On This Day in History, 1959: The Barbie Doll Made its Debut*
Only eleven years before I was born and odd to consider it already seemed ancient in the early ‘70s, something from an entirely distant era (which it was and wasn’t). But then, it was an old trope—the fetishized very white woman, not to be confused in any way with the fetishized very non-white women who serve similar purposes for different people and vice versa. The idea of idealizing and controlling a woman: perfect form, perfect face and hair, perfectly silent. As if the air bubble above her head is saying “like it used to be, back in the good old days” the people of the ‘50s having no clue that by the ‘70s their era would already be fodder for nostalgia, not to mention sit coms, this very American yearning for things that can’t be reclaimed mostly because they never existed. At some point, some of us come to understand that every generation pines for a reality not their own, fantasies about the frontier where a man could explore the untrammeled expanse and stake a claim, assuming he didn’t die from listeria en route. Or mail order brides for women, like the enterprising types who laid railroad ties coast to coast, simply seeking some opportunity they couldn’t name. Or when sturdier man died believing their faith kept them safe in unregulated factories or trenches, always called to wars waged in different languages. The way a father can look at an old movie or news clip or something he lets slip in a lighter moment and say they don’t make ‘em like that anymore.
(*On March 9, 1959, the first Barbie doll goes on display at the American Toy Fair in New York City. Eleven inches tall, with a waterfall of blond hair, Barbie was the first mass-produced toy doll in the United States with adult features.)
When mothers and daughters don’t speak
It’s ultimately up to the daughters
to understand their mothers tried—
using the tools nature equipped them
with—and no matter how we resist it,
each of us grows older every second.
Since time moves only in one direction,
even when the moon tires of speaking
to the sea her love moves the tides,
which wordlessly renew the world—
because everything depends on this.
—
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