Gender Identity in Piercy’s “Barbie Doll” Dolls often give children their first lessons in what a society considers valuable and beautiful. These dolls often reveal the unremitting pressure to be young, slim, and beautiful in a society which values mainly aesthetics. Marge Piercy’s “Barbie Doll” exhibits how a girl’s childhood is saturated with gender-defined roles and preconceived norms for how one should behave. In order to convey her thoughts, the author uses …showed first 75 words of 1032 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1032 total…act is the goal of society to change its inhabitants into “Barbie Dolls.” It wasn’t until the girl/subject was dead that anyone considered her pretty, and even then it was not actually her who they were looking at; rather, it was a generated character. Line twenty-five works with the previous line to evoke feelings of pity and reconciliation within the reader as they contemplate the severity of the pressures that society can produce.