Barbie's House and American Dream PDF

Barbie, Her House and the American Dream nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/23/realestate/barbie-dreamhouse.html Anna Kodé June 23, 2023 Against all odds, Barbara Millicent Roberts bought her first home in 1962. Women were d...

Barbie, Her House and the American Dream nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/23/realestate/barbie-dreamhouse.html Anna Kodé June 23, 2023 Against all odds, Barbara Millicent Roberts bought her first home in 1962. Women were denied mortgage applications because of their sex or marital status at the time, but that didn’t stop her. The house was modest: a yellow-walled ranch home made of cardboard. For Ms. Roberts — better known as Barbie — it was a dream, and it soon became a national craze. Today according to Mattel, the toymaker behind the iconic doll, a new Barbie Dreamhouse is sold every two minutes. Barbie’s body, careers, lifestyle and house — a hot pink monument of decadence and desire, now equipped with a swimming pool, slide and elevator — have all been qualities designed for children (and adults) to crave for themselves. Barbie has been the platonic ideal of what a young woman could and should be. “Every little girl needed a doll through which to project herself into her dream of her future,” Ruth Handler, the inventor of Barbie, told The New York Times in 1977. She named the doll after her own daughter (Ken was named after Ms. Handler’s son). Even the dollhouse itself is a status symbol among owners: Its retail value is $199.99, and one must have a home large enough to accommodate the nearly four-foot tall toy. From the beginning, much of Barbie’s existence — her unrealistic physical proportions, the lack of racially diverse dolls, the toy’s reinforcing of gender roles — has been debated in jest and in seriousness. But her home, which has not been as publicly parsed or praised like the doll, has been a mirror for the various social, political and economic changes the rest of the country was experiencing. It has followed housing patterns and trends, from chic, compact urban living to suburban sprawl to pure excess. At times, it has been out of step, ignoring the country’s ills (Barbie’s never been broke; she has never lost her house to foreclosure). 1962 Barbie’s Bachelorette Pad Financial institutions frequently turned down mortgage applications for women without male co-signers when Mattel debuted the Dreamhouse in 1962, three years after Barbie shook up the toy world, arriving in a one-piece bathing suit and kitten heels. 1/5 “Mortgage lenders had a host of stereotypes about women — the same kinds of stereotypes that were used to discriminate against women in employment, insurance and businesses open to the public — and that’s basically that women were economic dependents on men and that their role was to be caregivers,” said Deborah Dinner, a professor of law at Cornell University and the author of “The Sex Equality Dilemma.” Single or divorced women, Ms. Dinner added, were often denied loans because of the very fact that they weren’t married. This practice, known as credit discrimination, wasn’t banned until 1974, when the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed. Many employers weren’t legally required to pay women equal salaries as men for the same work either, before the passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963. Notably, Barbie’s first home, which was made of cardboard, had no kitchen. This was contrary to many early dollhouses, which were made with the intent of teaching young girls domestic tasks. Instead, Barbie had a television set and record player. She was here to have fun. Not be a homemaker. Books and varsity pennants are the markings of a college-educated woman, signaling Barbie’s autonomy. The single bed and a framed photo of Ken further asserted that this was Barbie’s own, unshared domestic space. Barbie’s first home was prophetic in one way: today, more single women own homes than single men. As a young girl in the 1960s, Sue Dalsing never fully realized the significance of Barbie owning a home. “I thought that was just how it was supposed to be,” said Ms. Dalsing, 62, an antique dealer. “Ken didn’t have anything. He came to Barbie’s house.” Now, Ms. Dalsing lives in Saint Joseph, Mo., in what she called her own dream house. “We got to pick everything out and give our daughters a nice, shiny, new home.” It’s also a ranch home, just like Barbie’s. While the toy’s debut could have been an act of feminist revolt, it was also about making money — perhaps primarily so. The year the house came out, Elliot Handler, Mattel’s president and husband of Barbie inventor Ms. Handler, told Time magazine how the company manufactured accessories that were part of the Barbie ecosystem in order to boost sales. “You get hooked on one and you have to buy the other,” he said. 2/5 That keep-them-coming-back-for-more sales formula is still working six decades later: “Dreamhouse owners buy twice as many Barbie toys as non-Dreamhouse owners,” said Lisa McKnight, the global head of Mattel’s Barbie and dolls portfolio, in an interview. From Ferns to A-Frames As the 1970s ended, Barbie — and many Americans — gave up the metropolitan lifestyle and moved out to the suburbs with a prototypical A-frame home. Maybe, she moved back to her home state of Wisconsin. Cities were shrinking in size and wealth, as white flight followed desegregation efforts and more areas adopted the model of Levittown, a Long Island community of roughly 17,000 homes that look startlingly alike. Though feminism was now mainstream, some efforts to advance women’s rights were stalling. In 1982, the Equal Rights Amendment, which stated that rights “shall not be denied or abridged” on the basis of sex, fell three states short of being added to the Constitution. Suburban life could be akin to domestication. Mirroring the growing popularity of prefabricated construction, Barbie’s A-frame house was modular — children could deconstruct it by pulling the sections apart. Houseplants saw a bloom during the environmental movement of the 1970s when people filled their homes with macramé plant hangers and terrariums. Barbie’s A-frame house had window planters overflowing with plastic flora — her plants were no longer just 2D. 1990 Pink, Pink and More Pink Barbie’s signature pink began increasingly popping up in the 1970s, part of Mattel’s effort to brand toys to stand out from competitors, said Mr. Burrichter. Though it might’ve been successful marketing, Mattel’s pink dousing would later be criticized for perpetuating gender stereotypes. The home’s glittery facade also spoke to the ethos of the McMansion, which prioritized showiness and size over quality or utility. As suburban residents grew hungrier for larger homes, McMansions both fueled and satisfied that desire. 3/5 “The size of the average American house rose from about 1,500 square feet in 1970 to more than 2,300 square feet in 2001, with a particularly big growth spurt” in the late 1990s, The Times reported. Women made several economic and cultural strides throughout the 1990s. The median age women were getting married was trending upward, women’s labor force participation increased and the “girl power” movement, popularized by the Spice Girls, was taking off. As a child, Maddie Bone, a 28-year-old brand designer, was given a hand-me-down Dreamhouse from a family friend. She felt like she hit the jackpot — it was in mint condition, and it even came with furniture. Ms. Bone, who lives in Waldoboro, Me., recalled creating highly-involved scenarios with her Barbies, making them go on “Homer-esque” journeys, traversing through her yard to the living room to a “super fun party blowout” in the Dreamhouse propped on the family coffee table. “I think we were all dealing with my mom’s cancer diagnosis in different ways during that time. Barbie was a world I could pour myself into and see this perfect house while ours … wasn’t,” Ms. Bone said. “There was no hospital bed in the Dreamhouse.” 2015 Escaping Reality In the aftermath of the 2008 housing crisis, many Americans saw their chances of achieving homeownership squashed. About 2.3 million homes in the United States had at least one foreclosure filing in 2008, more than triple the amount from 2006. Women, and women of color in particular, were disproportionately affected by the crisis, said Amy Castro, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice. “In the early 2000s, single women were the fastest growing group of home buyers in the United States,” she said. Predatory lenders then “super included” them when selling risky loans. “African American women were 256 percent more likely to have a risky subprime loan than a white man with the same financial profile,” Ms. Castro pointed out. The privilege of being a toy meant that Barbie never faced adversity. She kept moving into larger, more glamorous houses. In 2015, she had new seven-room digs, complete with a garage for her convertible. 2023 4/5 Interiors and Identity In 1980, Mattel launched the first Black and Hispanic Barbies. Before that, Barbie had a Black friend named Christie, but this was the first time the main character was Black. Now on Mattel’s website, the company boasts having dolls in 35 skin tones, 97 hairstyles and 9 body types. “Homes are made up of, or at the least contain, the materiality of aspirations, joy, despair — so many things. Tied up in that is identity,” said Catherine E. McKinley, the author of an upcoming book on Black homemaking. “To paint the doll but not the house is really a gesture towards the dollar.” Barbie Is Not Like the Rest of Us Aspects of the Dreamhouses are meant to appear “architecturally implausible” to keep things toylike, said Ms. Spencer. The four Dreamhouses had no walls, and there were also no toilets, no shadows, no color white. They used cheap fake grass — the higher quality fake grass appeared too realistic. The stark reminders that it’s a fantasyland might put some viewers at ease. Society has held up “this promise of homeownership as part and parcel of the American dream,” for centuries, said Ms. Castro. More than 60 years of Barbie’s Dreamhouses have further instilled that in us from a young age. To own a home at all, especially one with a three-story slide, can feel unattainable for most. From July 2021 to June 2022, home buyers were richer, whiter and older than they had been in decades. The share that were first-time homeowners was the lowest its been since at least 1981. And, the median home price exceeded $400,000 for the first time. It’s called a Dreamhouse for a reason. We can all dream, can’t we? Produced by Phaedra Brown, Gabriel Gianordoli and Michael Kolomatsky. 5/5