Ruth Handler. During the thirty-fifth birthday celebration of the Barbie doll at FAO Schwarz in New York City, 9 Mar. 1994. Courtesy of AP Images.

Handler, Ruth (4 Nov. 1916-27 Apr. 2002), businesswoman, was born Ruth Mosko in Denver, Colorado, the daughter of Jacob Joseph Mosko (né Moskowicz), a blacksmith, and Ida Rubinstein. Ruth's parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland who had come to the United States in steerage in 1907. The youngest of ten children, she attended public school in Denver and worked in the drugstore her father was able to purchase a few years after arriving. At the age of nineteen, she moved to Hollywood, California, where she worked as a secretary at Paramount Studios. In 1935 Isadore Elliot Handler, her boyfriend from Denver, joined her in California, and the two returned to Denver soon afterward. She studied at the University of Denver in 1935 and 1936, and she and Elliot (as he was always known) were married in 1938. The couple had two children. The Handlers returned to California, where Elliot studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. In 1941 Ruth Handler left the secretarial job at Paramount to which she had returned and worked with her husband, who had been designing and making their furniture and household accessories out of the new acrylic plastics Lucite and Plexiglas, to produce enough goods to sell to local stores. They formed a company called Elzac, from the first syllables of the names of Elliot and a partner named Zachary, and added costume jewelry and household items, such as bookends and candleholders, to their line. So successful was Ruth Handler's merchandising that the company reached $2 million in annual sales.

After a few years, the Handlers tired of the business and sold their share of it. In 1945 they started another, making picture frames with the scraps of plastic and wood leftover from their earlier business. They and Harold "Matt" Matson started Mattel Creations, again joining elements of the names of the two partners, and began fabricating dollhouse furniture. Ruth continued to run the marketing department, and Mattel did one hundred thousand in sales its first year. From doll furniture to toys was an obvious step, and Mattel began producing a miniature ukulele called the Uke-a-Doodle, a musical jack-in-the-box, and a cap pistol called the Burp Gun. Matson soon left the company, and under the Handlers' management, Mattel prospered. Sales increased rapidly when, in 1955, the firm advertised on the television show The Mickey Mouse Club. It was the first time toys had been advertised on a continual basis--Mattel contracted for fifty-two-week blocks of exclusive sponsorship--and the innovation had an industry-wide impact on the marketing of toys. The television show's cast of "Mouseketeers" promoted Mattel's "Mouseguitar," a child-size musical instrument, which promptly became a best seller.

The turning point for Mattel was Handler's decision, opposed by most of her male staff, to produce a doll in the form of an adult woman. As she explained in a 1977 interview,

Every little girl needed a doll through which to project herself into her dream of her future. If she was going to do role playing of what she would be like when she was 16 or 17, it was a little stupid to play with a doll that had a flat chest. So I gave her beautiful breasts. (New York Times, 29 Apr. 2002)

In 1956, on a trip to Europe with her teenage children, Barbara Joyce and Kenneth Robert, Handler saw a voluptuous female doll intended for an adult market and was inspired to create a less provocative version for little girls. Mattel presented the first "three-dimensional" doll at the American Toy Fair in New York City in 1959. The blond eleven-and-a-half-inch Barbie, named for Ruth's daughter, was a marketing sensation, selling more than 350,000 her first year, with a chic wardrobe that had to be purchased separately and that was updated regularly, reflecting the changing sartorial styles and self-image of women. Barbie (and later Ken, her equally idealized boyfriend, introduced in 1961 and named for Barbara's brother) became the best-selling toys in world history. By the time of Handler's death, more than 1 billion Barbies had been sold in 150 countries and with many lifestyles, including teenage model, babysitter, paleontologist, athlete, astronaut, physician, and policewoman. A series of Barbie mystery novels, featuring her as a star reporter who solved crimes, began in 2002. Mattel has provided its offspring, officially named Barbara Millicent Roberts, with appropriately garbed Asian, Native American, and African American companions as well. Feminists, including spokespersons for the National Organization for Women, objected that Barbie was an unrealistic role model--anatomically and professionally--observing that the doll "gave girls misguided goals, whether for their careers or their own physical development" (New York Times, 29 Apr. 2002), but Handler defended her iconic creation as showing that "the little girl could be anything she wanted to be" (People Weekly, p. 66).

Barbie was followed by another successful innovation, Chatty Cathy, the first talking doll, in the 1960s, reinforcing Mattel's dominance of the market, and Ruth Handler became the company's president in 1967. During that decade, Mattel began to diversify, with plants in Asia, Europe, Canada, and Mexico and the acquisition of such unrelated enterprises as a theme park, a pet products company, a publishing house, a motion picture company, and a circus. Spread too thin, the firm began to experience losses. Shareholder lawsuits followed, and a government inquiry revealed evidence of accounting irregularities. In 1974 the Handlers were forced to resign from Mattel, and in 1978 Ruth Handler and four others were indicted for conspiracy, mail fraud, and false reporting to the Securities and Exchange Commission. She denied all guilt but avoided trial by pleading no contest and accepting a fine and a five-year term of community service. During that period she helped found an organization to assist white-collar probationers to perform public service.

Handler attributed some of her business mistakes to the anxiety resulting from a diagnosis of breast cancer and a mastectomy in 1970. Unable to find a satisfactory artificial breast, she founded a new business, Nearly Me, in 1976, to provide silicon breast prostheses that fit comfortably and looked natural. Its product was, according to the company's statement, "the first breast form that specifically fit the right or left side of the body, came in familiar bra sizes and followed the natural slope of the actual breast" (www.nearlyme.org). A commercial success, the product's users included former first lady Betty Ford, a fellow advocate for early breast cancer detection. Handler directed Nearly Me Mastectomy Products until 1991, when she sold it to Spenco Medical Corporation.

The founder and president of the world's largest toy company, which employed eighteen thousand people and had an annual gross income of more than $300 million, Ruth Handler was active throughout her life in public service and won many awards from business and women's organizations. She died in Los Angeles of complications following colon surgery.

The business and personal papers (1931-2002), along with photographs, videotapes, and audiotapes of Ruth Handler, are in the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. Handler's memoir, written with Jacqueline Shannon, is Dream Doll: The Ruth Handler Story (1994). Extended histories and critiques of the doll she created are in M. G. Lord, Forever Barbie: An Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll (1994, 2004); Yona Zeldis McDonough, ed., The Barbie Chronicles (1999); Kitturah B. Westenhouser, The Story of Barbie Doll (1999); and Kristin Noelle Weissman, Barbie: The Icon, the Image, the Ideal: An Analytical Interpretation of the Barbie Doll in Popular Culture (1999). Obituaries are in the Los Angeles Times, 28 Apr. 2002; the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the London Times, 29 Apr. 2002; the Economist (U.S.), 4 May 2002; and People Weekly, 13 May 2002.

• Information on Handler and her influence in business and popular culture is available on the Web at
  http://www.mattel.com;
  http://www.barbie.com; and the Public Broadcasting Corporation Web site
  http://www.pbs.org
  (see "Ruth Handler," Who Made America?, aired 23 Mar. 2006).