Ruth Handler
1916-2002
Barbie Doll Creator
For 
most of history, dolls were created in the image of adult women and were dressed as such. In the late 19th century, baby dolls only became popular and they commanded the doll market well into the 20th century. That is, until 1959, when a brand new doll burst on the scene. Ruth Mosko Handler envisioned a three-dimensional doll that would allow a child to learn through playing. That's how the Barbie doll was invented.
Her creator had been short on playthings in her Denver childhood, as the youngest of 10 children of a Polish blacksmith and his frail, illiterate wife. Ruth left home at 19, vacationed in Hollywood and never looked back. Her high school boyfriend, Elliot Handler, joined her, and they married in 1938, when Ruth was a secretary at Paramount Studios. Elliot studied industrial design and made simple things - bowls, mirrors - in the new plastics for their home. Ruth persuaded her husband to manufacture his creations on a bigger scale in the garage. They turned over $2 million a 
year by 1942, when the couple joined Harold "Matt" Mattson to make picture frames.
The 1940s were the great age in the US of the doll's house, that dream tract home in small scale, propaganda for the post-war return of Rosie the Riveter to the kitchen, and the three made doll furniture from wood and plastic scrap left from the frames. They called their toy company Mattel; Matt as in Mattson and El as in Elliot.
Elliot's ideal doll was the talking Chatty Cathy, which he developed through the 1950s, but Ruth was less interested in what could be extruded in plastic and more in the playtime of her own daughter, Barbara, "Barbie". Barbie didn't want to cuddle a facsimile baby; she liked paper dolls, two-dimensional figures whose clothes and accessories were easily changed with fold-over tabs. The figures were usually adult and fashionably dressed. Ruth wondered if they could be manufactured three-dimensionally. That meant breasts, though, and Mattel's all-male executives were sure that no parents would buy bosomy dolls. They rejected the idea more than once.
While vacationing in Europe in 1956, Ruth saw a German doll, Lilli. The doll's shape was three-dimensional and voluptuous -- big bust, elongated legs and vestigial feet thrust into stiletto heels. Ruth brought Lilli back to Mattel and commanded plans for her mass production in Japan, with a strong doll tradition and low manufacturing costs.
The original "Barbie Teen-Age Fashion Model" of 1959 wore a blonde ponytail and a zebra-striped swimsuit. She hit the counters at $3. Mattel sold over 350,000 the first year and soon the compan
y was making an annual $100 million. Barbie was regularly updated - her hair went Jackie during the Kennedy years - and she left behind those small-town outfits, for a Friday night date, for Oscar ceremony designer gowns and executive suits with matching laptop.
The real genius of Ruth Handler came with her ideas to market Barbie. It was through her ideas to advertise directly to children through television, thereby, introducing the Barbie doll without the intervention of unimaginative adult buyers that brought fantastic success by Christmas in 1959. Today, college classes study both the marketing principles created by Ruth and the relationship of the Barbie doll to society in the 20th and 21st centuries.<o:p>
Named after the Handler's son, boyfriend Ken arrived in 1961, followed by Midge, Skipper and (in 1969) African-American Christie, Barbie's first ethnic friend. Black Barbie arrived in 1981 and was customized to locality. Maisai Barbie was big in Kenya.
Ruth asserted that Barbie's purpose was to allow a girl "to project herself into her dream of her future". That doll-sized dream expanded, as did the aspirations of real women: the high-schooler became an astronaut, athlete and teacher. Barbie, said Ruth, always "represented the fact that a woman has choices."
On the official Barbie website on the day of Ruth's death, the motto on the parents' page was "Today's play, tomorrow's career," beside pictures of both black and white Doctor Barbies, and a note that medicine would be better when there was "gender parity in the profession." Everybody could vote for "Barbie's new career - librarian, architect or policewoman"? As culture commentator Michelle Erica Green wrote of Barbie: "what other woman has come so close to having it all"?
Ruth Handler was searching for a way to give her little girl a more enjoyable way to play. Handler ended up creating an American icon for millions of little girls. The creator of our beloved Barbie doll, Ruth Mosko Handler, businesswoman, was born November 4, 1916 and died April 26, 2002. She is survived by her husband and daugher. Ruth's son Ken died in 1994.
