Unraveling the Barbie Lore: Who Is Ruth Handler?

It’s Barbie’s world and we’re just living in it. Or, at least, that much has been true in the past few months, as Greta Gerwig’s new feature Barbie starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling spurs some sort of pink revolution. One that’s enough to cause a shortage of pink paint, mind you. 

Also read: 

Barbie Is the Most Important Film of 2023

Barbie Used to Be Made in the Philippines. Why Did Mattel Leave the Country?

The film follows Barbie and Ken as they leave their bubblegum-pink paradise and begins a journey to the real world. But more than the feminist inquiry wrapped in glitter packaging, the narrative is also peppered with subtle nods to the legendary doll’s fascinating history. Some of the most impactful moments were the brief scenes that Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), Barbie’s creator, shared with Barbie (Margot Robbie). In her short screen time, Handler imparted Barbie with sage wisdom that had plenty of people teary-eyed. And once the credits started rolling, the Barbies and Kens of the real world began to wonder about the woman who started it all.  

Photo by IMDB.

Who is this trailblazer responsible for inventing the world’s most recognizable toy?

It all started in 1949 when Ruth co-founded a furniture manufacturing company with her husband, Elliott Handler, and their business partner, Harold “Matt” Matson. Despite being credited as the discoverer of this business opportunity, the company was decidedly named Mattel—a mesh of Matt and Elliott’s names. Ruth’s name was left out simply because they “couldn’t fit it in.” While unsurprising for an era where women were typically reduced to housewives, this fact still leaves a sour taste in the mouth. But that’s a conversation for another time.

Mattel makes a pivotal change in the company at the advent of the second world war, when furniture sales dropped drastically. They decided to shift their focus into making toys, producing hit toys like Magic 8 Ball and Fisher-Price’s Corn Popper prior to the genesis of Barbie.

Ruth came up with the golden idea after watching her daughter, Barbara, play with paper dolls. She started wondering why there are no life-like dolls for her daughter to dress up when her son, Kenneth, had so many options to choose from. In her memoir, Dream Doll: The Ruth Handler Story, she recalls, “I discovered something very important. They were using these dolls to project their dreams of their own futures as adult women. Wouldn’t it be great if we could take that play pattern and three-dimensionalize it?”

She pitched an idea for a mainstream doll with the proportions of an adult woman to Matt and Elliott, but was quickly turned down for reasons relating to business. But Ruth had a hunch that they were really concerned about the toy’s figure being off-putting for conservative parents. So, the idea remained in the back burner until 1956, when the Handler family went on a European vacation.

In Switzerland, Ruth saw a German doll called Bild Lilli being sold as a trinket for WWII soldiers. It was based on a comic strip from a gossip-sheet newspaper called Bild-Zeitung, featuring a call girl with a voluptuous figure who wore revealing clothes and spoke suggestive dialogue. In Dream Doll, Ruth remembers thinking, “Here were the breasts, the small waist, the long, tapered legs I had enthusiastically described for the designers all those years ago.” 

Ruth then wasted no time in buying the toy and bringing it home to Mattel manufacturers. A proven sharp-witted businesswoman, she also saw a profit opportunity in selling clothes and accessories separately. Soon enough, the very first Barbie was made, and life for little girls was never the same. After its debut at the 1959 Toy Fair in New York City—wearing the now iconic black-and-white striped bathing suit that Margot Robbie wears in the opening scene of the movie—Mattel went on to sell more than 300,000 Barbies in its first year on the market.

Barbara, the real-life inspiration for the iconic doll, however, was much less thrilled about being measured up against the toy. In an interview with BBC, she said “It was just very odd – people were coming up to me, asking me for my autograph. When people came up and say to me, "Oh, you're the real Barbie," I couldn't understand it because that's just a name that was given to the doll, but a lot of people thought that they modeled it after me and they made it look like me, and that I was supposed to be it. That's not true.”

The lore gets even more controversial come the ‘70s, when Mattel got caught in a scandal for allegedly falsifying invoices, bills, and signatures to influence the company’s price on the stock market. It’s because of this that the Handlers were forced to retire from their positions in the company. Ruth initially resisted the investigations, but ultimately ended up pleading no contest and was ordered to pay $57,000 in fines and five years of probation.

Gerwig’s portrayal didn’t delve too deeply into all of this, of course. The director took a more imaginative approach in her story, staying true to Barbie’s core purpose of being anything she wants to be. But as it turns out, there’s also enough drama in Barbie’s origin story for a standalone film.

But until that film comes out, we have Greta Gerwig’s Barbie to honor the legacy left behind by Ruth Handler, the woman who started it all.