Sexy, Career-Minded Barbie Turns 50 (5 Questions for Author & Barbie Expert M.G. Lord)
M. G. Lord, author of Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll, also wrote Britannica’s entry on Barbie. She kindly agreed to the following interview on the occasion of Barbie’s 50th birthday today.
Since 1995 Lord has been a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review and The New York Times Arts & Leisure section. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Discover, Travel + Leisure, ARTNews, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and The New Yorker. In 2004, she published Astro Turk: The Private Life of Rocket Science: A Social History of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a Family Memoir of Aerospace Culture During the Cold War. She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California.
* * *
Britannica: So today is Barbie’s 50th birthday — she was introduced this day in 1959 by the Mattel company of Southern California. Despite the glam and glitter traditionally associated with her, Barbie’s origins are actually rather low-brow, aren’t they? And her curvaceous figure immediately became a controversy. Tell us about her origins and how Mattel got around this controversy.
Lord: Barbie was closely modeled on the Bild Lilli doll — a plastic version of a sleazy cartoon character published during the middle 1950s in the Bild Zeitung, a downscale German newspaper. All the jokes in the Lilli comic involved Lilli taking money from jowly fat cats for sexual favors. Mothers hated Barbie (three original Barbies pictured right) the moment they saw her — or at least that was how it appeared to Ernst Dichter, Mattel’s market researcher. They felt intimidated by her voluptousness; one mother called Barbie “a Daddy doll.” Dichter, however, realized that if he could convince mothers that Barbie would teach their daughters “good grooming,” the mothers could be won over. And Mattel — through its advertising — did exactly that....
Read entire article at Britannica Blog
Since 1995 Lord has been a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review and The New York Times Arts & Leisure section. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Discover, Travel + Leisure, ARTNews, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and The New Yorker. In 2004, she published Astro Turk: The Private Life of Rocket Science: A Social History of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a Family Memoir of Aerospace Culture During the Cold War. She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California.
* * *
Britannica: So today is Barbie’s 50th birthday — she was introduced this day in 1959 by the Mattel company of Southern California. Despite the glam and glitter traditionally associated with her, Barbie’s origins are actually rather low-brow, aren’t they? And her curvaceous figure immediately became a controversy. Tell us about her origins and how Mattel got around this controversy.
Lord: Barbie was closely modeled on the Bild Lilli doll — a plastic version of a sleazy cartoon character published during the middle 1950s in the Bild Zeitung, a downscale German newspaper. All the jokes in the Lilli comic involved Lilli taking money from jowly fat cats for sexual favors. Mothers hated Barbie (three original Barbies pictured right) the moment they saw her — or at least that was how it appeared to Ernst Dichter, Mattel’s market researcher. They felt intimidated by her voluptousness; one mother called Barbie “a Daddy doll.” Dichter, however, realized that if he could convince mothers that Barbie would teach their daughters “good grooming,” the mothers could be won over. And Mattel — through its advertising — did exactly that....