A peek into Barbie's past at Harvard University
CAMBRIDGE - As the Barbie movie hits the big screen Friday, Harvard University gave WBZ TV a look back at where her story began.
Harvard's Schlesinger Library has a collection from Barbie creator Ruth Handler, who died in 2002. Handler left boxes of drawings, letters and fan mail to Harvard.
Handler created the iconic fashion doll in 1959. Among the facts learned through her Harvard collection is that Barbie and Ken were named after her two children.
"They caught on very fast," said Jane Kamensky, the Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library. "They caught on and had endless opportunities for tie-in purchases. You know, you didn't just buy a doll. You bought the new outfit, season after season, and the new accessories. It's interesting, to me, as an American historian, how many of the accessories followed sort of a suburban dream. Barbie was coined in 1959, this is when the Levittowns and the other older suburbs are growing up. And what does she come with? She comes with dreams houses and vans to take advantage of national parks and fabulous cars to take advantage of the new American highways. So part of what helped her catch on was you could build a world around her, that was like the world that Americans were, in the post-war, wanting to build in their own lives."
Handler was also a breast cancer survivor who started a custom prosthetic breast company in the 1970s.