The Barbie Legacy
I'm going to age myself by writing this piece but Barbie and I were born in the same year.
And yet I never possessed a Barbie Doll (to the best of my memory.) I’m not sure why - maybe my parents were so enlightened that they worried about the message that the first stereotypical Barbie would give their fledgling daughters - blonde, superficial and physically perfect.
This wasn’t going to be possible for us with our DNA and our parents intellectual aspirations.
In any case by the time I had the capacity to know what I wanted, I had truly bought into the patriarchy. I was brought up on The Sweeney, Starsky and Hutch and the Six Million Dollar Man and it was this action man (not Barbie) that the pre-pubescent me asked for as a Chanukah present.
I felt the allure of his telescopic eye and peel back arm skin (so that I could admire his bionic arm).
Interestingly, the Bionic Woman didn’t have the same draw for me - she was like the Six Million Dollar Man’s poor spin off - a 2nd thought. Merely a nod to the girl viewers.
I seemed to know, even at this age, that men ran the show and I had few public female role models (Thatcher certainly was not one for me).
Of course I had my Mum. A dentist and later an orthodontist, she was someone who never stopped learning and developing, later gaining a PhD in forensic Egyptology. Moreover my Dad, who had fathered two daughters told us ‘we could do it Duffy Moon’ (an allusion to a Disney show from the same era.)
Career and ambition were instilled as vital components but so was family. When my career started to motor and my pregnancies (like buses) came all at once (well almost), I (like all working mums) had to work out how to try and have it all.
The bad news is that I discovered it’s impossible. When I prioritised work I felt like I was short changing my boys - and when I prioritised the boys I struggled with severe FOMO.
Yesterday, I finally got to see Barbie The Movie.
My 18 year old son had told me it was extraordinary and it was.
I laughed out loud and wept.
No spoilers but the scenes with Rhea Perlman (Ruth) were wonderful and America Ferrera’s (Gloria) monologue was mesmerising.
Throughout the film I thought about the senior female executives that I’ve coached over the last 20 or so years - many of them I met on business school Women Leadership Programmes.
They brought to the coaching the acute balancing acts they have to perform, and the impossibility of balancing the equation that Gloria all too eloquently refers to in her speech.
It’s worth reading her speech in full, but I want to end this with two quotes - the first is from the end of THAT monologue where Gloria says:
‘I'm just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don't even know.’
And here is my final thought, Madeline Albright famously said
‘there is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.’
The film reminded me of the importance of collaboration over competition - the joy of ‘planned choreography’ when ‘sisters are doing it for themselves’ through amplification and mutual support. So this is a rallying cry for the sentiment of the film. An encouragement not to get back into the box but to continue working out who we want to be, to follow our dream and support one another in the process.