A mother wanted to look ‘tough.’ Then her daughter began collecting Barbies.

Claire Johnson brought dozens of Barbie dolls to the Bell Museum in St. Paul for Collectors Day, where each year people display their personal collections for museum-goers. But the 10-year-old’s mind on Saturday was already on her next doll. “Barbie is having a baby,” she explained, looking over her display table, where dolls lounged in sparkly dresses around a bowl of Starburst candy. Claire explained further that if your Barbie is pregnant, you can buy a baby doll when it comes to term. Maybe Christmas might be a good due date, she said, glancing at her mother, Paige Skogen. “What?” Skogen replied. For years, Skogen avoided buying Barbies. She was a lawyer and a millennial who came of age with the idea that the less a woman looked like Barbie, the further she’d get. But the floodgates had broken and now her daughter was a full-blown collector. Advertisement “Um, nothing,” Claire replied. She’d hadn’t submitted a Christmas wishlist, yet. Presenting as ‘girly’ The four oldest Barbies in Claire’s collection were once Skogen’s. Vintage Barbies, as Claire calls them, that spent decades in her grandmother’s basement. They’re old enough that Skogen doesn’t remember how she played with them or what plots she imagined for them. She can’t recall if her Barbie ever got pregnant. But she remembers their dresses, sequined and sparkly as if ready for prom. Over the years, Skogen distanced herself from anything too sparkly, too girly. As a child, she gave up dancing and joined soccer and basketball teams. She looked too “prissy” on the dance floor, she decided. She left the Barbies and the dresses in boxes in the basement. In college, she took classes in women’s studies and came to understand feminist critiques of Barbie and the slender body shape that many of the dolls promoted as ideal. She went to law school and became a prosecutor, specializing in child abuse cases. She did her best to come off “tough and manly.” That way, she figured, she’d get taken seriously. She had abusers to put behind bars.