“One of the concerns that several of the early people that worked for Mattel felt was that Barbie might be so glamorous that little girls couldn’t identify with her,” says Bradley Justice Yarbrough, a Barbie collector and historian. But she also had a distinctively different look from Barbie. Midge was the same size as Barbie, so they could both wear each other’s clothes. In 1963, Mattel released its third doll in the Barbie line: Barbie’s best friend, Midge. Here are some of the lesser-known pals from Barbie’s past. Within a few years, Barbie gained several friends, family members and friends of family members, all of whom-you guessed it-had their own clothing lines, too.Īfter that, Barbie’s circle of friends and family grew even bigger, and the characters within it evolved, were discontinued and even got pregnant. In 1961, Barbie got a boyfriend named Ken, another doll with his own line of clothing that parents could buy. The doll became a reason for parents to buy Barbie’s outfits. At a time when many of the dolls available in the United States resembled babies or children, Barbie broke the mold by resembling an older teenager or a young adult (more specifically, she looked like the risqué German novelty doll that inspired her).īecause Barbie was a fashion doll who came dressed in a bathing suit, Mattel’s goal wasn’t just to get parents to buy the doll. Marli sought moral support from Margaret Seymour, a shopper at the store.In 1959, the Mattel toy company debuted what would become its flagship doll: Barbara Millicent Roberts, more commonly known as Barbie. You look like this doll," pointing to the black doll. Within earshot of customers, Marli said, "But sweetheart, you don't look like that doll. In our first interaction of the day, as two unsuspecting women shopped for gifts, Donshea eagerly picked out a Caucasian doll and began asking Marli to buy it for her. Donshea would loudly insist on a light-skinned doll in front of the store's customers and Marli would vehemently protest her choice, ultimately pushing Donshea to embrace an African-American doll against her will. We cast Donshea, an adorable eight-year old African-American girl, and Marli, an African-American actress who has been in several other "What Would You Do?" scenarios, to play the role of her caretaker. We traveled with our team to Pearl River, N.Y., where we set up our hidden cameras at The Toy Box, a toy store that sells dolls of all ethnicities. What happens when an African-American child chooses a white doll and her caretaker admonishes her, refusing to allow her to play with it and insisting she play with one that is African-American? What if the situation is reversed and a Caucasian child is forbidden from playing with an African-American doll? Will anyone intervene? Board of Education, helping spur the changes of the last fifty years.įast forward to 2011, when forced segregation is but a distant memory and our biracial president challenges old notions of racial identity. It was a stark reflection of the times, and was later used to support desegregation in Brown v. They displayed a poignant disconnect from dolls of their own skin color and assigned negative connotations to the darker-skinned dolls. Ma— - A landmark study from the 1940s, conducted by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark, showed that 63 percent of African-American children surveyed preferred playing with white dolls over black dolls.
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