Show of Barbie Doll ‘First Ladies’ Stirs Mixed Feelings
One of my earliest traveling memories involves a Barbie doll.
As a little girl, I had a blond Barbie I couldn’t bear to be away from, so when my family loaded up the station wagon and drove to the Colorado Rockies for vacation, I packed Barbie’s red skating skirt, zebra-striped bathing suit and wedding gown in the cardboard drawers of her pink carrying case and took her along.
We were driving across Kansas on our way home to St. Louis, with me in the back, playing with Barbie between the suitcases. It was hot, and the car wasn’t air-conditioned, so the rear window was open. I don’t remember how it happened, but the case flew out, flinging Barbie and her wardrobe all over the highway.
“Stop!” I screamed.
My father hit the brakes and pulled over, and the whole family got out to retrieve tiny ice skates, sunglasses and bolero jackets.
Since those days, whether I like it or not, Barbie has accompanied me wherever I go, as an unreachable and ultimately depressing image of feminine perfection. So when I learned that the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda had opened a special exhibit of Barbie dolls dressed in the costumes of American first ladies, from Martha Washington to Hillary Rodham Clinton (on display through Sept. 4), I had to see it.
Created in 1959 and still produced by the California-based Mattel toy company, Barbie has the hourglass waist, ample bust line and long legs that were the ideal in the days when schools had air-raid drills, Mamie Eisenhower was first lady and Hugh Hefner started pandering to men’s fantasies with scantily clad real, live Barbies photographed for the pages of Playboy magazine.
Like other baby-boom-generation women who went to grade school with Barbie and to college with Betty Friedan, I now have a love-hate relationship with the toy.
My mother gave my Barbie to Goodwill many years ago. Still, I was disconsolate when the Barbie Hall of Fame in Palo Alto, a 21,000-piece collection amassed by Evelyn and Robert Burkhalter, closed last year before I got a chance to visit. The Mattel company bought the Burkhalter Barbie collection, intending to start a museum. Meanwhile, all those buxom blond, brunet and raven-haired Barbies sleep in a warehouse, like enchanted princesses waiting for Ken’s kisses.
I drove to Yorba Linda on a sunny spring morning, ready to be beguiled and, on another level, appalled. I was reminded that surprise and enlightenment are never far away in Southern California.
The Nixon Library exhibit displays 115 dolls garbed in outfits worn by first ladies, as well as numerous collector Barbies dressed as Revolutionary War patriots, the Statue of Liberty and women in the military, complete with red berets and camouflage fatigues. They were created by Barbie devotees from all over the country, including Carol Spencer, who was a Barbie fashion designer for Mattel from 1963 to 1998.
But, really, who would spend two weeks sewing 2,000 tiny sequins and beads on a Barbie-sized replica of Pat Nixon’s one-shouldered 1973 inaugural gown, as Spencer did? And how should it make women like me feel to see our nation’s first ladies represented by Barbie dolls?
Granted, the Mary Todd Lincoln Barbie looks lovely in her long-trained purple inaugural dress (never mind that she attended seances to foretell the outcome of the Civil War). So does Jackie Kennedy in her 1961 ivory, caped inaugural gown from Bergdorf Goodman. I studied these dolled-up Barbies and thought of our still-conflicted feelings about women in America.
The most striking dolls in the exhibit wear the inauguration gowns of Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton, neither of whom resembled Barbie even slightly or have had the kind of seamless good fortune the doll’s perfect looks seem to promise.
Next to a Barbie in Hillary’s romantic, violet 1993 inaugural gown, designed by Sarah Phillips of New York, there’s a photo of the first lady dancing in Bill Clinton’s arms.
Barbara Bush is represented in the exhibit too. She wore a beautiful purple-bodiced gown to her husband’s inaugural ball in 1989, replicated on a gray bouffant-haired Barbie at the Nixon Library. There they say that using Barbie as a model helps spectators appreciate the first ladies without competition among them. Barbie is a generic woman, with the same bright smile and dead eyes whether she sports a dress worn by Eleanor Roosevelt or Pat Nixon.
I think I’d rather view the genuine articles at the National Museum of American History, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Its collection of first ladies’ clothing and memorabilia was started in 1912 and includes the gown worn by Frances Cleveland at her White House wedding to President Grover Cleveland in 1886.
Barbie is too symbolically top-heavy to show off a gown like that. Besides, she misses my idea of a model first lady by a mile.
Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace, 18001 Yorba Linda Blvd., Yorba Linda, CA 92886-3949; telephone (800) 872-8865, Internet https://www.nixonlibrary.org. Admission: $5.95 adults; $2 children 8 to 11; $3.95 seniors.
National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, 14th Street and Constitution Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20560; tel. (202) 357-2700, Internet https://www.americanhistory.si.edu.
