maintain the status quo within various institutions, such as marriage, motherhood, and the workforce.

These critics then take issue with those representations that pose alternatives to the tradition. I find that her representation is framed as a type of deviant form of resistance against the traditional roles of wife, mother, and caretaker in a way that presents a new, harmful image to vulnerable girls.

Much of the discourse that is disengaged with early images of the Barbie Doll as a fashion model, a daughter, a babysitter, and an older sister, also forgets that Barbie once appeared in a white wedding dress with her beau, Ken.

This particular image then lends to the discursive contention surrounding her representation as a single woman. Mothers, for instance, felt that…

Barbie is initially described as “not a kept woman" … while she dates Ken, she’s never married him, ostensibly paying the Barbie Dream Home mortgage herself.” (Cordes 1992). In discussions about her failure to enter a union, the discourse also expresses concern about her presentation of sexuality.

As a reconstructed version of the Bild Lilli German sex doll for men, it is no surprise that Barbie’s sexuality is regarded as a threat to traditional courtship.

The discourse reveals instances where parents felt compelled to shield their daughters from the influence of the doll. 

Despite Mattel’s intention to please the requests of young girls that requested Barbie to have a boyfriend, the discourse regards Barbie’s relationship status as an insufficient achievement of the feminine role and therefore a harmful representation to impressionable youth.

In a similar manner to its strategy to “meet halfway” by advertising Barbie and Ken as a couple, Mattel introduced Barbie as an older sister and as a babysitter in 1963. The discourse reveals this to be an effort to convey a particular image of traditional femininity without fully conceding to the responsibilities of motherhood. Ruth Handler explains: _ dared not give Barbie and Ken a baby of their own. Barbie can baby-sit. What the child does with the baby is up to her." (Milton 1963: 85). 

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Furthermore, while much of the discourse criticizes her arguably unrealistic aspirations of leisure and consumption, others begin to recognize Barbie’s other ambitions and highlight her entrance into the professional workforce. However, her achievements are regarded to be directly connected to her sexual nature. Her access to the male public sphere is framed as a threatening possibility that career women will manipulate their male counterparts, destroy their morality, and to completely dismantle the male-dominated industry.

By the mid-1980s, Barbie’s careers had ranged from being represented as a teacher, astronaut, Olympic athlete surgeon, or a veterinarian, and within this context the following criticism is found:

“Their [Barbie and Ken’s] continuing popularity indicates that many men and women still see sex as an instrument of power in an industrial and consumer context. But whereas the Barbie Doll used to represent the management of the male audience for marriage, she now personifies the career woman manipulating it for business success.” (Berg 1986: 209- 10).

Barbie’s Threat to Feminine Representations 

Anti-Barbie claims targeting her poor coherence into American social institutions shifted in focus with the emerging feminist movement. With rising concerns over media portrayals and stereotypical images of women, the iconic power of the Barbie Doll is also understood to pose a threat to broader representations of femininity.

The discourse signals such threatening potential surrounding those arguably inaccurate images of femininity that uphold traditional stereotypes and reinforce unrealistic ideals. These feminist critiques range from pointing toward the characteristics expressed on the surface, such as her personality and body shape, to the roles and responsibilities she conveys through her activities and occupations. The discourse advances what could otherwise be individual, Barbie-specific qualities to argue that they wrongfully represent the feminine status as a whole. In doing so, the discourse upholds her iconic power but in the way that she breaks down the respectful image of the feminine ideal.

Whereas earlier concerns were raised about her failure to follow tradition, Barbie comes under attack for reinforcing traditional gender stereotypes.

Role Transformation

Contrary to her discursive potential to dismantle traditional patriarchal institutions, to threaten the endurance of feminine roles of motherhood, housewife, and caretaker, and to pose a disturbing image of the ideal female, other discourses diverge to frame the Barbie doll not to disempower institutional norms but to empower individuals to overcome these social structures.

The debates surrounding the impact of the Barbie Doll reveal a landscape of deliberations over the ways that her iconic status holds a force over social actors. Digging deeper, the discourse is replete with agreement over the powerful capabilities of Barbie’s iconic force.

Where threads in the discourse diverge is in the deliberations over which representations of Barbie ought to be maintained and/or changed within institutional settings, which ought to be reinforced onto the female identity, as well as which social actor holds the authority to make these distinctions: the cultural object herself or the individual that is exposed to the iconic force.

The young girls that manipulate her performance of femininity is suggested to have the power to navigate the pressures of the social world and to produce a freely chosen iteration of femininity onto the malleable doll. Barbie in this respect continues to thrive as a teaching tool--not only to portray the range of appropriate feminine representations--but to inspire and to work out one’s future self. Barbie’s mission to do so has continued to thrive throughout the decades:

“Barbie is a truly revolutionary doll, one that inspired, rather than oppressed, young girls' imaginations; ... the one toy that, since the mid-sixties, has epitomized for little girls the term 'having it all.” (Bracuk 1991: 37-38).

Discourse that focuses on her transformative value tends to be structured around personal narratives that reveal the very individual and otherwise subversive ways that youth utilize the Barbie doll as they please.

For example, Amy Leftkov responds to feminist criticism in the New York Times and to argue the play value of the Barbie Doll:

“To be sure, clothes were in abundance, but so was adventure. Our Barbies traveled wherever our imaginations took them. They went into backyard trees to explore jungles; our Barbies led expeditions to India to save people from starvation. Ms. Quindlen says that Barbie "gives little girls the message that the only thing that's important is being tall and thin and having a big chest." Barbie gave us no messages; it was we who gave Barbie meaning. (Leftkov 1994).”

Leftkov highlights the central tenet of this discursive transformation: it is through the child and through the individual’s form of play that the meaning of the cultural object is constructed.

By playing with a doll that is offered a seemingly never-ending collection of material goods, children are able to create new meanings in the process of undressing, redressing, and re-thinking how they would like to construct her representation.

One type of play value connected to this extensive range of items found in the Barbie Collection is seen in the joy of collecting and hunting for the pieces as a type of hobby.

Discussion

In this thesis I investigated the Barbie doll as a cultural icon, and I studied the historical developments in the discourse surrounding the meaning and impact of her representation. Since 1959, the ways she has changed in response to cultural criticism reveals the process through which icons embody and transform with social meaning.

After examining the collective process of both imbuing and contesting the meanings surrounding the doll, I uncover how culture is directly related to the structure and transformation of the feminine role. 

My historical analysis produced three salient findings. I discover how the cultural product gains iconic status.

The cultural object is held accountable for her social meanings and her performance of femininity. Barbie becomes a person, a celebrity even, who is ultimately built up by her social world to paradoxically maintain autonomy from these discursive processes at large.

The Barbie doll is negotiated within the collectively held boundaries of feminine meaning. As the cultural object undergoes her feminine performance, the act of boundary negotiation takes place with each new reiteration of femininity surveyed and contested as an appropriate form for individuals to imitate in their own performances of femininity.

This process occurs alongside a broader debate over the meaning and impact of cultural objects. First, those that understand the direction of culture to flow from consumer to object identify the Barbie doll as a “vehicle to let little girls dream,” which delimits the impact that culture has over social organization. Second, those that understand the direction of culture to flow from object to consumer are concerned with the social meanings behind her representation because they serve as education messages to imitate and idealize. I find that feminists fall into this camp, and throughout Barbie’s lifetime, they are located in the cultural diamond to gravitate Barbie’s performance of gender in an effort to create new reiterations of femininity – and in doing so, they actively work towards achieving her iconic status.