18 pages • 36 minutes read
Barbie Doll
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Background
Literary Context
“Barbie Doll” sits among a range of other feminist literature of its time. “The Feminine Mystique,” written by Betty Friedan and published in 1963, explores the ubiquitous, nameless unhappiness of housewives in the 1950s and 1960s. Friedan, a psychologist, conducted a survey of her former classmates at Smith College and noticed how unhappy they were with their lives as housewives. In her book, she criticizes Freud, whose theories were particularly influential at this time, she criticizes functionalism, which assigned women to biological roles as mothers and housewives, and she advocates for women to find fulfillment beyond the home. The “miniature GE stoves and irons” (Line 3) touch on those damaging expectations to be a housewife and caretaker—and what that type of invisible labor can do to a person—that Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique investigates.
Adrienne Rich’s 1973 poem “Diving into the Wreck” (Rich, Adrienne. “Diving into the Wreck.” 1973. Poets.org, Accessed 9 October 2021) puts words to the struggle to obtain equal rights for women. Piercy’s poem, however, is unique in style, with graphic, memorable imagery and accessible, direct syntax. Published in 1971, it’s placed approximately in the middle of the second-wave feminist movement—taking on those same topics. The struggle to obtain equal rights and the sensation of arduous hopelessness discussed in Rich’s Diving into the Wreck can be seen in “Barbie Doll” as the main character is relentlessly picked on for her appearance, shrunken into smallness by gender roles, as she receives conflicting advice, and as her good nature eventually wears out “like a fan belt” (Line 16).
Piercy’s poem sits among her other contemporaries’ writings as well. Muriel Rukeyser’s 1968 poem “Käthe Kollwitz” asks: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” The poem’s answer: “The world would split open.” Poets like Sylvia Plath, whose words showed the pain and loneliness she felt as a woman and a mother, and Anne Sexton, whose poems like “Cinderella” and “The House” (1961) explore gendered expectations, sexuality, life, death, and objectification, queried the same or similar topics as Piercy does in “Barbie Doll.”
Historical Context
As a second-wave feminst poem, “Barbie Doll” is one of many in the history of feminist poetry. Second-wave feminism took part roughly from the early 1960s through the 1980s. Piercy’s work took on many of the same topics that were of importance to this period: sexuality, family, reproductive rights, domestic violence, and the questioning of patriarchal institutions and cultural practices. Second-wave feminists like Piercy and her peers differed in this sense from their predecessors, the first-wave feminists or suffragettes who focused on voting rights and property rights.
Piercy was also an activist within other interconnected realms during this time period, involved with the Students for a Democratic Society, and was an organizer against the war in Vietnam. The 1950s and 1960s were also a time of change, with historical campaigns for equality like the Civil Rights Movement, Mexican American activism, the beginnings of gay rights movements, and others. In 1971, when “Barbie Doll” was originally published, feminist literature and literature in support of movements for equality was still seen by many to be dangerous, overly radical, or innapropriate, and could be subject to being banned from households, stores, and schools. “Barbie Doll” is unique in this context because of how direct it is: The poem is striking in imagery, vivid, and does not intend to hide its meaning.
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By Marge Piercy
