Free Forever Barbie by M. G. Lord

sophisticated woman that exciting things happen to, you need an apartment
     and you need to live in it alone!" Brown orders. Roommates won't do, nor will living at home; but you don't have to take up
     residence in Versailles, either.
    One can't help wondering whether Charlotte read Sex and the Single Girl while she was designing Barbie's 1963 wardrobe. "When a man thinks of a single woman," Brown writes, "he pictures her alone
     in her apartment, smooth legs sheathed in beige silk pants, lying tantalizingly among dozens of satin cushions, trying to
     read but not very successfully, for he is in that room—filling her thoughts, her dreams, her life." Sounds like Brown imagines him picturing Barbie—lying tantalizingly
     among the printed cushions on her pasteboard divan, smooth legs sheathed in the apricot silk pants that came with "Dinner
     at Eight," an outfit Charlotte introduced in 1963.
    Barbie's similarity to Brown's brave, new, vaguely selfish and decidedly subversive heroine has more than whimsical ramifications.
     It makes Barbie an undercover radical. Brown was "the first spokeswoman for the revolution," say Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth
     Hess, and Gloria Jacobs in Re- Making Love: The Feminization of Sex, even though today Brown is "a woman whom many feminists would be loath to claim as one of their own." Long before feminism
     was a part of the American political vocabulary, they point out, droves of women bought Brown's book—an antimarriage manifesto
     and plea for women's financial liberation and sexual autonomy disguised as a breezy volume of self-help.
    In choosing clothes, Brown urges: "Copycat a mentor with better taste than yours." And while Barbie didn't literally choose
     Charlotte, the designer certainly imposed her taste upon the doll. More significantly, the doll, to whom children looked up,
     was a sort of mentor to them. Just as Sex and the Single Girl spread Brown's gospel to adult women, Barbie and her paraphernalia conveyed it to their younger sisters.
    In Brown's protofeminist philosophy, preoccupation with appearance was a pragmatic necessity, not a narcissistic luxury. Men
     desired a single woman because she had "time and often more money to spend on herself . . . the extra twenty minutes to exercise
     every day, an hour to make-up her face for their date." Brown's Single Girl did not live in the world of ideas, where a looker
     like Robert Browning would fall for a lump like Elizabeth Barrett; she lived in the material world, where beauty was the decisive
     weapon in the everlasting battle for men. The Single Girl was not an intellectual; introspection, Brown makes clear, was a
     waste of energy. But the Girl was encouraged to have a sort of cunning—a nonverbal sagacity; she expressed herself through
     a vocabulary of objects rather than words.
    "Men survey women before treating them," John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing. "Consequently, how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated. To acquire some control over the process,
     women must contain it and interiorize it." A woman must cultivate the habit of simultaneously acting and watching herself
     act; she must split herself into two selves: the observer and the observed. She must turn herself, Berger says, into an "object
     of vision."
    Brown's book taught women how to turn themselves into such an object. Sex and the Single Girl is a Berlitz phrase book to the vernacular of clothing and style, a guide to help women manipulate men by manipulating how
     they appear to men.
    For some girls, Barbie no doubt functioned that way too. Not for all, but for many, I suspect. The relationship of the observed
     self to the observing self is much like that of a Barbie doll to its owner. When a girl projects herself onto a doll, she
     learns to split in two. She learns to manipulate an image of herself outside of herself. She learns what Brown and Berger
     would consider a survival skill.
    Another developing feminist who