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| Barbie |
In 1959, when the Barbie doll was first introduced onto the market by Ruth Handler, more than 350,000 units were sold and since then an estimated that over 1 billion dolls have been sold. She has survived a range of assaults, including the firing of Ruth Handler from the company in 1971 and backlash from feminists and women's rights advocates. Robin Swicord, an author and screenwriter, said "In countries where they don’t even sell makeup or have anything like our dating rituals, they play with Barbie. Barbie embodies not a cultural view of femininity, but the essence of woman” (qtd. in Lord 80).
Barbie was a respectable version of the Lilli doll in Germany. Lilli was "a German doxie - an ice-blond, pixie-nosed specimen of an Aryan ideal" that was popular among German men who often placed her on the dashboards of their car or gave the doll as a gift to their girlfriends (Lord 8). Handler recast Lilli as a wholesome all-American girl and marketed the doll to young girls. The rest is the stuff of marketing legend.
