Ruth Handler watched her daughter Barbara play with paper dolls, and noticed that she often enjoyed giving them adult roles. At the time, most children's toy dolls were representations of infants. Realizing that there could be a gap in the market, Handler suggested the idea of an adult bodied doll to her husband Elliot, a co-founder of the Mattel toy company. He was unenthusiastic about the idea, as were Mattel's directors.

During a trip to Europe in 1956 with her children Barbara and Kenneth, Ruth Handler came across a German toy doll called Bild Lilli. The adult figured doll was exactly what...

Barbie was born during the golden age of American post-World War II prosperity with its lushly saturated Technicolor movies, tidy new suburbs and cars as large as beached whales.

In the early 1950s, Mrs. Handler got the idea of creating an adult doll after observing her daughter’s fascination with adult paper dolls, whose clothing she was able to change.

Mrs. Handler envisioned a doll onto which girls could project their desire to act like, and indeed become, grown women. But the designers at Mattel initially balked, saying the level of detail that she wanted would make the doll prohibitively...