” . . . With all the women’s lib talk, Hasbro thought of doing an ‘action girl’ doll . . . “

After yesterday’s 1992 newspaper article on action figures for girls my mind started to ask: What info is there on action figures for girls before Kenner’s Bionic Woman line of the seventies? I was certain there had to be something else out there, so when I couldn’t sleep at 2 am I set off in search of information on girls action figures of the past.

That soon led me to this 1971 article from New York Magazine. Spread across ten advertisement-packed pages (hey, someone has to pay for magazines), Carol Troy gives us a wonderful snapshot of the girls doll market of the early seventies. Even then, a dozen years after her introduction on the market, Barbie dominated the scene. But that wasn’t stopping Ideal, Hasbro, and Topper from trying to muscle in on Barbie’s action and snatch a slice of the pie.

The article is packed with quotables that anyone looking to do serious research on toymakers and girls toys should explore. As I read the article, it almost felt like every page had a sentence or two that are dying to be part of a detailed paper on the evolution of girls toys on the market.

“Ideal, apparently feels it is beginning to traffic with a different group of buyers . . . the younger, ‘Naderized’ parents.”

Not good enough? Maybe you need something a little more sensationalist to appeal to today’s news cycle attitude:

“Arty and Judy are now thinking of introducing an ‘indication of nipples’ on Crissy’s flat little bust.”

Trust me, this article’s packed with exactly the info you need when you set out to work up the crowd and get people chanting demands for equality in the toy market. Four decades later and the world of toys hasn’t changed all that much. After all, this quote almost reads like it could have come from this week’s Toy Fair and not 1971:

“With all this talk of women’s liberation, they [Hasbro] thought surely there was a place on the market for an ‘action girl’ who did adventuresome things like skydiving.”

A slight tweak to the opening of the sentence and this is as ready for 2016 as it was for 1971.

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• Evel Knievel, Barbie, and Star Wars “Early Bird Kits” in 1977 (battlegrip.com)
• Shadows of the Empire in the 1996 Hasbro Toy Fair Catalog (battlegrip.com)