Fashion and Beauty in Barbie Novels from the early 1960s

Look for vintage clothes for Barbie from the1960s and you’ll find more ensembles that can fit in the closets in her dream house.  Search for reviews of the pioneering novels about the girl who is the living doll and you’ll come up price and identification guides plus some cover designs for the thirteen novels Random House issued between 1962 and 1965.

Cynthia Lawrence and Bette Lou Maybee collaborated on the majority of the volumes, but they seem to have left few traces behind, except for entries in the copyright records and a single box in the Random House archive at Columbia University.  A romantic explanation for the gaps in the record would be that these novels were written for money under assumed names by people who did not want to connected with them in the future, should their careers take off.   A more earthbound one is that they found employment elsewhere in publishing or in another industry altogether.  A really satisfying and completely unproven possibility is that one of them had been a Stratemeyer Syndicate writer in the Nancy Drew mill.

Whoever Lawrence and Maybee were, the world of difference between their presentation of the iconic character and in the later publications such as the 12-volume Barbie and Friends Book Club (Grolier, 1998-1999, pictured at the end) seems to have passed unnoticed.  In comparison to those later titles  promoting the well-established hydra-headed money-making brand, the short stories and novels of Lawrence and Maybee function something like a courtesy book for early sixties girlhood, a successor and competitor with the Nancy Drew mysteries.   Barbie is clearly a real girl and her connection to the doll is really not developed or exploited, although it is impossible to forget it.

“The Size 10 Dress” in the first volume, Here’s Barbie, is cringe-making. “Big Bertha,” a size 14 blonde damned to wear slimming shirtwaists, goes on a diet, determined to become like Barbie so she won’t sit at home any more.  Barbie encourages her to step out and join in, knowing that Bertha’s father is too busy and clueless to guide her in the womanly arts, but finds it embarrassing at being copied down to her lipstick color.  Bertha breaks down when the home-economics teacher won’t let her model the dress  identical to the one Barbie made, but she takes to heart Barbie’s advice “I’m just an ordinary girl, no better or worse than you or any other girl!  But I’m me.  And you should be yourself too.  When you try to become me, you’re just half a person and you make me less than myself.”  With Barbie’s coaching, a new hair cut, and the power of accessorizing, the new Bertha steps out on the stage with Barbie at the school fashion show.

The play in the same volume, “The Easter Hat,” shows Barbie the candy-striper volunteering in the local rest home, with a tip of the hat to the classic Hollywood film with Judy Garland and Fred Astaire.  One of the residents, who had been a Broadway star in her youth, gives Barbie the Easter bonnet she wore when her husband proposed to wear in the Easter Parade.   Barbie denies herself the joy of buying a smart new chapeau with her own money to show off on Sunday and instead organizes a surprise parade at the facility, where she and Ken bring up the rear in vintage costume, much to the delight of the ladies.

Barbie’s New York Summer is a whirl-wind account of her Teen Magazine internship, during which she effortlessly picks up the fundamentals of modelling and of fashion journalism.  In the evenings, she is driven to the Village in the red Jaguar of the adoring Latin trust-fund baby Pablo, who does his best to replace the faithful, steady All-American future lawyer, Ken in her affections. He’s a powerful temptation, who wouldn’t have any trouble being a playwright and keeping her in filmy frocks, matching pumps, gloves and tiny evening bags that Grace Kelly might wear.  (It’s surely no coincidence that Mattel has issued Grace Kelly dolls from Alfred Hitchcock’s films To Catch a Thief and Rear Window in their Barbie line).  The chic editor who bears no resemblance to Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, offers her a permanent position before she graduates from high school.  But in the end, Barbie’s head isn’t turned because she realizes that she loves and misses her life in Willows too much to leave home for the big city–she still has a lot of growing up to do and that process might take her down other paths before she returns to the industry she has come to love.   The editor thinks that Barbie has made the right choice and reassures her that the job will be there when she is ready.  And so will Pablo, which is just too good to be true.

It’s easy, for example, to find evidence of a fixation on thinness in the three books–the adjective “slim” is always a compliment and the most attractive characters, like Barbie’s mother and her Latin lover Pablo, conform to that body type. “The Size 10 Dress” concludes with a chart in which to record the reader’s measurements and more.  Overall the co-authors indirectly emphasize inner beauty as more important as outer, show that kindness to others is more satisfying than indulging personal pleasures, and suggest that listening to ambition without checking in with the heart and head may not lead the way to the best path forward.  Barbie Millicent Roberts in these books may be blonde, pretty and well-dressed enough to turn heads wherever she goes, but she is not a terrible role model, being  a thoughtful, intelligent, empathetic teenager instead of an airhead clotheshorse.   Of course she is too nice to be believable, when she should by all rights be the queen of mean girls.    Where on the scale of role models will the Barbie(s) in Greta Gerwig’s hot pink star-studded extravaganza fall?

Cotsen Research Projects: Vienna Secessionist Book Illustration for Children

Note: The Friends of the Princeton University Library offer short-term Library Research Grants to promote scholarly use of the research collections, which are awarded via a competitive application process.  Researchers usually offer a short informal talk or presentation to library staff and others in the Princeton academic community near the end of their work on campus about the results of their research and how it fits into their broader research project or interests.

The text below was kindly provided by Megan Brandow-Faller, recipient of a 2012 Library Research Grant, following her July 2012 research project at Princeton in both the Cotsen Children’s Library and Marquand Art Library, following her July, 13, 2012 talk entitled: “An Artist in Every Child–A Child in Every Artist: Avant-Garde Frauenkunst and Kinderkunst in Vienna, 1897-1930.”  (The images accompanying the text are adapted from select slides in her PowerPoint presentation.)  Dr. Brandow-Faller is currently Assistant Professor of History at the City University of New York/Kingsborough. Her research focuses on women’s art institutions in early twentieth century Habsburg Central Europe.

Vienna Secessionist Book Illustration for Children 

by Megan Brandow-Faller

The art of the child found fertile ground in Vienna 1900, cultivated by Franz Čižek’s renowned Jugendkunstkursen (Youth Art Classes), at important exhibitions of children’s art, and in the pages of Ver Sacrum and other periodicals.  Rejecting the elaborate technological miniatures popular in the nineteenth century–toys intended to ‘dazzle’ but which would ultimately leave a child cold–artists associated with the Vienna Secession and Wiener Werkstätte (the applied arts commercial workshops co-founded by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser in 1903) designed objects conceived ‘with the eyes of a child.’ Secessionist toys, illustrated books and graphics using simple shapes and bright colors were designed to awaken children’s creative impulses in a design language that children could understand.

Figure 4b: Kolomann Moser & Therese Trethahn, turned wooden toys, in Jan. 1906 issue of Kind and Kunst. (Cotsen Children's Library)

Figure 4b: Kolomann Moser & Therese Trethahn, turned wooden toys, in Jan. 1906 issue of Kind and Kunst. Leipzig: A. Koch, 1904-1909. (Cotsen 87516)

In designing these so-called ‘reform toys,’ Secessionists tapped two main sources for inspiration: the untutored drawing of children and traditional turned wooden peasant toys. The January 1906 issue of Alexander Koch’s progressive journal Kind and Kunst, for instance, devoted a richly-illustrated twenty-three page article to Wiener Werkstätte items (including finely-illustrated children’s books, games, silver rattles, and furniture suites) for children, including toy designs by Hoffmann, Moser, and Carl Otto Czeschka.

Kolo Moser’s crudely-shaped wooden figurines (illustrated in Figure 4b) reveal how Secessionists interpreted traditional toys in a highly-stylized manner verging on the grotesque.

Figure 1a: Minka Podhajska, cover illustration for Sept. 1902 issue of Ver Sacrum. (Marquand Library)

Figure 1a: Minka Podhajska, cover illustration for Sept. 1902 issue of Ver Sacrum. Wien: Verlag Gerlach & Schenk, 1898-1903. (Marquand N6494.W5 V47q)

Yet, it was actually the female students of Hoffmann, Moser, and Czeschka who produced some of the most important work in artistic toys and children’s book illustration. Contemporary critics found toy design and book illustration particularly appropriate fields for female craftswomen, given women’s ‘natural’ stake in childrearing (i.e. that women were believed to better understood children’s thought processes than men). Female craftswomen training at Austria’s progressive School of Applied Arts and Vienna’s Women’s Academy exploited such discursive linkages to the fullest.

 

Figure 1b: Fanny Harlfinger-Zakucka, stenciled image in Sept. 1902 Issue of Ver Sacrum. (Marquand Library)

Figure 1b: Fanny Harlfinger-Zakucka, stenciled image in Sept. 1902 Issue of Ver Sacrum.
(Marquand N6494.W5 V47q)

One popular method of graphic art and book illustration for children involved the use of painted stencils to produce clear, simple images. Stenciling had experienced a recent revival during the English and Scottish arts-and-crafts movement. In conjunction with the so-called Schablonieren Kurs (Stenciling Course) taught by Secessionist Adolf Böhm at the Women’s Academy, Böhm’s students published illustrated fairy tale and picture books and gained recognition through replication of such illustrations in the pages of Ver Sacrum, die Fläche and other periodicals. A special September 1902 issue of the Secessionist periodical Ver Sacrum featured the work of Böhm’s students. (Figures 1a & 1b)  His students’ toy designs were regularly featured in the pages of The Studio.

Figures 2a & 2b: Fanny Harlfinger Zakucka, stenciled images from Schablanon Drücke, ca. 1903. (Cotsen Children's Library)

Figures 2a & 2b: Fanny Harlfinger Zakucka, stenciled images from Schablanon Drücke, ca. 1903.
(Cotsen 103414)

One such book of children’s stencils (housed in the Cotsen Collection) created by Women’s Academy classmates artist/designers Minka Podhajska and Fanny Harlfinger-Zakucka around 1903 employs a fresh and original graphic language using negative white space in lieu of the black borders that Čižek encouraged his students to bound their drawings.

Packing a strong expressive punch into a minimal number of marks expressed as abstract geometrical shapes, Harlfinger-Zakucka’s stenciled image of a reform-clothing-clad mother, sporting what looks to be Wiener-Werkstätte style textiles, guiding her toddler plays on negative and positive space to reveal the interconnected forms and hence psychological closeness of mother and child (Figure 2b). Her stencil of a children’s Jause (snacktime) employs similar techniques (Figure 2a). These stenciled images reveal a striking encounter with Japanese printmaking techniques in their unusual manipulation of spatial perspective and boldly ‘cropped’ nature.

 

Figures 3a & 3b: Minka Podhaska, stenciled images from Schablanon Drücke, ca. 1903. (Cotsen Children's Library)

Figures 3a & 3b: Minka Podhaska, stenciled images from Schablanon Drücke, ca. 1903.
(Cotsen 103414)

Likewise carving her images out of negative white space, Podhajska’s depiction of a dancing couple (Figure 3a) reveals her fascination with folk art, an important source of influence for the turned-wooden toys she and Harlfinger-Zakucka produced. Her stencil of a witch conjuring her brew employs a wonderfully expressive sinuous curve associated with the new art movement (Figure 3b), which also relates well to the idiosyncratic use of turning-lathe methods in her turned-wooden figurines. The tangible figure of the witch and cauldron is expressed in a curvilinear fashion. Yet it is the intangible aspects of the image–the suggestion of smoke, fire and more abstractly the witches’ incantations–lending it its fiery expressiveness. While both artists tapped into folk imagery and design idioms, their work freely reinvented and modernized traditional folk design into images that were designed to awaken children’s creativity through subtle narrative elements. Images stood alone to leave the rest of the story to children’s imagination.