Out of the Pink: Barbie and the Gimmickry of a Female Presidency

In 1998, the now-defunct White House Project was formed to study the lack of women’s authority in politics and worked to increase female representation in government and business. The non-profit organization contended that the problem was young girls did not see women in positions of power or executive decision-making. In 1992—dubbed the “Year of the Woman” due to the record-breaking number of women elected to the House of Representatives and the Senate—WHP partnered with Mattel to create President Barbie, a plastic representation of a female US president wearing a red, white, and blue sparkly gown.

President Barbie’s attire and ethnicity have changed in years hence, but in light of Greta Gerwig’s history-making release of the Mattel-sponsored Barbie movie debut at the box office (it is Warner Brothers’s highest-grossing domestic release to date at $537 million, beating out Batman’s The Dark Knight, and the biggest opening weekend for a female director in North America, there is an opportunity and an imperative to re-examine how the concept of President Barbie, and the very idea of a female president, measures up in the Real World, where tellingly, “Totally Hair Barbie”—also released in 1992—is still the bestselling Barbie ($10 million) to date.

In the Real World 2023, Mattel’s President Barbie is a reminder that the doll was only ever a substitute, a gimmick, for an actual elected female president, and Mattel is only but one entity to employ such gimmickry. Throughout mainstream media, in films, TV shows, cartoon characters, and books, efforts have been made to represent the first female president in terms of race, ethnicity, gender orientation, and class. In most of these fictional representations, a woman becomes president by default. The elected male president dies, and the female vice-president steps into the role. Public address scholar in presidential rhetoric, Denise Bostdorff has argued that the contemporary vice presidency is a traditional female role. She describes how media depictions and entertainment avenues frequently cast the vice-presidential hopeful “as a stereotyped woman who nervously waits for the phone to ring,” and the presidential candidate “as a suitor who ‘pops the question’”, reinforcing traditional gender roles.

The Barbie movie is but another déjà vu that exposes how the idea of a woman as an executive leader has been in stasis for 250 years. Though there are “signs” of progress and it’s nice, I suppose, that a young girl can dress her Barbie as president or witness President Barbie reclaiming her authority in Barbie Land, we are still celebrating “progress” through a plastic lens. The strides that have been made, though statistically significant in the grand scheme, still feel shallow in the face of what has yet to be achieved in reality. The Barbie movie amplifies our paradox, and the paradox is the real barrier; not the proverbial glass ceiling.

Barbie, as a doll, can seemingly cross into the real world, while the real world itself remains impenetrable by a human embodiment of Barbie. The movie serves to amplify this paradox, which is the real barrier—not the proverbial glass ceiling—and sheds light on the complex relationship between novel elements and established norms, provoking contemplation on the nature of authority and leadership. This paradox can be equivalently expressed as the unprecedented being able to enter the real world, yet the real world fails to fully recognize and acknowledge the figure of the precedented.

As we ponder the concept of "President Barbie," we realize that her appearance is unprecedented, but her true potential and aspirations are precedented, buried in the depths of language and societal expectations. The idea of women holding the presidency constitutes an untold and radical narrative, waiting to be unearthed from conventional constraints, symbolically represented as "out of the pink, not out of the blue."

Pink, known as the Earth's oldest color, serves as a metaphor for the enduring history of women's representation in leadership, which lies beyond the realms of movies or dolls but resides in the powerful domain of rhetoric, where paradoxes thrive and the ancient hues of poetic expression come to life through creation. Tropes, akin to shifting colors, offer fresh perspectives, giving rise to novel and transformative possibilities. In this context, "out of the pink" signifies something expected and unremarkable, such as the concept of women in executive decision-making roles, and much like the pursuit of equality, has deep-rooted historical precedent; their authority is as old as the Earth itself, and the idea of a woman president is as old as pink.

Jane Sutton is Emeritus Professor Communication Arts and Sciences, Penn State University. Specializing in the intersection of rhetoric and women's communication history, she is the author of the forthcoming book, Precedented: Unravelling the Challenges on the Road to Female Presidency.