Why Historian Jill Lepore Hated Barbie
Time, with Olivia Waxman
I hated the film.
I will be unpopular for saying this. To pretend that a story about peddling plastic Barbie dolls for a giant international corporation is a story of feminist liberation, it's just almost unbearably sad to me. It's just a bizarre, creepy love letter to tyranny and capitalism.
One of the essays in my collection, which is called “Valley of the Dolls,” is about the intellectual property battle between Mattel and the manufacturer of the Bratz dolls. Barbie was herself basically plagiarized, so there was an intellectual property battle over the creation of Barbie in the first place. Ruth Handler, who created Barbie, basically bought a doll in Germany on vacation, came back and redesigned it and called it Barbie and then tried to sell it in the U.S.
https://time.com/6303126/jill-lepore-interview-the-deadline/