“Barbie Doll” by Marge Piercy, is the story about a girl who is so pressured to conform to societies view of how a woman should act that she ends up killing herself because she couldn’t keep up with the standard of beauty in modern society. The story is written by Marge Piercy who grew up in the 1940’s to the 1960’s so she was affected by post WW2 America, the holocaust, and the counter-culture movement. These three events all affected her viewpoint, the theme, and message of the story.

“Barbie Doll” by Marge Piercy, is the story about a girl who is so pressured to conform to societies view of how a woman should act that she ends up killing herself. It can be considered either a reaction or a critique of modern society.

First, the event that affected her the most was the Holocaust. In Nazi Germany, people who were considered pure were supposed to be pure white with preferably blue eyes and blonde hair. All others were considered enemies of Germany, so in the Nazis eyes the impure must be exterminated. They did this through a series of laws and concentration camps that were designed to harass and exterminate the minorities in the state. The most hated target of the Nazis were famously the Jews. Hitler had a personal hatred of the Jews and made it his goal to exterminate all of them. Through concentration camps and execution, over six million Jews died in the Holocaust. They were killed, tortured, and humiliated in a variety of inhumane ways. Many starved to death, many were gassed, and some even killed themselves. Nazis also used the healthy ones to work on war supplies for the Nazis, humiliating them even further. Even the Jews who were not in camps had to wear a yellow star and were not allowed to participate in a lot of parts of society. Amazingly, most of the world was not aware of what was happening in these camps until just before the war ended. The Holocaust had a profound impact on the rest of the world and modern society. It led to many new human rights laws, the state of Israel, and the common goal that an event so horrible. It led to better communication and the United Nations, so that countries could communicate their grievances in a healthy and political manner and not in a violent manner against people. Few crimes in history have been committed against a group of people whose only so called crime was having a religion and none, before or after, have been committed on such a mass scale on such a short amount of time. 

The Holocaust reflects on the story because it gave the author the opinion that we should not care about how a person looks. In her opinion, judging people based on appearance only leads to bad things such as suicide, which also happened to a lot of Jews in the holocaust. She believes that trying to get everyone to lead the same is impossible and only leads to bad things and in extreme cases, crimes against humanity.

The second event that affected her writing was post WW2 America. A lot of things happened in the fifteen years after. Firstly, the economy boomed to unimaginable heights and a lot of people moved into the middle class. Secondly, a population boom started and Americas population exploded to a historic high. Someone needed to raise the children and now that a lot of people were making more money women could afford to stay at home. This led to the view that the perfect American women should be a housewife.  Finally, a lot of people now had a lot of disposable income which they were now spending on luxury items and products they used to not be able to afford.Companies took advantage of this by creating an image that if you spent a lot of money then you could look like an artificial supermodel. Therefore, women started spending a lot of money on fashion and accessories. This type of marketing still happens today and many women have lower self-esteem because of it.

The post WW2 America affected the authors views in a variety of ways. it caused her to develop a dislike of the artificial standards of beauty and manners that we expected women to be. She saw that expecting women to live up to an impossible standard of beauty and curtsy was in some cases killing them. She did not believe that women had to just stay at home, cook, and play with makeup but could be strong independent women.

Finally, the last event to affect the author was the counter-culture. In the late 60’s a lot of young people had begun to question the idea that America was this perfect society and they started to question a lot of social norms such as Christianity, capitalism, and racism. The great economic machine of the 50’s had begun to slow down and a lot of jobs began to move overseas. This affected the young and they started to see a lot of the things wrong with America, which the richer old people could not. They started to experiment with new things such as drugs, rock and roll, and new religions such as Buddhism. This put them in direct conflict with their older parents who were generally more conservative. This reached its boiling point during the Vietnam War, when the young counter-culture hippies began to protest what they saw as an unjust war and the country being at war with a nation they had no need to be at war with. This led to the hippie movement and events like the Kent State movement. The effects of this movement are still seen today with events like the Donald Trump protest being a continuation of the counter-culture movement. This and the Civil Rights movement were the first true movements done by Americans who were not in power. It taught us that any group of people can rise up and make change even if they are not part of the elites of society.

This affected the author because she realized that it was okay to rebel because everyone else was doing it. She realized that there are things wrong with this country and she realized that she can do something about it.

The story is written by Marge Piercy who grew up in the 1940’s to the 1960’s so she was affected by post WW2 America, the holocaust, and the counter-culture movement. These three events all affected her viewpoint, the theme, and message of the story. 
