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required two wardrobes: one innocent, featuring strapless Mary Janes and knee socks; the other sophisticated, featuring grown-up, seventies platform shoes. It also required from its owner a taste for the macabre: Even in the Mattel catalogue the child photographed with it looks wide-eyed and aghast. The doll squeaks and lurches as its bosoms pop out, then, after another turn of its arm, snaps back into flatness. Growing Up Skipper slipped into production while men managed the Barbie line. Earlier Barbie products had reflected a sort of sly, knowing, conspiracy-of-women approach to the mysteries of femininity. But Growing Up Skipper is a male interpretation of female coming-of-age, focusing not on the true marker of womanhood— menstruation—but on a tidy, superficial change.

Steve Lewis defended the doll as "educational," but because it sidesteps what Joan Didion termed "that dark involvement with birth and blood and death," it doesn't teach biology. Rather, it is about signaling one's grown-up status to men through clothing. For many real-life females, becoming a woman is a messy, bloody, harrowing event. It is also nonreversible; only a small minority of anorexics and athletes manage to turn it back. But for the doll, the transition is a lark; no muss, no fuss, and an open invitation to retreat. I was heartened, however, to learn that not all the men who worked on Growing Up Skipper approved of it. "That thing was grotesque," said Mattel chief of sculpture Aldo Favilli.

Although there were complaints about Growing Up Skipper, they were, for the most part, drowned out by the furor over another 1975 product, Baby Brother Tenderlove, an anatomically correct male doll. In Louisville, Kentucky, a group of women stormed into a toy store and castrated the dolls; in response, some retailers placed stickers over the penis in the doll's photo on the box. The National Organization for Women, former Mattel publicist Beverly Cannady recalls, applauded Baby Brother Tenderlove; but columnist Ellen Goodman didn't, and Cannady wound up debating her on the Phil Donahue show. Other detractors were even more direct: Tom Kalinske received death threats.

Nineteen seventy-six was a more benign year for Barbie, as were the rest of the seventies. The world was no longer the raw, politicized place it had been a decade earlier. Young people who had turned away from plastic again embraced it. Infected with a sickness called "Saturday Night Fever," they left their homes at sunset, glistening with the brave unnatural shimmer of polyester. Physically energized, mentally narcotized, they spun on Lucite dance floors that exploded in brilliantly colored light. Their hearts beat, their limbs shook, their eyes slit to the throb of plastic disco records: "Get down. Boogy oogy oogy." "I'd love to love you, baby." They were transported, hypnotized, borne aloft, their dreary daytime lives checked like an overcoat at the door. It was a narcissistic opiate; any zhlub could be a star.

Although the idea of disco was democratic—a sound system and lights were all one needed to experience it—big-city discotheques maintained their mystique through exclusivity. Poor, ugly, and obscure people rarely mixed with the voluptuaries at Manhattan's Studio 54; an imperious blond doorman kept the masses at bay. In Interview, a magazine he founded in 1969, Studio 54 habitue Andy Warhol recorded the dull chat of his fellow habitues—Liza, Truman, Bianca, Halston. Celebrity became a cult, with stars its priests, boring conversation its liturgy, and the guarded discotheque its temple.

By 1977, Barbie had earned a place in that temple. Ruth intended the doll to represent Everygirl; and for a while, she did. But after eighteen years in the public eye, she was as famous as the wraiths who haunted the notorious Fifty-fourth Street botte de nuit. No matter that she stood less than a foot tall, Barbie, like Ruth, had become bigger than life.

Perhaps in recognition of her increased stature, Mattel, in 1977, issued an eighteen-inch version of the Barbie doll. The larger edition was not,