Barbie In Life Ruth Handler Analysis

Over decades there has been one doll that was sold more than any other doll worldwide. She has blonde hair, a tiny waist and long legs always wearing pink, a “blonde bimbo” as Miriam Forman-Brunell calls the feminine icon, Barbie, in her article “Barbie in ‘Life’: The Life of Barbie” which was published in the Journal of History of Childhood and Youth, in Fall 2009 by John Hopkins University Press. This “blonde Bimbo”, Barbie, named after her creator, Ruth Handler children Bar-bara, has formed and shaped a feminine idea that is controversial. However, I state that the representation of Barbie, as a cultural icon in Americans society, imposes undesireable as well as impossible models of feminity on adolescents. Therefore, I claim that Barbie’s creator, Ruth Handler, exploits the change in American culture by using the doll as a means of appropriation.

First of all, the author provides the different perspective on how to read Barbie as a material object. For once, Barbie represents the symbol of female libera-tion but she also portrayals female oppression. Secondly, the author analyses the historical development of the iconic Barbie doll in order to examine the ambiguity and ambivalence of the conflicting perspectives regarding

Yet, Ruth has hired servants to take care of Barbara and Ken because her perception of gender as well as motherhood was deformed due to her upbringing. Ruth believed that being a mother meant “never-ending burden of household responsibility and maternity” (Forman-Brunell 2009); thus striving to-wards emanciptation in a sense that being able to provide for the family equally means being emancipated. Subsequently, due to the appropriation of her own chil-dren and the American culture Ruth Handler exploit the constantly changing Amer-ican culture in order to gain