She even fit First Lady Betty Ford for the prosthesis after her mastectomy. People magazine featured her in such a pose. Her sales tactics included what she called her “strip act,” which involved removing her shirt to demonstrate that nobody could see or feel the difference between her real breast and her prosthetic one. She led a team of eight women, most of whom were breast cancer survivors, who would visit department stores and train sales staff to fit customers. She saw a need for life-like prostheses designed by and for women and sold a product called Nearly Me. During a scene in Barbie Handler references her mastectomy, and the Barbie creator did indeed battle breast cancer. Handler had a second act in the 1980s selling a totally different product. She was fined $57,000 and sentenced to 2,500 hours of community service. In 1978, Handler and several other Mattel executives were indicted by a federal grand jury for conspiracy, mail fraud, and giving the Securities and Exchange Commission false financial statements for the company. “For most baby boomers, she has the same iconic resonance as any female saints, although without the same religious significance.” Ruth Handler was a complicated womanĪs Barbie hints, Ruth Handler was a complex lady. “She’s an archetypal female figure, she’s something upon which little girls project their idealized selves,” she writes. Lord argued that Barbie is the most potent icon of American culture of the late 20th century. In her book Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Living Doll, author M.G. Barbie eventually transitioned from a fashion doll who just played dress-up into a career woman-who played dress-up as a doctor or astronaut in addition to a fashionista. Fans clamored for Barbie to have a boyfriend, so Ken (named for Handler’s son) was introduced in 1961. The fashion doll immediately became a hit, and buoyed Mattel to success. Read More: Why It Took 64 Years to Make a Barbie Movieīarbie debuted at the 1959 Toy Fair in New York City wearing the now iconic black-and-white striped bathing suit that Barbie star Margot Robbie dons in the opening of the film. to prove to Mattel’s designers that they could produce something similar. Handler brought one of the dolls back to the U.S. The doll was based on a comic strip about a pin-up with a voluptuous figure and was designed as a sexy trinket for soldiers during World War II. The idea stalled until 1956 when, on a European vacation, Handler saw a German doll called Bild Lilli in a store. But when she pitched the idea of an adult-looking doll to the company’s executives, they balked: No mother, they argued, would buy their daughter a doll with breasts. Handler had already co-founded Mattel with her husband in 1945 to sell picture frames before they pivoted to doll furniture and, eventually other toys. She would eventually name her iconic doll Barbie, after her daughter. Handler drew inspiration from her daughter Barbara, who would play dress-up with paper dolls. In the early 1950s, Handler had the rather revolutionary idea that playing with dolls modeled on grown-up women would help girls imagine what they might be when they grew up. Before Barbie came along, girls mostly played with baby dolls, an act that conditioned them to be mothers. Ruth Handler revolutionized the toy industry when she invented a mainstream doll with the proportions of an adult female.
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