Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [62]
To be fair, Mattel at almost the same time introduced a "Keys to Fame" game that encouraged little girls to try their hands at careers. But Queen of the Prom was the game that took off; it is the one boomers remember—especially for the splashy, eye-catching fifties graphics that belied its grim economic message. While playing it recently, I often brooded on the invisibility of the mother. Did little girls perceive Mom's absence as a victory in the war for Dad? Did they associate it with her status as a non-wage-earning entity? Or did they realize that they, too, could be headed in Mom's direction—a glistening prom queen one minute, a shadow the next?
I also thought of Ernest Dichter's market research on Barbie—the way he urged Mattel to exploit mothers' dark, unarticulatable fear that without a stern tug in the right direction, their boyish daughters would grow up into unmarriageable brutes. In Queen of the Prom, as in the card game Old Maid, to be ugly, frowzy, or manless is to be shut out forever from success.
To a degree, the three Barbie short-story collections and eight Barbie novels that Random House published are set in a similar world—the world of proms and boyfriends and "school activities." But Barbie Millicent Roberts, as the fictive character is called, reflects the biases and experiences of the young, independent women who told her stories. In 1962, a year before Betty Friedan identified "the problem that has no name" in The Feminine Mystique, Cynthia Lawrence dramatized it in her novel Barbie's New York Summer. In it, Margaret Roberts, Barbie's housebound mother, lurches from sacrifice to sacrifice; if she isn't renouncing some pleasure to accommodate her husband, George, she is torturing herself for Barbie. Flabbergasted by her masochism, Barbie finally blurts, "Mother, don't you ever want anything for yourself?" To which Mrs. Roberts, after weirdly taking stock of her living-room furniture, replies: "I have you till you're grown and I have Dad. You're the one who has an exciting career ahead of you."
Far from patterning herself on Mom, Barbie models herself after autonomous professional women. She has a string of glamorous female mentors who introduce her, and, by extension, millions of little girls (by 1966, the Barbie Fan Club had a million members), to the idea of economic self-sufficiency. These women have men in their lives, but they aren't dependent on them. Their autonomy is portrayed as desirable; none attended the Joan Crawford school of executive gorgonhood. Paula Foxx, a West Coast swimsuit designer who, in Bette Lou Maybee's Barbie's Fashion Success, invites Barbie to intern with her company, slips into the Roberts "family circle as naturally, as warmly, as any ordinary woman might have done." She is "not some cold, frightening creature that oozed sophistication."
Barbie's mother welcomes Foxx—even though Foxx's mode of existence implicitly calls Mrs. Roberts's into question. Instead of seeking self-validation by creating Barbie in her image, she goes the stage mother route. She admires Foxx for recognizing "what a pretty and talented daughter I have," where "I have" is a significant detail. Barbie is her possession—like the living-room furniture—and she enjoys having its quality discerned.
Like the world depicted on Father Knows Best, Barbie's cosmos is a comforting place for children. Justice prevails. Conflicts resolve. Life isn't random; actions have a cause and effect. Barbie's relentlessly nonethnic parents don't drink, fight, gobble tranquilizers, or have extramarital dalliances. Nor does Willows, the generic midwestern town where Barbie lives, teem with heroin addicts or teenage runaways. Barbie does not stew over nuclear war—or class or race war, for that matter. Asians, African Americans, and Hispanics apparently do not live in Willows, though an Italian-American family turns up in one of the later stories.
Significantly, Barbie cannot bear family