Ruth Handler

Before she was a doctor, astronaut, or president, Barbie was a sexed-up doll men flashed for laughs.

In the 1950s, dolls were babies.

The only future girls were expected to imagine? Motherhood.

Ruth Handler didn’t buy it.

She watched her daughter, Barbara, play with paper dolls, pretending they were cheerleaders, flight attendants, college students.

This gave Ruth an idea: what if girls had a doll with adult features? One they could use to imagine being grown women.

She pitched the idea to Mattel: the company she’d founded with her husband Elliot and partner Harold Matson.

They laughed her out of the room.

A doll with breasts? Too racy.

Then, in 1956, during a family trip, Ruth spotted a strange doll in a Swiss shop window.

Her name was Bild Lilli.

She was a 12-inch plastic bombshell based on a German comic strip. A high-heeled, heavy-lashed, wide-hipped caricature of a gold-digging blonde.

Men bought her as a gag gift.

They dangled her from car mirrors.

Brought her to bachelor parties.

Lifted her skirt for laughs.

But Ruth didn’t see a novelty sex toy. She saw a prototype.

She bought a few Lilli dolls and handed them to Jack Ryan, Mattel’s head of R&D.

They redesigned the figure, changing the face, softening the features.

Ruth named her Barbie, after her daughter.

She launched her at the 1959 New York Toy Fair in a black-and-white striped swimsuit.

Retail price: $3.

First-year sales: 300,000 units.

By 1961, Barbie had a boyfriend: Ken.

Then came the dream house. The convertible. The surgeon scrubs. The astronaut suit.

Mattel exploded.

By the mid-60s, they owned 12% of the U.S. toy market.

By the 80s, over 500M Barbies had been sold.

But success came with controversy.

In 1963, Greiner & Hausser sued Mattel for copying the Lilli doll’s hip joint design.

Mattel settled in 1963.

Then came Jack Ryan (Barbie’s lead designer) who sued Mattel in 1980, claiming he was the true creator.

And, in the early 70s, Ruth was diagnosed with breast cancer.

She had a radical mastectomy and stepped back from Mattel.

That’s when the numbers started getting fuzzy.

Between 1971 and 1973, Mattel falsely reported $20M in earnings.

In 1975, Ruth and Elliot were forced to resign from the company they’d built.

In 1978, she was indicted by the SEC for fraud and false reporting.

She pled no contest. Fined $57,000. Sentenced to 2,500 hours of community service.

But she wasn’t done.

After her mastectomy, Ruth couldn’t find a breast prosthetic that looked or felt real.

So she founded Ruthton Corp and launched Nearly Me. A realistic silicone prosthetic for women who’d undergone mastectomies.

She’d walk into meetings, take off her blouse, and show buyers they couldn’t tell the difference.

Unfortunately, Ruth died in 2002, from complications after colon cancer surgery.

She once said: “My whole philosophy of Barbie was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be.”