Readers Dessert

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book but once I got into it I thought it was fantastic. It was a great story about the work behind the scenes to create the first Barbie doll but it also took me down memory lane as I thought about my first Barbie doll. The first doll was sold in March, 1959. I was past playing with baby dolls but that year, my friends and I all HAD to have a Barbie doll. We spent endless hours changing her clothes, combing her hair and making up stories about her life.

Ruth Handler, co-founder of Mattel Toy company, walked into the board room in 1956 with a doll that she had found in Germany. She wanted to create this doll for America. At first the other members in the meeting were surprised. This wasn’t a baby doll like girls were playing with all over the world – this was a woman with real life attributes. They didn’t see any way that this doll would be accepted. But Ruth was a strong woman who insisted that they give it a try. She assembled a team to work on the creation of the doll – an engineer who used to work for an aerospace company, clothes designers and engineers started working on what it would take to bring Barbie to the public. This was a totally new design and they ran into a lot of roadblocks but she felt like this was what little girls needed and insisted that they continue to work on the doll. In 1959, the first year of sales, Mattel sold 300,000 Barbie dolls and it became the must-have toy for girls.

I found it so interesting to read about all of the challenges that the team at Mattel faced in bringing the doll to reality. Even after the doll entered the market, there were ups and downs over the years. During the women’s movement, the Barbie doll was deemed as bad for teaching young girls the wrong way to handle their futures. Mattel countered by introducing Barbie in many different roles — as an astronaut, a nurse, a doctor and a pilot to name a few.

Be sure to read the Author’s notes at the end of the book. She did significant research on the creation of the Barbie doll at Mattel and she shares a little about the real people in the novel and which characters only existed in her mind. There are also some great pictures of some of the Barbie dolls over the years.

I grew up playing with and collecting Barbie Dolls. I SO wish I had saved them. Vintage Barbie dolls now are worth a ba-zillion dollars, plus they hold so many memories.

Bestselling author, Renee Rosen has written the definite, well-researched book about how the eleven and a half inches tall doll, became a legacy, Let’s Cal Her Barbie (Berkley).

In the world of toy dolls in the 50s there were dozens of baby dolls, peeing dolls, whining dolls, dolls of every kind, except a doll that let young girls know they could become anything they wanted to be when she grew up. Enter Ruth Handler, of Mattel who saw the German Bild Lilli doll while travelling in Switzerland and knew this is what the American market needed.

The first Barbie debuted at the New York toy fair in March 1959. Mattel sold 300-thousand Barbies that year and the sales skyrocketed from there. Barbie dolls started being designed and taking jobs in male-oriented fields like an airline pilot, NASCAR driver and going into space. Barbie has been part of the American zeitgeist starting in1960 when she became a tennis player paving the way for Title IX.

Let’s Cal Her Barbie is an incredibly interesting story you won’t to miss. Who knew there was so much history behind a plastic doll.

Thanks to Berkley and NetGalley for a digital advance reader copy. All comments and opinions are my own.

This was an unputdownable, well-researched historical fiction that blurred the lines between fact and fiction in a fascinating multi-layered story. It tells how the Barbie doll was created, how Ruth Handler originated the vision of Barbie and was the motivator behind the cultural phenomenon. It’s also the story of the Mattel Corporation, from its 1945 origins as a two-person toy developer to a multinational toy manufacturing and entertainment company. And it’s Ruth’s personal story, as well as the story of Jack Ryan, engineer and Barbie co-developer. And fictional designer Stevie Klein also plays a major role in rounding out the various themes of the book.

My sister and I had one of the earliest Barbies, and reading about her development was fascinating – the behind-the scenes inspiration, the mechanical manufacturing as well as the marketing, the clothes and accessories – this was riveting. As Barbie’s success grew, so did the Mattel company, and the story of the company’s development, with its ups and downs, was also engrossing.

Alongside the business aspects, author Rosen told the personal stories of Ruth, Jack and Stevie. Sometimes they were working together, sometimes in competition, but always with Mattel and Barbie’s success as motivating factors.

I found myself rooting for Ruth throughout the novel. She was a nontraditional woman of the time. I didn’t know her motivation for creating Barbie was to set a new example for young girls, to “show them a different road they can walk down, one where marriage and children could be a stop along the way rather than a foregone conclusion, and definitely not the end of their journey.”

A feminist theme runs throughout the novel as Rosen repeats Ruth’s desire for Barbie “to connect with all those little girls out there. She wanted Barbie to be their role model and show them what it meant to be feminine and strong. That if they want to get married and have children, that’s fine, but they can still have a life of their own. Barbie was supposed to deliver a new, fresh message for the next generation to grow into.”

Whether or not you had a Barbie or saw the recent movie, this is an important book that tells the story of a strong woman who is determined to follow her vision of providing more career and lifestyle options for girls and young women. I highly recommend this one!