This piece is adapted from Barbieland: The Unauthorized History by Tarpley Hitt. Copyright © 2025 by the author and reprinted with permission of Atria/One Signal Publishers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

One morning in 1960, amid the euphoria of Barbie’s first year, Mattel co-founders Ruth and Elliot Handler held a kind of debate. They brought in the toy marketing team. And the ad guys, Cy Schneider and his cohort from Carson/Roberts, thought they were there mostly to listen. The real presence was the exuberant doctor with a shrinking halo of red hair. Ernest Dichter, the self-styled Freudian marketer who claimed to plumb the psyches of the American consumer, was visiting from New York. On this particular day, as Schneider later remembered, the Handlers called him in to discuss a c

See Full Page