Feminism and Capitalism under the Nuclear Cloud & Barbie

TEC HNO LOG Y JANUARY 2024 VOL. 65 AND CUL TUR E Gust erson , Hugh. "Nuc lear Tour ism:' Journ al for Cultural Research 8, no. 1 (2004): 23-3 1. Gust erson , Hugh. "Tales of the Cit/ ' Techn ology Revie w 98, no. 6 (1995): 56-5 7. Hech t, Davi d K. Story telling and Science: Rewr iting Oppe nheim er in the Nuclear Age. Amh erst: University of Mass achu setts Press, 2015 . Howes, Ruth H., and Caro line Herz enbe rg. Their Day in the Sun: Wom en of the Manh attan Project. Philadelphia: Temp le University Press, 1999 . Krup ar, Jason N., and Steph en P. Depo e. "Col d War Trium p~an t: ~e-R hetorical Uses of History, Mem ory, and Herit age Preservat10n w1th111 the Depa rtme nt of Energy's Nuclear Weapons Com plex:' In Nuclear Legacies: Com muni cation, Controve rsy, and the US. Nuclea r Weapons Complex, edited by Bryan C. Taylor, Willi am J. Kins ella, Steph en P. Depo e, and Mari beth S. Metzler, 135-6 6. Lanh am: Lexin gton Books, 2007. Kuhn, Thom as s. The Stru cture of Scientific Revolution s. Chicago: University of Chic ago Press, 1962. . . Lifton, Robe rt Jay, and Greg Mitchell. Hiros hima in America: Fifty Years of Denial. New York: Grosse t/Put nam, 1995. Masco, Josep h. The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manh atta n Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico. Princ eton: Princ eton Univ ersity Press, 2006. Molella, Arth ur. "Atomic Muse ums of (Part ial) Mem or/' The Journal of Muse um Education 29, no. 3/4 (Spri ng/S umm er-F all 2004): 21-2 5. Mon k, Ray. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life In side the Cente r. New York: Dou bleda y, 2012 . ,, . Slaughter, Aimee. "Performing the Man hatta n Project in Los Alamos. Hi story of Science. Publ ished on line, Augu st 28, 2023 . na Storm, An , Fred rik Kroh n Ande rsson , and Egle Rind zevic iute. "Urb an Nucl ear Reactors and the Secu rity Theatre: • H The Mak ing o f• Atom ic. eritage in Chicago, Moscow, and Stockh olm: ' In_Securing Urban Heritage:_ Agen ts, Access, and Securitization, edited by Heike Oeve rman n and Eszter Gant ner, 111 -29. New York: Rout ledge, 2020 . . Taylor, Bryan c. "Radioactive History;, Rhet ori~, Memory, and Place 111_ the Post -Cold War Nucl ear Muse um. In Publi c Mem ory: The Rhetoric of Muse ums and Memorials, edite d by Greg Dick inson , Caro le Blair, and Brian L. Ott, 57-8 6. Tuscaloosa: Univ ersity of Alab ama Press, 2010. Weart, Spencer R. Nuclear Fear: A History of Im ages. Cam bridg e, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988 . Feminism and Ca pita lism un de r the Nuclear Cloud & Barbie RAC HEL MA INE S The Warner Brothers/Mattel movie Barb ie is meant to be about feminism and capitalism in comp licated, comical, and nuanced ways. It most ly succeeds in its dual purp ose of come dy and inspi ration . The doll's origin in 1959 places her and her consort, Ken, squar ely in the context of the Cold War, althou gh neither the movie nor the doll's long and successful marketing history acknowledges anything outside the sunn y world of Barbie Land. The nuclear shadow does affect the movie's reception, however, in the form of international protests over the dashed lines scrawled on a supp osed "World Map" in one scene. For nations in and around the South Chin a Sea, the dashed lines evoke the specter of war in a nuclear age over claim s to territ orial sovereignty. Yet director Greta Gerw ig's film is a runaway succe ss, the first film solo directed by a woman to gross more than a billion dolla rs and counting. ABSTRACT: ,• I i l I j· KEYWORDS: dolls; fem inism; filmmaking; nuclear warfa re Intro duct ion Whe n I was a ten -year -old livin g in Berk eley, Calif ornia , in 1961, my paren ts had two cons tant worr ies: how to supp ort their hous ehold on graduate-s tuden t pay, and whet her my newb orn brother and I woul d survive to adult hood . This was the era of nucle a r drills in publ ic scho ols, signs on publi c build ings direc ting citize ns to fallo ut shelt ers, and air raid siren s on lamp posts (see figure 1). Two years late r, durin g the Cuba n Miss ile Crisis, American radios, inclu ding ours , were on all day as we waite d for word that World War III h ad begu n. But I was a fifth grad er in 1961, and all I want ed was a libra ry card and a Barbie doll. My moth er, a lifelong Fabia n socia list and femin ist, was horrified and lectu red me at lengt h abou t capit alism and gend er stere otypi ng, but I stood firm. Not only did I get a Barbie, I also got a Ken, with his chara cteristica lly nond escri pt genit al lump , and glued -on hair that quickly turne d Citation: Maine s, Rachel. "Feminism and Capit alism under the Nuclear Cloud & Barbie:• Technology and Culture 65, no. l (2024): 333-4 2. ©2024 by the Society for the History of Techn ology. All rights reserved. 0040- l 65X/2 4/650 1-000 l/ 333- 342 332 333 TECHNOLOGY AND RACHEL M A INES CULTURE I Feminism and Capitalism under the Nuclear Cloud & Barbie green and rubbed off. Nevertheless, I tuned out the nuclear threat and sat happily on the floor inventing life stories for my homunculi, much as I had done earlier in my childhood with a collection of dime-store plastic horses. -tro WARNING S1R FAST The Well-Dressed Shelter Mom JANUARY 2024 VOL. 65 ...,_ c.WWt--•·' , TOU N r•t ,:;.-:; 1 .. .......... ,... ... ............ ~ ~ .~' :· . ' . \' ' FIG. 1. Home Front Barbies. American women in the 1950s and 1960s were expected to play multiple roles in fami ly life under the nuclear cloud, as depicted in a newspaper pull-out section t itled "What to Do if A-Bombs Fall." If she's at home or a teacher at schoo l when the alarm sounds, she's responsible for getting the ch ildren to a she lter. Th e woman who is "out walking" and has no access to a shelter nearby is instructed to lie down and cover what she can. In the drawing, however, her legs remain exposed, with her feet in heels. (Source: Philadelphia Inquirer, February 1951.) 334 My anti-capitalist parents, however, drew the line at the Barbie clothes and accessories, which, as publications like Business Week and the Saturday Evening Post pointed out at the time, were the real profit center for Mattel. 1 So, like many other girls with their dolls, I turned my rudimentary sewing skills to making outfits. I did not really learn dressmaking until I was in junior high school and well past the Barbie stage, but I did my best with scrounged fabric scraps and large-eyed needles, folding and fastening strapless and sleeveless dresses for my blonde prize. As anyone who sews clothing knows, sleeve setting is a tricky operation, involving the insertion of a larger piece of fabric into a smaller armhole opening without visible gathering or tucking, an operation known, with unintentional irony, as "easing:' More skilled youngsters than I used dolls in general, and Barbies in particular, as opportunities to practice such sewing skills, which they could later apply to their own wardrobes. These fabric engineering activities were not (and are not) considered to be comparable in technical sophistication with the suggestively named "hard sciences" like nuclear physics. These wardrobes were supposed to be close to the center of a girl's universe in the 1960s, necessary, as it was thought, for the serious business of catching a husband, raising a family with him, and thriftily outfitting the growing children- though not the husband-with the products of the needle and home sewing machine. In my era, however, girls and young women were expected to add a new dimension to their domestic roles of looking pretty, cooking, sewing, and homemaking: that of Shelter Mom. In this role, as popular media, school programs, and government publications explained, American women were to help their husbands design and furnish shelters in their homes and neighborhoods, stock them with food, water, and hygiene and medical supplies, and provide the family with entertainment such as books and games to pass the hours, days, or weeks waiting for the sirens to sound the all clear. Judging by the images that accompanied the instructions, women were to accomplish these tasks while being impeccably coiffed, dressed fashionably yet soberly, wearing appropriately feminine l. "It's Not the Doll, It's the Clothes;' Business Week, December 16, 1961, 48- 52; William K. Zinsser, "Barbie Is a Million-Dollar Doll;' Saturday Evening Post, December 12, 1964, 72- 73. 335 TECHNOLOGY JANUARY 2024 VOL. 65 AND RACHEL MAINES CULTURE I Feminism and Capitalism under the Nuclear Cloud & Barbie footwear, and continuing to smile benignly at all members of their households (see figure 2). 2 In short, they were to emulate some postmarital version of Barbie, managing their domestic nuclear hideaways as gracefully as Barbie Dream Houses. Kenneth Rose's One Nation Underground includes illustrations of these paragons of femininity making beds and stocking shelves for their allwhite nuclear (no pun intended) families and watching as their husbands, who are taller than they are in the same proportion that Ken is taller than Barbie, stack sandbags and concrete blocks around the underground living space. 3 The jarring juxtaposition of alluring femininity with the threat of nuclear destruction was perhaps epitomized by the brief popularity in the 1940s of Mexican actress Linda Christian, who, according to Paul Boyer's book By the Bomb's Early Light, was characterized by Life magazine in 1945 as the "anatomic bomb:"' In my Texas high school, the training of girls to merge the roles of fashion icon and shelter manager was integrated into a class called "Health;' with units on dress and grooming, first aid, and shelter management, including medical issues like home treatments for radiation sickness and nuclear burns. In its paternalist wisdom, however, the Texas State Board of Education had ordered the emergency-childbirth section removed from all state copies of the civil defense textbook for high schoolers, the U.S. Office of Civil Defense's Family Guide to Emergency Health Care (1965). 5 Unlike the Barbie of the movie's final scene, Shelter Barbie, at least in 1960s Texas, was definitely not ready for an appointment with her gynecologist (see figure 3). The Nuclear Cloud over Barbie Land Director Greta Gerwig's Barbie is strictly nonnuclear in both senses of the word, meant to be funny and mostly succeeding, with poignant moments and sharp sociopolitical thorns lurking among the pink roses. As author and collector Sally Edelstein points out, the Barbie Dream House conspicuously lacks a fallout shelter. Bikinis appear in Barbie Land, with no reference to the Pacific atoll from which they take their name. 6 In Gerwig's film, Ken's height is about the only advantage he has over the om nicompetent empress of feminine fantasy; we cannot envision him as Shelter Ken, piling sandbags 2. Shelter Matrons. The stereotypical "Shelter Mom," dressed as if for church, inspects an exhibit of ideal household preparations for nuclear warfare in a photo by Marion S. Trikosko, 1961 . Pots and pans are displayed on the wall, although no stove or hot plate is visible in the picture . Digging and trenching tools are prominently displayed . She is evidently expected to somehow augment the meager supply of water vi sible in the lower right center, as well as the small box of "extra clothing." No menstrual care items are visible. (Source: Library of Congress.) FIG. 2. "20 Photos of Bomb Shelters During the Cold War & Red Scare;• History Daily, December 4, 2020, https:/ /h istorydaily.org/20-photos-bo mb-shelters-during-cold-war -red- scare. 3. Rose, One Nation Underground, 35, 85, 144. 4. Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light, 85. 5. U.S. Office of Civil Defense, Family Guide to Emergency Hea lth Care. 6. Sally Edelstein, "Barbie and the Bomb;' Envisioning the American Dream, July 21, 2023, https:/ /envisioningtheamericandream.com/2023/07/2 I /barbie-and-the-bomb/. 336 337 - n TECHNOLOGY JANUARY 2024 VOL. 65 AND CULTURE or sweating over a shovel in the backyard, any more than we can picture the Nurse versions of Barbie handing out radiation sickness remedies in a concrete-lined basement. But one of the charms of the Warner Brothers/Mattel movie is a consistent thread of self-parody, with all the main doll characters expressing frustration at their limitations, including feet that are perpetually and dysfunctionally suited only for high heels and their lower torsos forever devoid of genitalia. Mattel, the movie's maker, consistently portrays the company's male human representatives as clueless executive jocks, including a feckless, mostly white, impeccably dressed, all-male board of directors. The women associated with Mattel's movie version of the corporation are few but heroic, including Gloria, the receptionist, and the ghost of real-life designer Ruth Handler as Barbie's "mother;' who guides and inspires the doll's journey into reality. While the nuclear threat-which has hovered over Barbie's history since her creation in 1959 by marital partners Ruth Mosko Handler and Mattel cofounder Elliot Handler-is not visible in the film, the reality of global conflict was apparently lurking just outside the frame, as the fantasy map of the route from Barbie Land to the "Real World" set off a wave of international outrage and censorship even before the film's release. The film sequence in question is the one in which Stereotypical Barbie and hippie throwback Weird Barbie are planning her route, while she stands in front of a cartoonish and comically inaccurate map of the world, with several dashed lines drawn in what appears to be chalk or crayon, intended, we imagine, to represent her itinerary. Mentor Weird Barbie prepares her for this travel challenge by presenting Stereotypical Barbie with a pair ofBirkenstocks, the antithesis of the doll's traditional high-heeled footwear. Nations in and around the South China Sea, however, failed to appreciate the satirical comedy of this scene, as dashed lines have a sinister history in the region, in Chinese claims of sovereignty over international waters. Both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (usually referred to as Taiwan) have drawn dashed lines on maps of the sea since the late 1940s, delineating what they regard as their territory, eventually leading to an arbitration tribunal in July 2016 that concluded that the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea takes precedence over China's historic sovereignty claims. The issue remains a sore point in the region, as evidenced by Vietnam's banning of the Barbie movie in July 2023 and the Philippines demanding that all copies distributed in that country blur the map image so as to obscure the dashed lines. While the international brouhaha over a movie about a doll may seem overblown, historian Peter Zinoman of the University of California at Berkeley summarized the dispute's significance in the media journal Vax: "To the Chinese, the nine-dash line signifies their legitimate claims to the South China Sea;' adding that "To the Vietnamese, it symbolizes a brazen act of imperialist bullying that elevates Chinese national 338 RACHEL M AINES I Feminism and Capitalism under the Nuclear Cloud & Barbie FIG. 3. Shelter Barbies. Selling personal fallout shelters with shapely legs and prominent breasts in 1951 Los Angeles, California . The mailbox to the left of the door suggests that postal service will continue after a nuclear attack. The inviting smi le and sexy posture are clearly designed to attract the attention of heterosexual male customers for one-person shelters. (Source: History Daily.) 339 I - 'f TECHNOLOG Y AND interest over an older shared set of interests of socialist brotherhood:' 7 Thus, a representation of Barbie Land, however frivolous and imaginary, unintentionally invokes the threat of international conflict in the real world that the fi ctional Barbie is trying to enter. Apparently, there is no escaping the nuclear cloud, even in a fantasy universe. JANUARY 2024 VOL. 65 The Barbie Matriarchy While the geopolitical issues of the Barbie era are nowhere explicit in the movie, gender issues are definitely front and center: The previous two films directed by Greta Gerwig were also about being a woman in a patriarchal society: the award-winning Lady Bird, about a teenage girl's transition to womanhood, and Little Women, an imaginative retelling of Louisa Alcott's classic tale. 8 All three fi lms explore the relationship between mothers and daughters; Barbie has two such subplots: Barbie's encounters with the ghost of her creator, Ruth Handler, and the dynamic tension between Gloria, the woman whose "playing too hard" with her Barbie in early life is credited with opening the rift between the Real World and Barbie Land, and her smartmouthed daughter Sasha, who calls Barbie a "professional bimbo:' Much of the plot revolves around Barbie's dominance of her realm, which is contrasted throughout with Ken's role as a handsome nonentity: "There is no 'just Ken:" Both characters are confused and dismayed by their lack of functioning genitalia and what Ken laments as his perpetual "blonde virginitY:' The configuration of Ken's nether regions is aptly characterized in the film by Weird Barbie as the "nude blob under his jeans:' While Mattel once produced a pregnant Barbie spin -off doll named Midge, who makes a cameo appearance in the movie, she was discontinued as "too weird;' and inconsistent with the paradoxically sexy sexlessness of the doll line. Accompanied by Ken, who both literally and figuratively takes a back seat, Barbie uses a dizzying array of Mattel-toy transportation technologies-a car, boat, camper van, tandem bicycle, rocket ship, snowmobile, and roller skates- to reach the Real World and address her existential concerns head-on. But while waiting outside the Mattel building, Ken is distracted by evidence that men matter in twenty-first-cen tury Los Angeles and heads back to Barbie Land to foment a masculinist rebellion. While Barbie causes a stir at Mattel's "phallic" headquarters and meets her mother, Ruth, Stereotypical Ken, along with all the other Mattel versions of Ken, incite a revolution against their homeless and meaningless lives in 7. Tim Brinkhof, "How Hollywood Appeases Chin a, Explained by the Barbie Movie;• Vox, July 13, 2023, https: //www.vox.com/culture/2023/7/13/23 791805/barbie-map -nine -dash-line-vietnam -china. 8. Lady Bird, directed by Greta Gerwig (Sa nta Monica: Lionsgate, 2018); Little Women , direc ted by Greta Gerwig (Culver City : Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2020). 340 RACHEL MAINES CULTURE I Feminism and Capitalism under the Nuclear Cloud & Barbie the fantasy world of wall-free Barbie Dream Houses with no room for male partners. The caricature of patriarchy they create, "Ken Land;' contains, as one of the Barbies remarks, "the seeds of its own destruction" and is overturned when Barbie returns with Real World allies Gloria and Sasha and former Ken buddy doll, the wimp-turned-a ndrogynous-cru sader Allen. There is a hilarious battle scene using only toys for weapons: paddleballs and rackets, suction-head arrows, Frisbees, Nerf bats, and a hobby-horse cavalry charge. The battle is followed by one of the movie's excellent dance sequences, with choreography that has drawn praise even from famously sharp-eyed critics like Gia Kourlas of the New York Times. 9 Parodies of stereotypical male heroics are everywhere in Barbie, including the opening scene of Barbie's birth, featuring Richard Strauss's A lso Sprach Zarathustra, recalling the opening of another blockbuster movie, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.10 The musical fanfare is repeated in later scenes, including when the living-doll reaches the Mattel headquarters tower in Los Angeles. The movie's credits are well worth watching, as a historical parade of Mattel's Barbie-related toys rolls by on the right side of the screen, including such implausibly surreal offerings as a toy dog that eats and defecates and, of course, the pregnant Midge doll with a removable fetus. Conclusion While the movie is clearly intended to be a lot of fun and succeeds in this respect, its inherent feminism is just as clearly not a joke. At several points in the film, a grandmotherly voice, played by Helen Mirren, insists, "Because Barbie can be anything, women can be anythinf' The movie's impact in the real world of film history makes this point even more forcefully: Barbie is the first film directed by a woman alone to gross more than a billion dollars, and, at the time of this writing, it is still racking up sales as theaters extend their runs of the movie around the world. In this respect, both the Barbie doll phenomenon and the movie's success make the same point. Despite my late mother's reservations, sometimes feminism and capitalism get along just fine. Rachel Maines is a Carnegie-Mellon Ph.D. (1983) and the author of three books and numero us articles. Since 2016, she has been a seminar associate of the Columbia University Sem inar in the History and Philosophy of Science. 9. Gia Kourlas, "Ken's Big Moment Bursts with Emotion;' New York Times, July 31, 2023, C l -C2. 10. 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick (New York: MGM/United Artists, 1968). 341 TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Bibliography Published Sources JANUARY 2024 VOL. 65 Boyer, Paul S. By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Rose, Kenneth D. One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2001. U.S. Office of Civil Defense. Family Guide to Emergency Health Care. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965. "Modernism with a Soul": Designing and Building Communities for Corporate and Civic Life STUART W. LESLIE This essay explores how film, feature and documentary, can offer a new perspective on modernist architecture, industrial design, and urban planning. Through the lens of two young directors, Kogonada and Davide Maffei, it traces the histories of two twentieth -century company towns: Ivrea, Italy, headquarters of Italian business machine giant Olivetti, and Columbus, Indiana, U.S.A., home to Cummins Inc., a global leader in diesel engine design and manufacturing. Adriano Olivetti and J. Irwin Miller shared the conviction that modernist architecture and design had a decisive role to play not just in the economic health of their respective firms but in the civic health of their surrounding communities. These companies have long abandoned the corporate idealism of their founding patrons. In film, Ivrea and Columbus have become architectural time capsules that raise important questions about the transformative power of architecture and design in the face of an increasingly competitive global economy. ABSTRACT: corporate architecture and design; Olivetti; Cummins Engine; documentary films; Kogonada, Davide Maffei KEYWORDS: Introduction Does the built environment capture or shape the spirit of the age? Can modern corporations build communities that serve the shared interests of workers, managers, and shareholders? Many nineteenth-century company towns combined corporate paternalism with social control, looking to architecture and city planning to mediate the conflict between capital and labor. Notable examples include Grand-Hornu, the Belgian coal town; Pullman's railroad car factory south of Chicago; and Port Sunlight, the Lever Brothers Citation: Leslie, Stuart W. '"Modernism with a Soul': Designing and Building Communities for Corporate and Civic Life:' Technology and Culture 65, no. l (2024): 343-57. ©2024 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040- l65X/24/650 l -000 1/343-357 342 343