Ruth Handler

And I chose eight women from that period within a range of fields.

So I think I had Ruth Handler who created the Barbie doll.

I had Mary Blair, of course.

I had June Christie who did like, she was a jazz musician.

So here I took a random web page at the time when I was making this talk.

I just grabbed it from the main page of Wikipedia, and it was about Ruth Handler.

And so think about being the neural network, and you're given some amount of words and trying to predict the next word in a sequence.

Well, in this case, I'm highlighting here in red some of the words that would contain a lot of information.

gave them tons of money, tons of freedom.

And it was in this environment that Ruth Handler one day happened to see her daughter Barbara playing with her friends, making cutout paper dolls.

And it wasn't about playing with baby dolls that were on the market at that time.

Those were the only dolls that were out there.

It's as if they were imagining themselves in the future as adults, as women, as opposed to just being mothers and taking care of babies.

A light bulb went off.

Ruth Handler, again, the marketing genius behind this young company, she realized there was this huge opportunity for girls to buy a different type of doll.

So on March 9th, 1959, Barbie doll was released to the world.

He was the co-founder of a huge toy company called Mattel.

His wife, Ruth Handler, had already invented the world-famous Barbie doll.

One day, Elliot watched his son, Kenneth, playing with matchbox cars and thought, we can do better for the boys' toy aisle.

What did he want to change? He wanted toy cars that looked like the real, super-fast California hot rods he saw cruising the streets.

So how did they not see it? A shopper was shocked and appalled after allegedly spotting Nazi symbolism in a Barbie doll package at CVS.

The TikTok clip posted by mom Anna Elizabeth shows the content creator at the pharmacy clutching the so-called problematic figurine.

um a gymnast inspired barbie that's um gussied up gussied up what the fuck does that mean

it's white

Yeah.

Well, okay, here's this.

So the creator, Ruth Handler, the co-founder of Mattel, designed Barbie after seeing her daughter play with paper dolls.

The design was modeled on the German Build Lily doll.

You're going to, in a stage play so what was the what was that how did that transition work and what were the obstacles that you had to overcome was there a learning curve to it or did it come naturally because of your the newspapers and the magazines and the novels how do you transition because they're they're two completely separate not two there's all of them newspapers magazines novels and then you've got a totally separate medium I

actually wrote the biography of Ruth Handler, the founder of Mattel.

I want to get

into the Mattel aspect,

Um, I have to ask, this has nothing to do with playwriting whatsoever, but I'm fascinated with...

You wrote a book about Mattel?

I wrote the first biography of Ruth Handler, who founded Mattel and created Barbie.

And everyone knows her name now because of the movie.

Her creation owed to one woman.

Ruth Handler founded toy company Mattel with her husband in 1945.

But the first major turning point for the company was Handler's most well-known creation, the Barbie doll.

It was years in the making, the predominantly male executives of Mattel resisting the idea of a grown-up doll for children.