The Beginnings of Barbie Doll
In 1959, California entrepreneur Ruth Handler created the plastic doll that revolutionized the toy market.
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Watching her daughter, Barbara, play with paper dolls, Handler—co-founder in 1945 with her husband, Elliot, of the company that became Mattel—became convinced that girls used dolls to act out future roles. Barbara preferred the teenager or career-woman cutouts to babies or children. “When I convinced Barbie,” Handler wrote in her autobiography, Dream Doll, “I believed it was important to a little girl’s self esteem to play with a doll that has breasts.” (Many critics argue the opposite.)
Named after Barbara and loosely based on Lilli, a racy German comic-book character, Barbie debuted at the 1959 toy fair in New York City. By summer, she was at the top of every American girl’s wish list.
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Four decades later, the Barbie doll—with her extraordinary measurements recently resized more realistically—is available in 150 countries and sells at the rate of two dolls per second.
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The entire Barbie line, including dolls, clothes, and accessories, rakes in $1.9 billion a year. Back in the 90’s, it is astonishing that a typical American girl between the ages of three and eleven owns ten Barbies on the average.
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