Do You Guys Ever Think About Childbirth?

On feminism, child psychology, careers, motherhood, and freedom in the Barbie movie

spoilers ahead! read at your own risk.

A lot of commentary I’ve read on the Barbie movie asks the question, how do we play with Barbies? What does she mean for little girls?

I’m not sure this is actually the question the film was grappling with. But I do think that the Barbie doll, as a concept, represents the dread of being a mother. 


From the opening scene, motherhood is portrayed as boring and unenlightened. The movie opens with little girls in drab colors, joylessly playing with baby dolls. The narrator explains that pretending to be a mom “can be fun…for a while, anyway.” 

“Ask your mother,” she adds, and it’s obvious what she means: being a mom really isn’t fun. Motherhood is the monotony of ironing clothes and washing dishes and changing diapers and keeping your eyes down and your hands full until the kids are grown. But by then you’re old and tired and worn out and you realize that your life is almost over but it wasn’t even yours. To be a mother is to give yourself away even when you have nothing left to give. 

The Barbie movie parodies 2001: A Space Odyssey when an oversized Barbie doll shows up, inspiring the little girls to smash their baby dolls the same way that the monolith inspires the apes to smash an animal skeleton. Girls’ next evolution is to abandon motherhood for a new dream: the sexy, childless, adult woman. 

The rejection of motherhood is a recurrent theme in the Barbie movie. We see the sidelined pregnant Barbie, Midge, who was discontinued by Mattel. Barbie’s fear of cellulite—which, really, is her main motivation for facing the real world—is arguably about rejecting a body capable of bearing babies. 

I’d argue that the Barbie doll, as a character, is the icon of second wave feminism. 

Second wave feminism was born from Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. Friedan uncovers what she calls “the problem with no name” — the total despair of suburban housewives in the 1950s and 60s. 

The women Friedan studied came of age in a culture that expected women to find fulfillment in sex, marriage, housework, and children—a concept endorsed and enforced by the men in power on every level of society. Friedan found that even when women had a choice, many of them gave up their independence, education, and careers, believing that they would be happy if they could just be a good housewife and mother.

But they found themselves disillusioned, unfulfilled, and longing for something more than the responsibilities of a husband and children and a house. 

"We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my house,’” Betty Friedan wrote. Women have that innate human need to create, to contribute, to be people with dreams and fears of their own. Denying women identities beyond their roles as wives and mothers was suffocating their souls. 

The Feminine Mystique awakened American housewives to the reality that they had given up their autonomy, convinced or forced to lead meaningless lives. Their response, second wave feminism, was a political movement that sought to give women control in their families, homes, and workplaces. This era saw the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title IX in 1972, and Roe v. Wade in 1973. Workplace sexual harassment became illegal in 1963, and women got the right to hold credit cards and apply for mortgages in 1974.

Barbie, meanwhile, has owned her own house since 1962. She’s ambivalent towards men. She has any career she wants. Barbie is economically self-sufficient, self-actualized and fulfilled. She’s literally impenetrable—totally free from the demands of children or a husband, and all the meaningless labor they require. 

For the feminists of the 1960s, this was the definition of liberation.

But I don’t think that motherhood is really what women fear. Careers don’t satisfy us. 

As kids, we used dolls like Barbies as tools for what psychologists call representational play. Representational play is the way we worked out the conflicts we didn’t have words for, how we processed our worlds, how we engaged with the reality we were learning to be part of. 

And Weird Barbie—and the fact that a whole theater laughed, recognizing her from every little girl’s closet—is proof that career Barbie isn’t tough enough to withstand the drama of children’s inner lives. 

Little girls are brutal. They’re sadistic and manipulative and brilliant in their methods of destruction. 

Personally, I was never a huge Barbie girl. And I didn’t annihilate my Barbies the way many other women did. But my dolls were dictators. They were backstabbers. They were architects and entrepreneurs but they weren’t respectable career women that men in a boardroom think little girls dream about—they were breathtakingly, gloriously, awe-inspiringly crazy. They had untamable hair and unbridled ambitions and they were unstoppable. 

Give girls nuclear dollhouse families and we will build empires. Give us scientists and astronauts and we will chop off their hair and gnaw on their shoes and give them face tattoos. As you watch a little girl destroy her barbie, it’s clear that being an astrophysicist is as relevant to us as having plastic boobs. We like nice outfits, but we aren’t particularly attached to Barbie’s job description. Our lives are messy and dirty and cruel, and that’s what our barbies live out. 

It’s not that we don’t want to be mothers—it’s that we’re just not interested in being zip tied into the nice, pink, domesticated box of what men think we’re supposed to be. We can nurture baby dolls. But give us this plastic, mass-produced, male-fantasy woman somewhere on her journey between boardroom and landfill, and we destroy her. She’s made to be consumed and abandoned so she handles our reality just as well as an influencer would survive the wilderness.


The feminists of the 1960s fought for women’s freedom to build identities beyond their roles as mothers and housewives. So why did so many of them believe it would be empowering to instead find their identities in a career, bowing to the demands of capitalism? Why do we believe that it’s regressive to find fulfillment in being a housewife, but liberating to girlboss your way to the top of the corporate ladder? 

In her critique of The Feminine Mystique, bell hooks observes that Betty Friedan’s “problem with no name” only affects wealthy, educated, married white women— “housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products, who wanted more out of life.”

Friedan says that these women needed “something more” than a husband and children and a home. But she defined that “more” as a career — and never asked who would clean their houses, take care of their children, and cook their food when white women left their homes for the workforce.

 “She did not speak of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes,” hooks continues. “She ignored the existence of all non-white women and poor white women. She did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute than to be a leisure-class housewife.” 

By assuming that careers will liberate women, Friedan calls out the patriarchy but complies with the parallel power structures of oppression, racism and economic inequality. The Feminine Mystique doesn’t call for a just society—it just suggests that instead of expecting men to satisfy them, privileged women should expect jobs to satisfy them. 

This is the version of feminism the Barbie doll traditionally represented: women were liberated if they had a career, a house, and no children. But this means that freedom and power still only belong to highly educated landowners without childcare responsibilities. An empowered woman is a privileged man with a perfect body and a lot of pink.  

The insidious thing is that this mindset doesn’t actually uproot the patriarchy—it just shares the power with some women.

The Barbie doll exists because of our cultural fear of being trapped in motherhood. But the Barbie movie suggests that perhaps motherhood is what frees us from patriarchy.

Ultimately, it’s Gloria—a disillusioned Mattel employee and mother of a middle schooler, played by America Fererra—whose iconic monologue candidly describes the frustrations of being a woman, spurring Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) to action. We get shots of Gloria delivering one-liners that awaken the other Barbies to the patriarchy that Barbieland has become. 

Ferrara’s character suggests that moms are creative geniuses and contagiously existential, they have cellulite and thoughts of death and they’re heroes. They’re complicated. And they’re the ones in the drivers’ seat of the car chase against capitalism and patriarchy.

As Barbie is deciding whether to become a woman in the real world or not, Ruth Handler—who invented the Barbie doll in 1959 and named her after her own daughter, Barbara— says, “we mothers stand still so that our daughters can look back and see how far they’ve come.”

And isn’t that true?

Women have “gotten ahead” since the Barbie doll was introduced in 1959 and Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963. We are career women now. We do have freedoms our grandmothers could only imagine.

But it’s not because of girl power and glitter. It’s because of the moms who made us dinner and checked our homework and worked a second job so we could have a better life. It’s not because of the Dream House, it’s because our moms sacrificed their dreams for ours. 

I don’t think that we should have to have high-powered careers that require a lifetime of sacrifices from our parents in order to “get ahead,” or even just be financially stable. But our moms were willing to do it. 

Liberation doesn’t come from new cars and expensive clothes and high-paying jobs, because ultimately these things come from an economic system that still exploits someone somewhere else. True liberation comes from loving someone else enough to want them to have a better world. Motherhood isn’t a burden—it’s our only hope. 

Convincing us otherwise might be patriarchy’s worst trick yet. 

So freedom doesn’t mean preventing women from the drudgery of motherhood: freedom means building a society where women—and men—can experience the gift of baby smiles and chubby little newborn toes while also meeting their own human needs for purpose and belonging. I want to be a woman in a world where I can melt with the self-sacrificial love a mother has for her baby while still having a self to sacrifice.

And I’d like to think that the final line of the film—Barbie’s ridiculously upbeat announcement that she’s here to see her gynecologist—is a recognition of this. Barbie chose the real world. She chose to take on a breakable and beautiful female body. Barbie saw how hard it is to be a woman—but for all the struggle and pain, it’s real. It’s precious. Maybe it is “literally impossible.” But it’s worth it.