Free Forever Barbie by M. G. Lord Page B

this hope to those who cannot
     tan: "With every office clerk able to afford a vacation at the shore, you may be able to make white skin worth more in status
     than a tan."
    Well versed in the art of sunbathing, Barbie, in 1963, had not yet had her feminist consciousness raised—though, like Steinem's
     political awareness, it would evolve with time. ("Feminism didn't come into my life at all until 1968 or 1969," Steinem told
     me when I asked her about The Beach Book.) In Barbie's defense, however, she could hardly have pondered the condition of "women," having been for four years the only
     adult female doll on the market. This, however, changed when Mattel introduced her so-called best friend Midge.
    Freckled of face, bulging of eye, Midge was from the outset a sorry Avis to Barbie's Hertz. Her debut commercial was a catalogue
     of tortures endured by homely teenage girls. Midge, the ad alleged, "is thrilled with Barbie's career as a teenage fashion
     model." But anyone who has ever been sixteen and female knows she was probably rent with feelings of inferiority.
    "Barbie has introduced Midge to her boyfriend," the ad continues, "and the three of them go everywhere together." Terrific.
     Tagging along after Mr. and Miss High School. If plastic dolls could kill themselves, I'm sure Midge would have tried.
    The following year things grew slightly more equitable; Mattel gave Midge a boyfriend (Allan) and dumped a younger sister
     (Skipper) on Barbie. Mattel's engineers also did something really hideous to Barbie's face, replacing her painted eyes with
     feline-shaped mechanical things that blinked. Now called "Miss Barbie," she looked like the offspring of an interspecies union,
     a cousin of Nastassia Kinski in Cat People.
    Not surprisingly, as Barbie racked up other doll friends she also gathered competitors. Rival toymakers could scarcely witness
     Mattel's triumph without hatching plots to exploit it. Barbie's major challengers were Tammy, brought out by the Ideal Toy
     & Novelty Corporation in 1962, Tressy, brought out by the American Character Doll Company in 1963, and the Littlechap Family,
     introduced by Remco in 1964.
    Named for an insipid movie character portrayed by Debbie Reynolds, Tammy looked as if she could have given Barbie a run for
     her money; but in hindsight it's clear that she never had a chance. Barbie may have appeared as if she belonged in the fifties,
     but her ethos was pure sixties; she was a swinging single with a house, a boyfriend, and no parents. Tammy, by contrast, came
     with Mom and Dad. She didn't have a boyfriend, she had a brother. "Basically, Tammy was a baby doll," explains vintage Barbie
     dealer Joe Blitman. Boring, sexless, and shackled to the moribund nuclear family, Tammy bit the dust in the mid-sixties when
     the divorce rate took off.
    I must confess to feeling chills the first time I saw Tammy. There is something creepy about a doll with the body of an eight-year-old
     and the car, clothes, and trappings of a grown-up. If, as some psychoanalysts contend, anorexia is a perverse strategy to
     thwart the development of female secondary sex characteristics, Tammy is the model for such a weird infant-adult. At least
     Barbie embraced womanhood, however cartoonish her interpretation; she wasn't a female Peter Pan demanding car keys and the
     right to vote while shirking the burden of sexual development.
    Tressy was possibly even more physically bizarre than Tammy; she had a tuft of hair in the middle of her head that could be
     yanked out and screwed back in, like a tape measure. When beehive hairdos went the way of the Hula Hoop, so did Tressy.
    Like Tammy, Remco's Littlechap Family was cursed by its links to what McCalVs in 1954 termed the "togetherness" movement, in which, as Betty Friedan put it in The Feminine Mystique, a woman "exists only for and through her husband and children." Daughter Judy Littlechap bore a striking resemblance to Jacqueline
     Bouvier Kennedy, which, when