Who Is Ruth Handler? Hulu’s Barbie Doc ‘Tiny Shoulders’ Will Give You the Background You Need For ‘Barbie’

If you just came back from watching the Barbie movie in theaters, you’re no doubt curious to learn more about Ruth Handler, aka the creator of Barbie. Ruth, played by actress Rhea Perlman, shows up to give Barbie her own kind of happily-ever-after in Greta Gerwig’s new comedy. For those who don’t know the real-life story of Barbie and Mattel, it’s also a quick history lesson in how this famous doll came to be.

While obviously, the ghost of Ruth Handler doesn’t actually live on the 17th floor of the Mattel office, there are kernels of truth to Handler’s story that are hinted at in the Barbie movie—like the fact that she named the doll after her daughter, Barbara. If you’re interested in learning more about Ruth Handler, you can check out the 2018 documentary, Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie, which is currently streaming on Hulu.

Take this doc—directed by Andrea Blaugrund Nevins—with a grain of salt, as it’s significantly more pro-Mattel and pro-Barbie than Gerwig’s film. The doc attempts to reshape Barbie as a feminist icon and does so with much less self-awareness than Margot Robbie’s Barbie. That said, the first 20 minutes or so do offer a useful history lesson, especially when it comes to the legacy of Ruth Handler.

Who was the creator of Barbie, Ruth Handler?

Ruth Handler and her husband, Elliot Handler, were second-generation Jewish immigrants who, alongside their business partner Harold “Matt” Matson, started the toy company, Mattel, in 1945.

“Elliot was the creative one, and Ruth was the manager,” explains M.G. Lord, author of the non-fiction book Forever Barbie, in the Hulu documentary. “They set up a toy manufacturing business in their garage, little realizing that they were going to have this billion-dollar industry with Barbie.”

Is Ruth Handler still alive?

Handler died in 2002 at the age of 85. However, the documentary features archived video and audio interviews with the businesswoman. “I always kind of considered myself a fluke, because there were no others like me,” Handler says in one such archived interview. In a different, crackly archived audio, she admits, “I loved being a mother, but I was fit to be tied with staying home. I hated that. Knowing how to cook, and keeping a good house… Oh, shit, it was awful.”

But it was, she says, her daughter who inspired the idea for the Barbie doll. In the doc, Handler describes watching her daughter, Barbara, or “Barbie,” playing with adult paper dolls on the floor. “They would reflect their dreams of their future through their play with their paper dolls,” she noted.

Handler brought the idea of a three-dimensional version of those paper dolls to her husband, but Elliot told her it was “impossible.” Handler then tried approaching the designers in the Mattel factory. “I couldn’t spark a favorable response from any of our male designers,” she says in the film, with a note of anger.

But then, on a trip to Europe, Ruth came across “Bild Lillie” dolls, which were dolled-up little plastic women that were sold in tobacco shops to men. (Think rearview mirror decorations that a trucker might have.) Unsurprisingly, Mattel didn’t think such a doll would be appropriate to market to young girls. But Handler pushed for her dream doll, noting that she “tried not to make Barbie too pretty” because she didn’t want little girls to feel bad about themselves.

When was Barbie invented?

The first Barbie doll was finally unveiled at the 1959 Toy Fair in New York City. It was a disappointing opening, said Handler. “The men felt that women would not buy a doll with a women’s body, with breasts.”

When asked, point-blank, in a TV interview, why it was important for the Barbie doll to have breasts, Handler responds, “The whole idea was that little girls could dream dreams of growing up, and every grown-up that she saw had breasts.”

In an archival interview with Handler’s husband, Elliot says, “I was telling Ruth, ‘See, I told you!’ But as soon as it got on the counters, I was wrong, and she was right.”

Despite what the men in the toy business thought, women consumers were all too quick to buy Barbie dolls for their little girls. The first Barbies flew off the shelves and became the worldwide phenomenon it now is today.

You can hear the rest of the story—or at least Mattel’s side of it—by watching the 2018 documentary Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie on Hulu.