Barbie Doll (Author Biography)

Author Biography

A feminist activist as well as a poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright, Piercy melds the personal and the political in her writing. She writes frequently about women’s issues, particularly the ways in which women have been made to feel inferior, both about their minds and their bodies. Born to working-class parents Robert Douglas and Bert Bedoyna (Bunnin) Piercy in Detroit, Michigan in 1936, Piercy began writing — both poetry and fiction — when she was fifteen. Her early literary influences include Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and the Romantic poets Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, but Piercy learned about storytelling through listening to the women in her family, especially her mother, her Aunt Ruth, and her maternal grandmother, Hannah, who gave Piercy her Hebrew name, Marah. Piercy received a full fellowship to the University of Michigan, where she co-edited the literary magazine her senior year and also won a prestigious Hopwood Award for her poetry. After receiving her bachelor’s degree, she entered Northwestern University, from which she graduated with an M.A. in 1962.

Piercy’s grandfather was a union organizer who was murdered while organizing bakery workers. Piercy too has fashioned an overtly political life for herself. An active member of Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s, she helped organize protests against U.S. involvement in Vietnam and for civil rights for all Americans. Her involvement in the women’s movement, however, has come to define her writing. By infusing her poetry, fiction, and essays with autobiographical elements, Piercy gives her writing an urgency and edge frequently lacking in so much contemporary poetry. Her description of the girlchild in “Barbie Doll” is a not-so-thinly-veiled reference to herself. Piercy, however, did not sacrifice herself to patriarchy’s image of what an “ideal” woman should be; rather, she made herself into a crusader for women’s rights. The majority of her novels, most of which contain autobiographical material, address some aspect of recuperating women’s identity from the snares of a society that does not have women’s interests at heart. The author of numerous novels, poetry collections, essays, and plays, Piercy writes full time and occasionally teaches workshops. Her writing has appeared in more than 150 anthologies and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. She lives with her third husband, writer and publisher Ira Wood, and five cats in Wellfleet on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

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Media Adaptations

• Marge Piercy has her own website: http://www.capecod.net/~tmpiercy/index.html
• A compilation of essays about the Barbie doll’s cultural significance can be found at this website: http://www.dolliedish.com/barbie/onbarbie.html
• For another point of view on how Barbie has been marketed, examine Mattel’s own website for Barbie: http://www.barbie.com/
• In 1976 Watershed Tapes released a cassette of Piercy reading her poems, At the Core.