The success of the Barbie movie, grossing over a billion dollars globally, can be in part attributed to the innovative and unexpected portrayal of the iconic doll. It is not only the symbol of unachievable beauty standards, but also a tale of emancipation and feminist resistance in a patriarchal society. Our article, published online the 1st of June 2023 in Business History(https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2023.2215193) explores these themes by focusing on the entrepreneurial journey of the creator of Barbie and founder of the company Mattel, one of the most influential firms in the global toy industry since the 1950s, Ruth Handler. Known as one of the greatest examples of female entrepreneurship in the United States, surely the Barbie movie has reinforced this image and idea about the business woman.
The authors, Valeria Giacomin and Christina Lubinski, summarise their article in a blog post here.
In the article “Entrepreneurship as emancipation: Ruth Handler and the entrepreneurial process ‘in time’ and ‘over time’, 1930s–1980s,” co-authored with Christina Lubinski, we draw from a diverse set of historical sources – including personal archives, oral histories, primary and secondary sources on American female entrepreneurs – to retrace Ruth Handler’s fifty-year entrepreneurial career. Our research avoids the narrative of the heroic entrepreneur and seeks to provide a balanced reconstruction of her business activity. In part, this allowed to investigate the concept of “entrepreneuring” as emancipation theorized in management studies by Violina Rindova and colleagues looking at entrepreneurship as a means of liberation, challenging the status quo to pursue freedom and autonomy.
The image of Ruth Handler that emerges from our analysis is one of controversy and reinvention. The historical perspective helped us uncover Handler’s entrepreneurial process through time and identity. We reconstructed how Handler managed to introduce her unique female perspective in a male-dominated industry, not only through the introduction of Barbie, but also through innovations in marketing and sales that revolutionized the toy industry since the beginnings of Mattel in the late 1940s.
Handler fought to validate her ideas over and over among (primarily) male customers, wholesalers, engineers and even with her husband and business partner Elliot Handler. After the global success of Barbie and the internationalization of Mattel in the 1960s, Handler had to face several controversies. Mattel was criticized for advertising directly to kids through television ads such as the ones of toy guns and rifles. Barbie ads were criticized for promoting unrealistic beauty standards to young girls. While battling against breast cancer in the 1970s, Ruth also faced an indictment and prosecution for fraud and tax evasion at Mattel, which resulted in her permanent departure from the company.
Despite these challenges, Handler spent the last fifteen years of her active business life in rebuilding her image and she did that once again through entrepreneurship. She founded NearlyMe, a company specializing in breast prostheses and lingerie for women who had undergone mastectomies. The analysis shows how Handler applied several innovations leveraging on her experience at Mattel. She also employed cancer survivors as sales agents throughout the US to promote her product. Albeit never particularly profitable, this social enterprise helped Handler to mend her tarnished reputation. Eventually she returned to Mattel’s Barbie collectors’ events as guest of honor in the 1990s.
Ruth Handler story of entrepreneurial emancipation challenges conventional narratives on female entrepreneurship by offering fresh insights on strategies and disruptive forces employed by women in male-dominated environments.
Organizational History Network 