Barbie is having a moment! While I was never a Barbie girl myself, I heard an author interview on the Thoughts From a Page podcast and I knew I wanted to learn more about Barbie's backstory. I'm always intrigued with that side of how small ideas become big ideas - especially ones that change the world! I don't have a business brain and I'm not a marketing guru, but somehow stories like this always catch my attention.

The actual development of Barbie was fascinating to me and Rosen gives us all the details. Barbie is 1/6 the size of a regular human, but creating clothes that would fit her properly and still show off that figure proved to be challenging. The right plastic that the doll was made out of caused a lot of trouble, and even Barbie's hands had to be shaped just right so the clothes would go on and off. While Barbie's figure caused quite a lot of controversy, it was never about her looks that motivated her creator (Ruth Handler), it was giving girls a way to imagine a future for themselves. This was the 1950s, so girls were basically aspiring to be stay-at-home moms, but Ruth wanted them to know they could be anything they set their minds to! It's actually quite inspiring, despite the outrage from the women's movements.

Unfortunately, as seems to be the case with all things related to Barbie, there are several men involved that just can't help but to steal the show. Jack, another co-creator of Barbie, was a wild card. What started off as a great relationship, eventually turned into a lot of trouble. In interviews, Jack would claim the credit for Barbie and erase the work that Ruth put in. It was disheartening how the success of Barbie became overshadowed by Jack's desire for attention.

But true to her true nature, Ruth rose above the scandal and drama that engulfed Mattel and started another successful company creating prosthetic breasts for breast cancer survivors. Barbie and Ruth were incredible women who changed the world when men dominated and I'm really glad this book was brought to my attention.