Uncle John’s Presents Mom’s Bathtub Reader (28 page)

Fun Fact:
Credited as Phylicia Ayres-Allen, Phylicia Rashad played a munchkin in the 1978 film
The Wiz.

It takes a mother of invention to create a great gal.

I
n her long career as one of America’s most popular toys, the glam Barbie doll has been a teacher, a singer, a stewardess, and even an astronaut—but never a mother. Too bad, since Ruth Handler was one of the world’s most creative entrepreneur moms.

Barbie’s creator had few toys when she was growing up in Denver, Colorado. Ruth was born in 1916 to Jewish immigrants who’d fled persecution in Poland. As the youngest of ten children, Ruth’s family situation wasn’t exactly easy. Her mother was illiterate and in such poor health that Ruth had to leave home to live with her older sister.

When she was in high school, Ruth fell head over heels for a guy named Elliot Handler. She eventually moved to California and the two were married there in 1938. The Handlers’ marriage wasn’t only a love match that lasted 63 years, but also a strong business partnership. Elliot became an expert at creating giftware, while Ruth was a whiz at marketing and merchandising his products. By 1944 the successful couple could afford a house that Elliot designed for Ruth, himself, and their two children, Barbara (nicknamed “Barbie” or “Babs”) and Kenneth (nicknamed “Ken”). Barbie and Ken sound familiar, right?

In 1945, Ruth and Elliot formed a company that would become one of the largest toy companies in the world—Mattel. The first Mattel products were wooden picture frames, but the company branched out into toys when Elliot started making dollhouse furniture from leftover frame scraps. For the next decade Mattel grew exponentially, with Elliot and a partner creating toys and Ruth successfully marketing them.

As a mom in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Ruth noticed that her daughter Barbara didn’t have many types of dolls to play with—mostly baby dolls; dolls that looked like little girls; and paper dolls. Ruth noticed that Barbara preferred paper dolls, which looked like fashionable young women and had multiple gorgeous outfits that could be changed frequently. This observation gave Ruth an idea. She wanted Mattel to create a teenaged doll or a career woman doll for her girls to play with, but Mattel’s male executives discouraged her until she gave up.

Then in 1956, the Handlers went on a European vacation. In a little store in Lucerne, Switzerland, Barbara finally saw a three-dimensional molded plastic doll that interested her. It was a Lilli doll made in Germany. A mature German lady, Lilli had an alluring female shape and face. She was actually created as a takeoff on a bawdy comic strip character and designed to appeal to the male bar crowd, but little Barbara didn’t know that, and Ruth didn’t much care. She bought Lilli dolls for her daughter and herself. Based on her daughter’s reaction to the doll,
Ruth became convinced that this idea for a new type of doll would be a runaway success.

Ruth used Lilli as a prototype for her own doll, Barbie, named after Barbara Handler. With Barbie, a little girl could act out the fantasy of growing up and having beautiful clothes to do it in. “My whole philosophy of Barbie was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be,” Ruth wrote in her autobiography. “Barbie always represented the fact that a woman has choices.” Barbie would be a fashionable young woman with a fashionable wardrobe that could be changed and varied.

Ruth presented her idea to the suits at Mattel. At first they resisted the doll’s zaftig figure and the idea that any mother would buy a doll with—well—large breasts. Ruth insisted that the doll would sell, so Barbie made her first appearance at the 1959 Toy Fair in New York City, wearing a zebra-striped bathing suit and costing all of three dollars. The male buyers didn’t like the doll themselves, but the little girls sure did. Mattel was deluged with orders and sold more than 350,000 dolls that year.

Five years later, Barbie was a million-dollar doll. Ruth used all her marketing skills to keep Barbie current and on top of the latest trends. As women took on more varied careers, Barbie took them on too, including becoming an astronaut in 1965. Barbie’s social circle began to expand with the introduction of the Ken doll, which was named after Ruth’s son. Then came Midge and Skipper. And eventually Stacie, Todd, and Cheryl, who were named for Ruth’s grandchildren.

Despite big earnings, Barbie’s figure remained controversial.
The National Organization for Women argued that Barbie gave girls an unhealthy body image. If she were five foot six instead of 11 inches tall, her measurements would be “unrealistic” and rather top heavy. An academic expert once calculated that a woman’s likelihood of being shaped like Barbie was less than one in 100,000. Feminists, concentrating on Barbie’s chest, missed the fact that her creator—who by now was a grandmother—had become one of the top executives in the male-dominated toy industry. Ruth liked to point out that successful women—and feminists—would come up to her and admit they’d loved to play with Barbie. Today a new Barbie doll is sold approximately every three seconds. Barbie is a $1.5 billion business for Mattel, so tomorrow’s feminists probably have Barbies as well. All in all, Ruth’s creation has become an icon of American life.

Could you afford a mom’s services if you had to pay for them?

W
hat would it cost to pay someone to do all the jobs that mom does during the day? What would it cost to hire a mom to cook for you, keep your house clean, help solve your personal problems, and nurse you when you’re sick—not to mention walk your dog? Get ready for sticker shock.

In 1934, economist Margaret Reid developed a way to measure the value of unpaid labor—the third-person criterion. If a third person could be hired to do a job, then the job would qualify as work. So technically, the hours Mom spends cleaning the house, balancing the checkbook, and acting as a taxi driver for her kids can be considered work.

Ric Edelman, chair of Edelman Financial Services, put together a list of all the different job tasks and titles that seems to come close to all the stuff moms do every day. Then Edelman tried to quantify a mom’s market value in the 2002 job market based on all these job descriptions.

Here are just a few positions and their annual salaries:

And that doesn’t even begin to consider her transportation and property management services. Or making sure that the species continues. When Edelman Financial Services added up all of Mom’s salaries (which included more than the ones listed above), her total deserved pay came to a hefty $635,000.

Not everyone agrees with this nice six-figure salary. Economic journalist Ann Crittenden, author of
The Price of Motherhood
, has a more conservative estimate of Mom’s market value, putting it at about $60,000. Crittenden sees motherhood as a very skilled, mid-level management job. Whether worth $600,000 or $60,000, getting two economists to agree on anything is about as easy as attaching an accurate price tag on all that Mom does for us.