ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that when Barbara Millicent Roberts steps out of Ruth Handler’s mind and into the American imagination, she joins a handful of female figures who embody woman’s burgeoning autonomy and cultural power. Yet in the face of 1940s–50s post war manufacturing, woman’s power, like the home goods she selects, is “femineered” by mass production and marketing, her autonomy is circumscribed by domesticity. Barbie, the author suggests, disrupts this femineering of woman’s power throughout the 1960s–70s and beyond by severing ties among womanhood, marriage, and motherhood, while showing that imaginative play with changing gender expectations makes the subversion of gender norms not only possible, but provocative.
