Barbie: The Feminist Who Could?

Growing Up Barbie

I love Barbie.

I don’t think that’s particularly surprising, although perhaps it is to people who know me only through Wellington Treads. I do not often write about childhood media, nor do I spend much time discussing princess films and talking animals, but the reality is that I love Barbie.

I think I owned two Barbie dolls growing up. One was a 2008 Island Princess Ro, complete with a peacock fan. The second, I remember less clearly. I think it was connected to Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus. There was definitely a horse, definitely a carriage, and I distinctly remember pretending it flew.

The Island Princess remains vivid in my memory. Looking back, I suspect that is because I loved the idea of living on an island far away from civilisation. It will come as no surprise, then, that I was equally obsessed with Nim’s Island and The Blue Lagoon, although quite why I was allowed to watch the latter at such a young age remains a mystery.

I can say with confidence that I watched every Barbie film released before 2012. I watched Life in the Dreamhouse. I vaguely remember some strange YouTube vlog series that may or may not have been real. And, of course, I watched Greta Gerwig’s 2023 Barbie.

For a franchise that has existed since 1959, Barbie has accumulated an impressive number of lives. She has been a princess, a mermaid, a fairy, a musketeer, a teacher, a vet, an astronaut and, apparently, over two hundred other things besides. She has sisters, cousins, dogs, dreamhouses and a long-suffering boyfriend called Ken.

But was she actually feminist?

The older I get, the less convinced I am that this is the right question.

The Shame of Girly Things

For years, I did not talk about any of this.

I loved the films, continued to watch them well into my teens, and yet rarely admitted it. Loving Barbie felt faintly embarrassing in the same way admitting you liked pink, One Direction or Lizzie McGuire felt embarrassing. It was the same reason I never talked about loving Sabrina the Teenage Witch. These things felt silly, girly. I had somehow absorbed the idea that I ought to be cleverer than that.

(I still love Sabrina, and I owe Melissa Joan Hart an apology.)

Looking back, I find this reaction fascinating because the films themselves never felt anti-feminist. They did not feel anti-feminist so much as they made me feel anti-feminist watching them.

At least, that was how I understood it at the time.

The discomfort was not coming from the stories. It was coming from the growing belief that things made for girls were somehow less worthy of affection.

I remember feeling better about myself because I was sporty, or because I was a “tom-boy”, because I wasn’t as seemingly boring as other girls. The term “pick me” is a very modern one, but those memories are riddled with the same desperation for acceptance that the label now describes. I would never admit to having cramps, did my best to appear unemotional, and spent years trying to separate my identity from anything that felt too stereotypically feminine.

The strangest part is that I thought this was feminism.

Looking back, that feels almost absurd. I had somehow reached the conclusion that empowerment meant distancing myself from femininity. I wasn’t rejecting stereotypes so much as accepting the idea that feminine things occupied a lower rung on the cultural ladder.

I remember making fun of Twilight and telling my friends I wanted to watch it ironically. I remember reading the books because my mum told me the films were too old for me, and I remember loving them. I still do.

The Hero of Her Own Story

As a child, I would not have called Barbie a feminist icon. Then again, I am not sure I understood feminism particularly well.

Barbie, to me, was beautiful dresses, effortless grace, wit, and an almost guaranteed certainty that she would be the best person in the room. She was clever. She was kind. She usually knew exactly what to do.

Most importantly, she was usually the one doing it.

Whether she was Ro, Liana, Elina, Annika, Blair or countless others, the story revolved around her. She solved problems. She rescued people. She made mistakes and learned from them. Even when romance appeared, it rarely felt like the point.

What strikes me now is how little I questioned this.

The films never seemed interested in convincing me that girls could be heroes. They simply assumed it. Barbie could be a princess, a fairy, a mermaid, a student, an explorer or, somewhat improbably, a musketeer. Whatever role she occupied, she was rarely waiting around to be saved.

Perhaps that was more significant than I realised.

“Wherever you go in this world, I’ll come along”

Barbie and the Diamond Castle was never really about romance.

There were eventually princes, and there were certainly the wise-cracking twins who seemed suspiciously inspired by Fred and George Weasley, but the emotional centre of the film was friendship.

The story is about music, loyalty, forgiveness and the people who stay beside you when everything goes wrong. Notably, the entire plot exists because Barbie is trying to explain to her younger sister why friendship matters and why forgiveness is worth offering.

As a child, I loved the songs. I probably still know most of them.

As an adult, however, I find myself wondering why a film centred on female friendship ever felt embarrassing to admit I loved. Was it because it was Barbie? Because they sang every ten minutes? Because the plot involved an enchanted diamond castle hidden behind a waterfall and a woman who lived inside a magic mirror?

Or was it because I loved it more than I thought was acceptable?

I find that question surprisingly difficult to answer.

What I do know is that stories about friendship, care and emotional vulnerability were often dismissed as frivolous in ways that stories centred on traditionally masculine adventures never were. Looking back, it seems strange that I absorbed that hierarchy so readily.

The Island Girl

I remember Barbie as the Island Princess particularly clearly because I wanted her life.

Not because she was a princess, although that certainly didn’t hurt, but because she seemed to possess a kind of freedom that felt impossible to imagine anywhere else. She could talk to animals, lived on an island and appeared entirely at peace with her surroundings.

The elephant was annoying, though. I cannot ignore that.

At its heart, the story is about family. About mothers and daughters. About memory and belonging. Yet the thing that stayed with me was something else entirely.

I wanted to be her.

Not because she was beautiful, because she sang, or even because she could talk to animals. I wanted to be the girl who could survive on her own.

The more I think about it, the more I realise how often I was drawn to that archetype. Nim’s Island. Ocean Girl. The Blue Lagoon. If there was a vaguely feral young woman living independently somewhere, I was probably interested.

The common thread was never romance, but competence. Again and again, I found myself drawn towards girls who seemed entirely capable of navigating the world on their own terms. Girls who were curious, resourceful and self-sufficient; who did not need anyone’s permission to exist.

Looking back, I suspect I found something deeply comforting in that fantasy, and Barbie was full of those characters.

Alexandre Dumas, Who?

Barbie and the Three Musketeers is, admittedly, a very loose adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ nineteenth-century novel. I suspect Mattel and Dumas scholars might disagree on exactly how loose.

More than any other Barbie film, though, it embodied the thing I now find myself admiring most.

The characters never had to sacrifice their femininity to be strong. Their dresses became weapons. Their jewellery became tools. Their femininity was never treated as a weakness they needed to overcome, nor as an obstacle standing between them and competence. Instead, it simply existed alongside their courage, intelligence and ambition.

I think this fascinated me because it stood in such stark contrast to the lessons I absorbed elsewhere. As a teenager, I spent years trying to create distance between myself and anything that felt too feminine. I wanted to be sporty. Sensible. Rational. Different. The idea that strength and femininity could comfortably coexist felt surprisingly radical, even though Barbie had apparently been telling me exactly that all along.

The musketeers never seemed remotely interested in proving they were “not like other girls”. They wore the dresses and saved the day anyway.

Perhaps that should have sunk in sooner.

Returning to Barbie

As an adult, I feel far more comfortable admitting that I love these films. I would happily sit down and watch Diamond Castle tomorrow. In fact, I suspect I still know most of the songs.

What has changed is not the films themselves, but my relationship to them.

The older I get, the less interested I become in proving that my interests are serious. I no longer feel the need to distance myself from things because they are feminine. If anything, I now find myself doing the opposite. I push back when people dismiss things as “girly”. I celebrate interests that I once felt pressured to hide. I make space for womanhood not as something that needs defending, but as something that already deserves to exist on its own terms.

Am I overcompensating? Probably. But that is an entirely different article.

The Feminist Who Could?

Perhaps Barbie was never a feminist icon because she carried a particularly radical political message.

Perhaps she was a feminist for a much simpler reason.

For decades, Barbie films presented girls as heroes without feeling the need to justify it. They solved problems, rescued people, made mistakes and carried on. Sometimes they were princesses. Sometimes they were mermaids. Sometimes they were musketeers wielding weaponised jewellery. The specifics hardly mattered.

The stories were not perfect. Neither was Barbie.

What strikes me most is not that I loved Barbie. It is that I ever felt embarrassed to admit it. The films themselves never taught me that girlhood was something to be ashamed of. They never suggested that dresses, friendship, music, emotion or femininity were weaknesses to overcome. If anything, they treated those things with surprising sincerity.

The world around them was less convinced.

Somewhere along the way, I absorbed the idea that being different from other girls was empowering. That being sporty was better than being feminine. That liking Twilight was embarrassing. That liking Barbie was childish. That feminism meant creating distance between myself and anything too pink, too emotional, too obviously made for girls. Looking back, I am not sure that was feminism at all.

As a teenager, I thought feminism meant distancing myself from Barbie.

As an adult, I suspect it means feeling no need to apologise for her.