Barbie and Ruth
by: Robin Gerber
January 1, 2009, Harper Business
288 pages
Review by: E. Broderick
My childhood was punctuated in Barbie. Every birthday, I marched right up to the Barbie aisle and selected a doll, doll outfit, or furniture set. I was shown all manner of other toys by my parents. My options were limited only by our budget. I simply knew what I wanted, and what I wanted was a foot tall and could wear a wedding gown in the morning followed by a bathing suit in the afternoon and a power suit in the evening. On a trip to NYC, I rode the FAO Schwartz elevator and enviously drooled over the Barbie shoe lava lamps. How many orphaned Barbie shoes could even one of those pillars have matched up for me?
Like most of my friends, Barbie wasn’t all about fashion for me. She was also a way for me to be different people, try on different roles, and even flex my entrepreneur spirit. I sewed my first ever homemade garment for Barbie – a hooded riding cloak with gold trim. And all along, I had no idea that Barbie’s creator was Jewish. Until I saw someone mention it in a review of Barbie and Ruth, a biography of Ruth Handler, the woman who invented the Barbie Doll, written by Robin Gerber. I immediately knew I had to read the book too.
I opened Barbie and Ruth with the same anticipation that I opened a new doll box as a kid. I loved that Ruth had the guts to do what her inventor husband could not – actually run a business – and how their marriage lasted through the roller coaster that followed. I felt really seen when Ruth explained that little girls do not necessarily want to play with baby dolls. Sometimes they want their play to allow them to be bigger girls. This realization, that girls want a chance to try out numerous careers and ways of being a woman, was in my opinion Ruth’s true genius. There were similar dolls on the European market, but they were for adults and had more salacious purposes. Through Barbie and Ruth, I realized that Ruth Handler saw the raw power of letting girls imagine a world with limitless possibilities open to them. Plus, she had the chutzpah to use television advertising to convince a male dominated toy industry to buy a doll they swore would never sell because they assumed no respectable mother would buy a doll with boobs for her daughter.
Barbie and Ruth does not hold back from darker truths. Ruth was indicted for tax fraud, the Mattel employees quoted have very differing takes on her character and working style, her daughter Barbara (Barbie’s namesake) resented her for working, and her son Ken passed away from HIV/AIDS at a time when nobody in “polite society” talked about HIV or being queer. This struck me as fairly ironic since little girls all over the world have been known to explore their own sexuality by having two Barbie’s kiss and Earring Magic Ken became almost a gay icon.
Ruth is shown for what she likely was – a business pioneer during a time when women were told to stay at home, but also a polarizing figure who may have indeed been aware of tax fraud at Mattel, at least to some degree. To me, after reading the evidence presented, it felt like nobody was willing to give Ruth her proper title when it was due, her husband had to be CEO for a long time despite Ruth carrying out all CEO type duties, but everyone was more than willing to place the blame on her when the time came for that. It’s the story of being a powerful woman. Nobody claps when you’re up but they all come to throw stones when you’re on your way down.
However, if you’ve ever had a Barbie you’d understand that her creator likely couldn’t be kept down for long. Just like Barbie, Ruth had many acts. She was also a double mastectomy survivor who tried to move forward from the Barbie tax fraud debacle by starting a company that produced comfortable, confidence boosting, prosthesis for mastectomy survivors. Remember that reconstructive options were nill back then, and available prosthesis were bulky and ill fitting. Ruth gave women like herself, who had undergone unwanted mastectomies and mourned the loss of their breasts to cancer, a means to hold their heads up and still feel beautiful. She is also depicted as handling Ken’s illness with understanding and grace, as a contributor to several Jewish philanthropic causes, and in later life a mentor for women in business settings.
The prose of Barbie and Ruth is workmanlike. It felt to me more like a legal brief than a novel, which paired well with the framing of the narrative. The intro foreshadows Ruth’s legal troubles and then the book goes back in time to show the entire build up to the ultimate court case and later resolution. This includes Ruth’s growing up as the child of Jewish immigrants with a large family and being raised by her eldest sister. This book is not written in the style of biographies that are meant to feel like fiction or thrillers. I needed time to digest and make my way through.
After finishing the book, I became one of the last people in the known universe to finally watch the Barbie Movie. I enjoyed the Ruth Handler cameo character, and based on the book felt it was truly representative of Ruth the woman. Much has been said about the movie and its different representations of feminism. I’m not a movie critic, so I’ll simply direct you to read those voices for a nuanced take on those issues while I focus on Ruth and her vision for Barbie. Barbie, like Ruth, has her flaws. Many of them are pointed out in the movie. None of us is perfect, but for some of us, Barbie lead us to believe that we could still dream big.
Barbie had every career under the sun, and above it – looking at you astronaut Barbie! -so it makes me smile to realize that I ultimately chose a career for which I didn’t have the corresponding Barbie as a child. Because isn’t that the point? By giving me so many different ways to play, to be, to exist, as a woman (albeit most frequently as a slim, white woman who never gave any indication of being Jewish) Ruth Handler allowed me to think past what was in front of me and dream for myself. I’ll never have Barbie’s figure, and I’m no blonde, but Barbie still had something meaningful for me and Ruth’s story did too. Because this little girl most definitely liked to pretend she was a big girl. And she still does, even after she’s all grown.