Barbie Day

What the day is

Barbie Day is observed on March 9, the date the doll was first presented at the New York toy fair in 1959.

Origin and background

Ruth Handler, who co-founded Mattel, is credited with the idea after watching her daughter play with paper dolls and noticing that the child gave them adult roles rather than treating them as babies. Dolls available at the time were overwhelmingly infants, and the gap was the opportunity. Barbie is named after that daughter, Barbara, and Ken after her son.

The design was not original. On a trip to Europe, Handler encountered Bild Lilli, a German doll based on a newspaper cartoon character and sold largely as a novelty gift for adult men rather than as a children's toy. Mattel adapted the form, and later acquired the rights to it. That origin is rarely mentioned in the official telling and explains a good deal about the original proportions.

Those proportions have drawn criticism for decades, with analyses noting that the measurements would be anatomically implausible at human scale, and research examining the effect of play with such dolls on children's body image. Mattel eventually responded in 2016 by introducing curvy, tall and petite body types alongside the original, along with a much wider range of skin tones.

The career line is the more interesting counterweight. Barbie was given professions steadily and sometimes ahead of the culture, including an astronaut version issued in 1965, four years before the moon landing and at a time when no American woman had flown in space.

Handler's own later history is worth knowing. After a mastectomy she found prosthetics inadequate and co-founded a company manufacturing better ones, which occupied the last part of her working life.

How to take part

• Look up Bild Lilli, which is the part of the origin usually left out.
• Find the 1965 astronaut version and check the date against the space program.
• Read about Ruth Handler's prosthetics company.
• Pass old dolls on rather than binning them. They last for generations.
• Notice which professions the current range includes.