Piece Marge’s “Barbie Doll” was written during the same time as so called “second-wave” feminism. With her poem, she showed how society was “forcing” young girls to fill a certain role. These roles mainly included being house-wives and not having a “real” job, instead simply cooking and cleaning. One of the driving factors for these young girls were Barbie Dolls. The Barbie Dolls showed extremely thin women doing their “wifely” and “ladylike” duties. These subsequently rubbed off on the young girls who played with the dolls in a similar fashion to how the “action figures” played with by young boys pushed them to be astronauts or racecar drivers. This all ties into the idea of “second-wave” feminism since the supporters of it wanted to rid society of what was commonly thought to be a “normal” women, be it the size and shape or the job. Piece Marge’s Barbie Doll exemplifies this idea by showing what bad things can happen when you tell a girl that she isn’t perfect like a Barbie is. 

In D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein’s essay, “She Gives Birth, She’s Wearing a Bikini: Mobilizing the Post Pregnant Celebrity Mom Body to Manage the Post–Second Wave Crisis in Femininity,” Hallstein explains how celebrities are pushing women to “go back” to being what, at the time “Barbie Doll” was written, was considered a “normal women.” Much like in “Barbie Doll,” Hallstein insists that it is societies fault that young girls don’t want to go into the same professions as young boys. She explains that when society “says” that girls should only be playing with certain “dolls” and boys should only play with certain “action figures,” both parties will most likely end up wanting to be like these toys when they grow up. In the young girls case the wifely duties of Barbie and similar dolls would make the girl want to be a house wife, whereas the boy would want to be an astronaut.  Both writers point to slightly different parts of what could be described as the same problem. In Pierce’s eyes, something as simple as the toys that are played with as a child can have a lasting effect on both how young girls, and boys for that matter, see themselves and each other. The toys re-enforce the ideas of what a girl should be or should do when she grows up. We see this when she says “she was advised to play coy, extorted to come on hearth, exercise, diet, smile, and wheedle” (Piercy 349). Hallstein takes a slightly different approach, looking instead at the celebrities that girls, young and old, tend to look up at. She points out how the media shows these celebrity women as being the epitome of what a woman should be. They show how great of a birth giver the celebrities are and how they return to their beautiful thin bodies just weeks after giving birth. 

Both works deal with the self-image of girls. Barbie Doll shows how a girl could be told or showed what the “perfect” body looks like and, even though it is extremely unrealistic and unhealthy, try her very best to reach that image. Even though she tries her best, she can’t physically look “perfect.” As such, people (society) begin to make fun of her imperfections to the point that she goes “too far” in her quest for perfection. This can be seen near the end of “Barbie Doll” when Piercy says “She cut off her nose and legs and offered them up” (Piercy 348). This is closely followed by the implication that the girl in the poem kills herself. Hallstein looks at the more modern self-image standards derived by the medias obsession with celebrity beauty. Young girls see these celebrities and aspire to be them, therefore, they also tend to want to look just like them. This means that, again, other people will judge girls harshly for not looking like their idea of perfection. In “Barbie Doll”’s case, this leads to a girl killing herself over the comments of others. Hallstein doesn’t use a specific case of a girl but instead claims that this practice is pushing us back toward pre-second wave feminism ideologies for women. 

Feminism won many battles in the 1970’s. Roe vs. Wade overturned a ban on abortion, this was seen by many as a major win by most feminists, equal rights acts were passed in congress to give women the same rights as others, and generally life was getting better for most women. Even so, the way that society sees women could be one of the biggest problems yet. If you look at it in a certain way, the measures taken to get women on an equal ground as men could be useless if women don’t take advantage of the new opportunities. This can be seen with how, even if laws were passes to make it easier for women to get a degree from a college, when society pushes women to not go to college and instead become a house wife, the measures taken become useless.  

Piercy touches on this subject briefly in “Barbie Doll”. She wrote “She was healthy, tested intelligent, possessed strong arms and back abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity” (Piercy 347) Yet, because society wanted this girl to look a certain way, she started dieting and “cut off her nose and legs” in an ill-fated attempt to make society except her (Piercy 348). They didn’t, however and she instead ended up in a casket. She could have gone on to be the next Einstein or Shakespeare, but society kept her back. 

Ironically, an essay by Jennifer Scanlon titled “Anticipatory Elements of Second Wave Feminism” almost disproves this idea. She shows that there was a “feminist fashion” that made beauty standards backtrack to the standards of decades ago rather than simply removing any form of beauty standards. While both Piercy and Scanlon both agree on the lasting effects of showing young girls what beauty looks like from a young age, Scanlon shows how feminists weren’t exactly helping with beauty standards. Instead, they told women to not dress like “women.” By this they meant wearing short skirts and makeup and expressing their sexuality. However, this also made the young girls want to dress alike to this new idea which meant they weren’t dressing like traditional women, but also still meant that there was a standard to dress like. It was a solution to the problem stated in Barbie Doll but, ironically ended with a similar problem. This put many feminists in a tough situation where they would have to decide whether they want women to dress anyway they want, even if they want to dress up like a “traditional” women, or if they wanted to try and force women to not dress a certain way. 

Also written about by Scanlon was how much of the second wave of feminism still revolved around being feminine. She explained how, in the work place, many women would try to avoid “noticeable perfume, bouffant hairdos, tinted glasses, enormous shoulder bags, clanging or ornate jewelry or clothing of any kind without a jacket.” She claimed that this was meant so that women would be able to “achieve a secure place in the workforce.” However, she also claimed that this would rid women of the same things that Piercy was saying made a girl a girl. This was meant to mean that women sill have to be women. They shouldn’t and probably couldn’t make themselves seem like men and instead should take advantage of being a women.  She instead argued that women should be able to choose whether they wanted to be masculine or feminine in the workplace, along with in general and that women didn’t need to throw femininity into the trashcan. 
