What? What is this? A book about Barbie? What am I – a philistine or something?

In my pre-teen years, I inherited a whole bunch of books from my mother’s and my favorite aunt’s childhood collections. My mother’s books consisted of about 50-75 hardcover “horse story” books – Misty of Chincoteague, Justin Morgan Had a Horse, Man-O-War, you know, that kind of thing.* My aunt contributed hardcover books about teenaged girls – Donna Parker, a whole series of problem stories about teen girls navigating change in their lives, and several Barbie books.

I liked the novelty of the packaging – very late 50’s/early 60’s, with an asterisk dotting the “i” in Barbie’s name, and a picture of quintessential Barbie, high blonde ponytail, big blue eyes, and tiny chin, on the cover. Over the years, I’ve kept an eye out at garage sales and used bookstores and amassed 5 or 6 titles. Not enough to call myself a collector (if I stumble across them I’ll buy them but I’m not going to search the internet for them) and I don’t really care about condition (my copy of this one looks like it’s been chewed by a dog and possibly was), so they’re probably not worth much.

The stories are fun. Sure, some of them are Barbie dating Ken, or going for malts with Midge. In all of the ones I’ve read, Barbie is still in high school, she lives in the Midwest, designs her own clothes, draws incessantly, and designs costumes for school plays and stuff. She has friends – Ken, Midge, Jody – but is not the queen bee of the school. She dreams of being a fashion designer some day – but she’s not thinking about getting married and she teases her friends who don’t aspire to more. Her parents, solidly upper middle class, live in a suburban bungalow. She is very much like any other teen girl in any of the other books my aunt handed down to me.

In this one, Barbie’s Dad gets sent to Alaska for two months on business and the company pays for her mom to accompany him… only Mom can’t go because Barbie can’t stay home by herself for two months! Luckily for mom, a famous fashion designer for Sandcastle Swimsuits in San Francisco drops by, sees some of Barbie’s designs, and offers her a two-month job as a junior-designer working on a new line of swimsuits for teen girls! Mom calls Barbie’s Aunt Liz, who lives in San Francisco, and Dad suggests that Barbie can skip school for those two months and make up her studies in summer school! “Watch out, San Francisco, here comes the conquering Barbie!”

Oh, if only life were so easy!

I just realized how many exclamation points I used in describing the plot set-up. Something about the writing style does that to you! Everything seems possible when you’re reading about Barbie!

Barbie quickly finds her feet at Sandcastle Swimsuits, which is staffed by a lot of capable women, and the owner’s cute son. Barbie gets some real-world design advice from these experienced professionals, fills in at swimsuit photo shoots when models drop out, and the owner’s son invites her to a sailing party on the family yacht. But there’s a fly in the ointment – the owner’s cold and rude teenaged daughter, Linda, who the other women warn Barbie away from, and her brother begs Barbie to make friends with. “Don’t think trying to get my brother on your team is going to save that designer’s job of yours. Sandcastles in the air are the only kind you’ll ever build when I get through!”

Ah, the melodrama of work! If only office politics was that obvious…

But does Barbie fire back a quick, “You wish, bitch”? No, because Barbie is a good-hearted girl and far too busy whipping up designs under deadline for drama with the owner’s daughter and she doesn’t use language like that. But then things start to go sour for Barbie – one of her mentors keeps dropping by when she’s away from her desk, and marking up her designs in ways that don’t make sense. Barbie – put on the spot in a meeting right after yet another set of designs have been marked up – erupts in frustration, is put in her place by the famous designer, and has to have a performance discussion with her mentor. Oooh…

And then it’s revealed that the corrections aren’t from her mentor: someone else has been marking up her designs, sabotaging her work! But who would do such a thing? Then Barbie is assigned to work with Linda on a line together! Can Barbie get around the huge chip on Linda’s shoulder? Will the two of them be able to finish their designs on time? How will it all end?

I won’t spoil it for you.

Great literature, no. But these books are fun to read. And look at the role models they offered teen girls: professional working women, living independently in the 1950s. Teen girls who aspired to do more than just marry a rich man. Barbie learns important lessons about how to behave in a business situation, how to handle criticism, how to defang an enemy.

Well, having had work enemies, I’m not sure her approach always works. It’s worth a try but, when you run into a true narcissist at work, Barbie’s method is the wrong one to use.

Reading these books now, I am also struck by how very, well, white they are. Yeah, yeah, I know, the era of Leave It to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show, you’re not going to see a lot of color. But Nancy Drew, Donna Parker, and even the other problem books that my aunt gave me – all very white books – feature immigrants trying to adjust to America, some African-American characters (even if they’re not the stars), and one book even has a girl confront her boyfriend for his attitude towards her new, Hispanic friends. Heady stuff for light teen fiction, in those days.

But, for a series of books featuring Barbie, of all things, these books are fun. And they put ideas in girls’ heads, dangerous ideas about moving to the big city, having a career…

Despite what the movie proposes, I don’t think Barbie started out being about empowerment. When I was the age when I owned Barbie dolls, she hadn’t developed a career and body-positivity yet. She was just a beautiful girl with an unrealistic body type that looked great in clothes and beautiful blonde hair and blue eyes. (Exactly what my mother wanted me to be, except shorter and daintier, not with Barbie’s Amazonian height and, uh, frame.) I don’t remember “playing” with my Barbies, giving them stories, marrying them off to Ken. (I had Kens, too.) I did build houses for them out of record cubes and make cars for them out of Kleenex boxes. Houses and cars that they posed in.

I don’t remember my sisters and I asking for Barbies or seeking them out – they were all gifts to us. But, if we stopped at a Stuckey’s, we whined for those plastic horses, the ones that were scaled to Barbie’s size. The horses came in all different builds and colors and my sisters collected them religiously: Palomino, Pinto, Bay. And the horses got played with – whole stories and names and personalities. The horses went with us on camping trips. The horses had lives.

But Barbie’s legs didn’t stretch so that she could sit on the plastic horses. And, if Barbie couldn’t ride horses, what good was she? And that was the end of Barbie at our house.

I like these books because of their sense of optimism: I can get that big job I want. I can make it work. I can get around that coworker who gives me such a hard time. I can do impossible things at work.

This sense of optimism is important to keeping us going, when things get tough. When you can’t get the job you want. (“I’m not going to give you this job. But stick with it, kid, you’ve got moxie,” one HR VP told me, like we were in a production of 42nd Street or something. Putz.) When your ideas get shut down at work – or worse, get stolen – or even worse, you get told they’re a great idea but somehow every time you want to put them into action, the timing gets deferred. Or when you meet that hostile coworker who is a narcissist and, when you go to HR, they play dumb. Or when you’re trying to do impossible things and everyone’s too scared to put them into practice. [“I need your help, Barry Manilow…”]

It’s when you don’t believe you have a chance to win that you burn out. When work gets you down, you need a book filled with optimism, to recharge you, to help you get out of bed every day, and keep fighting that dang dragon.

So, yes, Barbie’s Fashion Success. It’s not great literature. And that’s okay with me.

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^{*I won’t be reviewing the horse books here. Unfortunately, Mom gave them all away not long before she died. Grrrr.}