Book-It 'o9! Book #12
Apr. 6th, 2009 04:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alivemagdoleneMore of the Fifty Books Challenge! This was a library request.
Title: Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World's Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her by Ellen Greaves and Wayne Nish
Details: Copyright 2009, Collins Business
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): The tragic and redeeming story of how one visionary woman built the biggest toy company in the world and created a global icon.
Barbie and Ruth is the entwined story of two exceptional women. There's Barbie: the diminutive yet arrestingly voluptuous doll unveiled at the 1959 Toy Fair who became the treasure of 90 percent of American girls and their counterparts in 150 countries. She went on to compete as an Olympic athlete, serve as an air force pilot, work as a boutique owner, run as a presidential candidate, and ignite a cultural firestorm.
And then there's Ruth Handler, Barbie's creator: the tenth child of Polish Jewish immigrants, a passionately competitive and creative business pioneer, and a mother and wife who wanted it all. After a business scandal that forced Ruth out of Mattel, the company she founded, she drew on her experience as a breast cancer survivor to start a business that changed women's lives. She was ultimately honored as a pioneer, humanitarian, and masterful entrepreneur.
Based on original research, extensive interviews, and previously unavailable material, Barbie and Ruth tells the fascinating story of how two women forever changed American business and culture.
Why I Wanted to Read It: I'm fascinated by the history of the Barbie doll, which was fostered in me by M.G. Lord's Forever Barbie when I was only fourteen. I saw a review of this in Newsweek as well and was curious.
How I Liked It: Ruth Handler, creator of the Barbie doll and co-founder of Mattel has an interesting life story. So does forgotten film sensation Alla Nazimova. Unfortunately, this is the second biography I've read this year that does a woeful disservice to its subject.
Gerber's prose reads out of a book for "tweens" about inspiring, remarkable women (Susan B. Anthony, Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks), save for some PG-13 language in the quotes. Somehow she manages to whittle the controversial, colorful Ruth Handler down to a gilded heroine, only hinting at the more fascinating, complicated character therein. Gerber spends plenty of time on how attractive Handler was physically, pouring over her fashion, her "tiny waistline and huge bust", as though grooming her for the dumbed down deification she's getting in this book. About an equal amount of time is dedicated to Handler's "smart haircuts" as is to her business sense, it seems.
Mattel, far from the murky waters of questionable practices that would set a standard in the industry and the "quirky" behaviors of some of its staff, namely Jack Ryan, is remade as a egalitarian worker's paradise, where employees of all colors were treated with equal respect since the company's inception in the 1950s. It's true that Mattel (or more accurately, Elliot and Ruth Handler, its co-founders) were friendly with all their staff, remembering names and family members and ensuring loyalty even after the fall-out of Ruth's forced resignation from the company on felony charges in the late '70s. But in Gerber's version, like much of the book, the gilded halo is blinding.
In the Author's Note at the end of the book, Gerber said she had no idea that the Barbie doll was conceived by a woman and especially not that Mattel, Inc was founded and built by a woman until she read Enterprising Women: 250 Years of American Business. Gerber paraphrases Arthur Schlesinger with "[H]istory's greatest causalities are women's stories."
So true. And so sad that this book does such a disservice to yet another one.
Notable: Ruth Handler makes for interesting feminist meta. For Handler to climb the corporate ladder as ruthlessly as a man, let alone in the Eisenhower era, is a laudable feat. Isn't it? Handler by all accounts eschewed most feminism. As this book seems to almost stumble upon and over, Handler said numerous times how she preferred to be the only woman, intimidating her male employees and investors with her sexuality.
"'I had a nice figure," she said. "I was well built, and I was proud of my breasts. I was proud of how I looked. I wore designer clothes, and they fit me tight and showed my body.'"
(pages 150-151)
It wasn't until Handler's work with "Nearly Me", a company that revolutionized prosthesis for breast cancer survivors, did Handler's "sense of sisterhood" appear to kick in, according to Gerber's book. Fitting women ("making them over" was the term Handler used) with the prosthesis she designed after finding the market lacking after her own struggle with breast cancer is what led Handler to have an epiphany.
"'I had never made friends with women, and suddenly I found women were becoming my friends. I never sought them out. I found a whole new breed of women seeking me out. Young women, career women, professional women sought me out as a role model, and they sought me out as someone who could help them understand how they could achieve.'" (page 207)
So what are to we to make of Handler? She's was a ground-breaker, a pioneer, certainly, but one has to accept the fact she eschewed the very movement that set about to if not to create than to ease her path. In political terms, she wasn't Phyllis Shafely or Ann Coulter, but she was Maureen Dowd or Sarah Palin (I am aware that Palin is the only one of the four that's actually a government employee). And her corporate ethics were certainly nothing to aspire to, successful or no. So do we hold Handler up for the simple fact of her gender even though that very fact is what made her success so very unlikely? It remains a feminist's conundrum.
Title: Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World's Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her by Ellen Greaves and Wayne Nish
Details: Copyright 2009, Collins Business
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): The tragic and redeeming story of how one visionary woman built the biggest toy company in the world and created a global icon.
Barbie and Ruth is the entwined story of two exceptional women. There's Barbie: the diminutive yet arrestingly voluptuous doll unveiled at the 1959 Toy Fair who became the treasure of 90 percent of American girls and their counterparts in 150 countries. She went on to compete as an Olympic athlete, serve as an air force pilot, work as a boutique owner, run as a presidential candidate, and ignite a cultural firestorm.
And then there's Ruth Handler, Barbie's creator: the tenth child of Polish Jewish immigrants, a passionately competitive and creative business pioneer, and a mother and wife who wanted it all. After a business scandal that forced Ruth out of Mattel, the company she founded, she drew on her experience as a breast cancer survivor to start a business that changed women's lives. She was ultimately honored as a pioneer, humanitarian, and masterful entrepreneur.
Based on original research, extensive interviews, and previously unavailable material, Barbie and Ruth tells the fascinating story of how two women forever changed American business and culture.
Why I Wanted to Read It: I'm fascinated by the history of the Barbie doll, which was fostered in me by M.G. Lord's Forever Barbie when I was only fourteen. I saw a review of this in Newsweek as well and was curious.
How I Liked It: Ruth Handler, creator of the Barbie doll and co-founder of Mattel has an interesting life story. So does forgotten film sensation Alla Nazimova. Unfortunately, this is the second biography I've read this year that does a woeful disservice to its subject.
Gerber's prose reads out of a book for "tweens" about inspiring, remarkable women (Susan B. Anthony, Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks), save for some PG-13 language in the quotes. Somehow she manages to whittle the controversial, colorful Ruth Handler down to a gilded heroine, only hinting at the more fascinating, complicated character therein. Gerber spends plenty of time on how attractive Handler was physically, pouring over her fashion, her "tiny waistline and huge bust", as though grooming her for the dumbed down deification she's getting in this book. About an equal amount of time is dedicated to Handler's "smart haircuts" as is to her business sense, it seems.
Mattel, far from the murky waters of questionable practices that would set a standard in the industry and the "quirky" behaviors of some of its staff, namely Jack Ryan, is remade as a egalitarian worker's paradise, where employees of all colors were treated with equal respect since the company's inception in the 1950s. It's true that Mattel (or more accurately, Elliot and Ruth Handler, its co-founders) were friendly with all their staff, remembering names and family members and ensuring loyalty even after the fall-out of Ruth's forced resignation from the company on felony charges in the late '70s. But in Gerber's version, like much of the book, the gilded halo is blinding.
In the Author's Note at the end of the book, Gerber said she had no idea that the Barbie doll was conceived by a woman and especially not that Mattel, Inc was founded and built by a woman until she read Enterprising Women: 250 Years of American Business. Gerber paraphrases Arthur Schlesinger with "[H]istory's greatest causalities are women's stories."
So true. And so sad that this book does such a disservice to yet another one.
Notable: Ruth Handler makes for interesting feminist meta. For Handler to climb the corporate ladder as ruthlessly as a man, let alone in the Eisenhower era, is a laudable feat. Isn't it? Handler by all accounts eschewed most feminism. As this book seems to almost stumble upon and over, Handler said numerous times how she preferred to be the only woman, intimidating her male employees and investors with her sexuality.
"'I had a nice figure," she said. "I was well built, and I was proud of my breasts. I was proud of how I looked. I wore designer clothes, and they fit me tight and showed my body.'"
(pages 150-151)
It wasn't until Handler's work with "Nearly Me", a company that revolutionized prosthesis for breast cancer survivors, did Handler's "sense of sisterhood" appear to kick in, according to Gerber's book. Fitting women ("making them over" was the term Handler used) with the prosthesis she designed after finding the market lacking after her own struggle with breast cancer is what led Handler to have an epiphany.
"'I had never made friends with women, and suddenly I found women were becoming my friends. I never sought them out. I found a whole new breed of women seeking me out. Young women, career women, professional women sought me out as a role model, and they sought me out as someone who could help them understand how they could achieve.'" (page 207)
So what are to we to make of Handler? She's was a ground-breaker, a pioneer, certainly, but one has to accept the fact she eschewed the very movement that set about to if not to create than to ease her path. In political terms, she wasn't Phyllis Shafely or Ann Coulter, but she was Maureen Dowd or Sarah Palin (I am aware that Palin is the only one of the four that's actually a government employee). And her corporate ethics were certainly nothing to aspire to, successful or no. So do we hold Handler up for the simple fact of her gender even though that very fact is what made her success so very unlikely? It remains a feminist's conundrum.
