Dennis’ Nemesis Comes Into Her Own

A tall, slender, supermodel-shaped Barbie doll she’s not.

That’s the Margaret doll’s implicit message. The explicit one is on her T-shirt: “Someday a Woman Will Be President.”

So there.

Margaret Wade, the funny-faced, bespectacled preteen in crimson ringlets has been bossing Dennis the Menace around for nearly half a century. Now she’s a symbol of women’s empowerment--anointed by Florida psychology professor Ann Moliver Ruben, who heads the nonprofit educational organization Women Are Wonderful Inc. Margaret and her message adorn more than 250,000 T-shirts, and the Margaret doll is being adopted by hip moms as kind of an anti-heroine.

“I like what she represents. She has a strong image and a great message: that my daughter can be anything she wants,” said Santa Barbara physician and psychoanalyst Marjorie Gies, who bought a Margaret for her 20-month-old daughter, Margaret.

“Besides,” Gies added, “I’m generally opposed to Barbie.”

“Dennis” artist Hank Ketcham created Margaret as a super-feminine, possessive and dominating counterpoint to his long-running comic strip’s tiny, testosterone-charged hero.

“She’s always been Dennis’ foil,” said the 79-year-old artist by telephone from his studio in Pebble Beach. “I guess that makes her a good symbol for women’s power.”

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Margaret was first brought to life in 1959 by 8-year-old Jeanne Russell on the popular CBS prime-time sitcom “Dennis the Menace.” Russell, now a North Hollywood chiropractor, admitted that the character has indelibly stamped her life. Other former child actors often ask her to organize projects and reunions, and she’s been national co-chairwoman of the Screen Actors Guild Young Performers’ Committee for more than five years.

“Whenever we get together, they always want to put Margaret in charge,” Russell said, sighing.

For Ruben, who lives in Miami Lakes, the nexus between comic strip and cultural symbol came in an epiphany. One August afternoon in 1993 she was deep into writing an academic journal article based on a research project determining attitudes of children toward female leaders. Her interviews with 1,500 Miami first- through sixth-graders revealed, among other things, that half didn’t think a woman should ever be president. The assertion that “only a boy is smart enough to be president” won agreement from 62% of boys and 30% of girls.

As she took a break, she picked up the Sunday comics, and her eyes fell upon a strip in which Dennis and his buddies bar Margaret from their clubhouse. In the final panel, Margaret defiantly utters what would become Women Are Wonderful’s rallying cry.

Ruben still recalls feeling stung 67 years ago when she was 8 and an older male cousin wouldn’t let her be president of his club. And so she’s always looked at Dennis’ feisty playmate as something of an alter-ego.

“She wants Dennis to love her, and he keeps rejecting her. He thinks she’s a pain in the butt,” Ruben said. It’s true enough that Margaret’s a pain, Ruben agrees, “but there are so many positive things about her that I love. She doesn’t take no for an answer. She stands her ground.”

Ruben promptly won a license from King Features Syndicate to produce the T-shirt bearing the “Someday . . .” panel in 1994. She even received a splash of national publicity when Wal-Mart refused to carry the shirts, before relenting. Now the shirts are sold through college bookstores, the JCPenney catalog and the Internet, at https://www.womanprez.com.

The doll, which can be purchased online for $29.95, was longer in coming. Ketcham wouldn’t sign off on a plush Margaret until last year, when it was clear that the T-shirt was defining a new cultural icon among his stable of characters.

“This is a new experience for me, to see Margaret elevated to a new plateau, to being a symbol for young ladies,” Ketcham said. “I really have to applaud Ann.”

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Will Margaret grow up to be president?

Russell, the first of four screen Margarets, thinks it’s possible. But her youngest successor is more interested in the character’s near-term arcs.

“Sure. I’d like to do another movie--’Margaret Goes to College’ or ‘Margaret Dates,’ ” said Jacqueline Steiger, a South Bay 13-year-old who was the Menace’s nemesis in the 1998 Warner Bros. movie “Dennis the Menace Strikes Again.”

Jack, as she likes to be called, isn’t anything like Margaret, who’s too girlish and taken with extravagant fashion for her tastes. She enjoyed turning heads for a few months with her blond hair dyed bright red for the part. But watching Russell at a photo session, the reality of her place in popular culture suddenly hit her: “This is going to come back and haunt me forever.”