![]() The year the house came out, Elliot Handler, Mattel’s president and husband of Barbie inventor Ms. ![]() While the toy’s debut could have been an act of feminist revolt, it was also about making money - perhaps primarily so. “We got to pick everything out and give our daughters a nice, shiny, new home.” It’s also a ranch home, just like Barbie’s. Dalsing lives in Saint Joseph, Mo., in what she called her own dream house. “I thought that was just how it was supposed to be,” said Ms. “This was also the time of the Playboy bachelor pad and the idea of a single occupancy home for a freewheeling bachelor, but here you have the female version of that,” said Felix Burrichter, the co-editor of “Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey.”īarbie’s first home was prophetic in one way: today, more single women own homes than single men.Īs a young girl in the 1960s, Sue Dalsing never fully realized the significance of Barbie owning a home. The single bed and a framed photo of Ken further asserted that this was Barbie’s own, unshared domestic space. Many employers weren’t legally required to pay women equal salaries as men for the same work either, before the passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963. This practice, known as credit discrimination, wasn’t banned until 1974, when the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed. Dinner added, were often denied loans because of the very fact that they weren’t married. “Mortgage lenders had a host of stereotypes about women - the same kinds of stereotypes that were used to discriminate against women in employment, insurance and businesses open to the public - and that’s basically that women were economic dependents on men and that their role was to be caregivers,” said Deborah Dinner, a professor of law at Cornell University and the author of “The Sex Equality Dilemma.” Single or divorced women, Ms. Barbie’s Dreamhouse was all her own - Ken was not on the deed.įinancial institutions frequently turned down mortgage applications for women without male co-signers when Mattel debuted the Dreamhouse in 1962, three years after Barbie shook up the toy world, arriving in a one-piece bathing suit and kitten heels. The house has served as a subliminal, maybe even subversive, blueprint for children, especially girls. At times, it has been out of step, ignoring the country’s ills (Barbie’s never been broke she has never lost her house to foreclosure). It has followed housing patterns and trends, from chic, compact urban living to suburban sprawl to pure excess. ![]() But her home, which has not been as publicly parsed or praised like the doll, has been a mirror for the various social, political and economic changes the rest of the country was experiencing. From the beginning, much of Barbie’s existence - her unrealistic physical proportions, the lack of racially diverse dolls, the toy’s reinforcing of gender roles - has been debated in jest and in seriousness.
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