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Mary Pipher used to denounce Barbie dolls.
Barbies were exactly what Pipher, whose 1994 non-fiction book Reviving Ophelia inspired the plot of Barbie, according to director Greta Gerwig, strived to warn girls about in her writing. Girls shouldn’t need to have a figure like Barbie, she said, nor a perfectly symmetrical face or smooth blonde hair to be beautiful. “To totally accept the cultural definitions of femininity and conform to the pressures is to kill the self,” Pipher writes in her book. “Girls who do this are the ‘Muffys’ and ‘Barbie dolls’ with hair and smiles in place and a terrible deadness underneath.”
But through the eyes of Gerwig, Pipher tells me, Barbie becomes a “feminist icon.” No longer are Barbie dolls the antithesis of accepting one’s physical and emotional self. Barbie, as portrayed by Margot Robbie, goes through the same struggles as the young girls Pipher writes about in her book.