Forever Barbie Read Online Free PDF Page A

also a consumer of toys, the making of which, by the late nineteenth century, had become an industry. Until
     World War I, Germany dominated the marketplace; but when German troops began shooting at U.S. soldiers, Americans lost their
     taste for enemy playthings. This burst of patriotism gave the U.S. toy industry its first rapid growth spurt; its second came
     after World War II, with the revolution in plastics.
    Just as children were "discovered" in the eighteenth century, they were again "discovered" in post-World War II America—this
     time by marketers. The evolution of the child-as-consumer was indispensable to Barbie's success. Mattel not only pioneered
     advertising on television, but through that Medium it pitched Barbie directly to kids.
    It is with an eye toward using objects to understand ourselves that I beg Barbie's knee-jerk defenders and knee-jerk revilers
     to cease temporarily their defending and reviling. Barbie is too complicated for either an encomium or an indictment. But
     we will not refrain from looking under rocks.
    For women under forty, the implications of such an investigation are obvious. Barbie is a direct reflection of the cultural
     impulses that formed us. Barbie is our reality. And unsettling though the concept may be, I don't think it's hyperbolic to
     say: Barbie is us.

CHAPTER TWO
    A TOY IS BORN
    I t is hard to imagine Mattel Toys headquartered anywhere but in southern California. A short drive from Disneyland, minutes
     from the beach, it is in a place where people come to make their fortunes, or so the mythology goes, where beautiful women
     are "discovered" in drugstores, and a man can turn a mouse into an empire. Barbie could not have been conceived in Pawtucket,
     Rhode Island, where Hasbro is located, or Cincinnati, Ohio, where Kenner makes its home. Barbie needed the sun to incubate
     her or, at the very least, to lighten her hair. This is not to say that Hawthorne, where Mattel had its offices until 1991,
     is anything but a dump—a gritty industrial district that cries out for trees. But it is a dump with a glamour-queen precedent:
     In 1926, Marilyn Monroe was born there.
    Of course it's inaccurate to say Barbie was "born" anywhere. The dolls were originally cast in Japan, making, I suppose, Barbie's
     birthplace Tokyo. But Barbie's "parents," Ruth and Elliot Handler, are very much southern Californians—of the fortune-making
     variety—who fled their native Denver, Colorado, in 1937.
    California was a different place back then: neither stippled with television antennas nor linked with concrete cloverleaf.
     The McDonald brothers wouldn't raise their Golden Arches for another fifteen years. Thanks to the Depression, the Golden State
     had lost some of its glister. Okies and Arkies poured in from the ravaged Dust Bowl; and for many, the land of sunshine and
     promise was just as gray and bleak as the place they had left.

    Not so for the Handlers. Just twenty-one when they uprooted, they were optimists; and because they believed in the future
     they were willing to take risks. The youngest of ten children, Ruth was a stenographer at Paramount Pictures; Elliot, the
     second of four brothers, was a light-fixture designer and art student; and their first gamble was to chuck their jobs and
     start their own business, peddling the Plexiglas furniture that Elliot had been building part-time in their garage. The wager
     paid off: In the first years of World War II, they expanded into a former Chinese laundry and hired about a hundred workers.
     They made jewelry, candleholders, even a clear-plastic Art Deco airplane with a clock in it.
    Wartime shortages derailed that venture, but the Handlers remained on track. In 1945, they started "Mattel Creations" with
     their onetime foreman, Harold Matson, whose name was fused with Elliot's to form Mattel. Matson, however, did not love gambling
     with his life savings; he sold out in 1946, making him the sort of asterisk to toy history that