What a doll!
Barbie continues to inspire after all these years
By Corbin Crable
Ruth Handler had seen it her entire life.
The dolls she and countless other women had played with as children were almost always baby dolls. Not so much toys as preparations for a life of motherhood, the dolls were a girl’s introduction to the limited roles available to a woman of centuries past. Wife. Mother. Nurturer. Caretaker.
It was postwar America, and Handler wanted to show girls that they had other paths in life they could choose as the world around them changed and grew. She watched as her daughter played with paper dolls…
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A Message From Our Editor
Action figures were toy industry’s answer to Barbie
by Corbin Crable
As little girls in the late 1950s and early 1960s played with a new doll named “Barbie,” their younger brothers probably wondered, “What’s the big deal with this toy?”
In the mid-1960s, those boys would get their own version in the form of a similar toy being marketed as an “action figure” – a fully posable “doll” with more masculine themes (though don’t you dare call them “dolls” to the boys who played with them!).
The term was developed by toy giant Hasbro in 1964, five years after Barbie was introduced, with their G.I. Joe action figure…
Photo by D A V I D S O N L U N A on Unsplash