Women and Barbie

This past weekend I saw a play and a movie—thought provoking, emotional and sometimes funny—that brought me back to the years I was growing up in the Fifties and Sixties. In different ways they each portrayed the slow transition women have experienced—from those who tied their lives and livelihoods to men (as often portrayed in women’s magazines and movies) to real life women with their own aspirations and dreams.   

The play was "The Smile of Her," a world premiere at the Berkshire Theater Group written and performed by the award-winning actor Christine Lahti which was based on her adaptation of her memoir, "True Stories from an Unreliable Eyewitness: A Feminist Coming of Age." It was a two-person play, with Lahti narrating and playing herself, and a young actor playing her as a child living in a dysfunctional home full of bullying, lies and trauma. The movie was the blockbuster film “Barbie."

Both show and movie explored the patriarchy, misogyny, and their effects on women and girls--one painful and destructive, the other satirical and campy. Both caused hard thinking about women, our place in society, how far we have come, and still have to go.

I most resonated to Lahti’s play, not because I came from the same kind of dysfunctional family, but because we lived through the same period of time when sexual harassment was the norm, and women were expected to defer to men and make marriage their career goal. There were moments when I was flooded with memories of my own truncated dreams so well described in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. I had first seen Lahti’s play in a workshop with a “talk-back” afterward. The women of all ages in the audience spoke tearfully of their own experiences and how the emotional impact of seeing these experiences acted out on the stage was so powerful. There were men who also expressed pain from evoked memories too.

“Barbie” was another story. If you were a girl growing up playing incessantly with the first stereotypical Barbie who looked like an anatomically impossible woman; if you were a woman who played with them in the later years when Barbie could be anything—a pilot, a president, a pastry chef; if you were a mother who didn’t want her daughter playing with Barbie dolls (me);  there was something in the movie to move you and remind you of where you came from and where you are now. And America Ferrera’s monologue resonated with all the women in the theater, calling out the impossible expectations placed on women to be everything to everybody. The film was funny, it was satirical, it was even emotional at different places for different viewers. 

When I got up to leave the theater, I noticed a little girl who was in my row. She was standing and looking worriedly at her mother (who was evidently crying) and she said, "Did that make you sad Mommy?" I didn't hear the mother's answer, but since I was teary-eyed myself at the last funny and, at the same time, very serious scene, I could only imagine what she said. 

Although I don’t think “Barbie” will have a huge impact on women’s rights issues, it may inspire young girls and women to take hold of their lives more forcefully. And, of course, it certainly will earn Mattel a boat-load of money.