--- title: Jill Lepore on Her New Book and Hating 'Barbie' description: Historian Jill Lepore discussed her new collection of essays, why she became a historian, and why she hated the Barbie movie. canonical: https://time.com/6303126/jill-lepore-interview-the-deadline/ author: Olivia B. Waxman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2023-08-24T11:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:51:00.523Z article:section: History og:title: Why Historian Jill Lepore Hated 'Barbie' og:description: Jill Lepore discussed her new collection of essays. og:url: https://time.com/6303126/jill-lepore-interview-the-deadline/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt11d125c7b5d66ec2/698a3f564ee2625f0131ba0a/jill-lepore.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1602 og:image:height: 901 og:image:alt: Jill Lepore og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Why Historian Jill Lepore Hated 'Barbie' twitter:description: Jill Lepore discussed her new collection of essays. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt11d125c7b5d66ec2/698a3f564ee2625f0131ba0a/jill-lepore.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Why Historian Jill Lepore Hated _Barbie_ > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Margot Robbie and the "Barbie" Cast Are Here for a Barbie Challenge [Watch (HLS stream): Margot Robbie and the "Barbie" Cast Are Here for a Barbie Challenge](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/rnmcLo7q.m3u8) (10:00)  _Published 2023-06-27. Ahead of Barbie's big screen debut on July 21, the cast of the movie reconnected with their inner child and took on a "dress up your doll" challenge. Margot Robbie, Issa Rae, Kate McKinnon, Hari Nef, and Alexandra Shipp all play different versions of Barbie._  by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/)  ## Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer Aug 24, 2023 11:00 AM UTC  Webb Chappell—Guardian/Eyevine/Redux  by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/)  ## Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer Aug 24, 2023 11:00 AM UTC Jill Lepore teaches history at Harvard and writes about history for the _New Yorker_. But she's equally interested in the present: "We have an obligation to try to make sense of the relationship between today and yesterday," she says. Lepore's latest book _The Deadline_, which comes out on Aug. 29, is a selection of her essays over the last 20 years on topics ranging from the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol to the fight between Barbie's maker and Bratz dolls. In a recent phone interview with TIME, Lepore talked about why she mined deeply personal material for her new book, the most surprising thing she's found in the archives lately, and why she thought the [_Barbie_ movie](https://time.com/6295639/barbie-movie-review/) was "creepy." The following interview has been lightly edited and condensed. ### **Was there a moment growing up that played a role in why you became a historian?** I had a high school English class assignment, which was to write an essay about how to do something that you did not know how to do. I had my Italian grandmother teach me how to make meatballs. I do not speak Italian, and she did not speak English. I cannot record what she knew. I’m fascinated by the loss of knowledge and the obligations of historians to recover archives. That’s why I don't write presidential history. I don't write the history of Congress and or the history of the Supreme Court or institutions of power that maintain perfect records. There's a lot that historians can do with those institutions, writing biographies of men who left abundant evidence behind, but I am interested in the very opposite of that. ### More From TIME ### **One of the things that distinguishes your work is your deep dives into archives. What's the most surprising tidbit you found recently?** I'm working on a book on the history of attempts to amend the Constitution and at the moment I'm reading through reports of state constitutional conventions from the 19th century. I was reading yesterday the report from New York's 1821 constitutional convention, and there's a proposal at the convention to add the word white to the suffrage requirements. So instead of “free inhabitants,” it would be “free white inhabitants.” And then also they want to add the word male, so it'd be “free white male inhabitants.” There's just this incredibly interesting argument about that that goes on and on. I hadn't realized just quite how strenuously the case was argued on both sides starting in the 1820s. They get the word “white” in, and then it takes a really long time to get it out. But it also is useful to remember how long it took to get it in. Things were almost another way. Things could still change. ### **Some of the essays in your new anthology** **_The Deadline_** **are quite personal. In one, you write about both the idea of having to hide your motherhood duties as a scholar and about having a miscarriage. What made you decide to reveal such personal moments?** That essay—which is the title of the collection—I wrote on the 20th anniversary of the death of my best friend who died while I was giving birth to my first child. My friend Jane knew how much I wanted to have a baby and had been with me through all of those early struggles, including the miscarriage. When I was pregnant, she was diagnosed with leukemia, and she made this kind of crazy pact with herself and with me that she wouldn't die until the baby was born. It was an expression of love and also her way of taking care of me. How could I possibly erase a detail that explains the momentous decision that this person I really love had made? ### **Another essay gets into the history of** [**Barbie**](https://time.com/6289864/barbie-time-cover-story/)**. Have you seen the film?** I hated the film. ### **Why?** I will be unpopular for saying this. To pretend that a story about peddling plastic Barbie dolls for a giant international corporation is a story of feminist liberation, it's just almost unbearably sad to me. It's just a bizarre, creepy love letter to tyranny and capitalism. One of the essays in my collection, which is called “Valley of the Dolls,” is about the intellectual property battle between Mattel and the manufacturer of the Bratz dolls. Barbie was herself basically plagiarized, so there was an intellectual property battle over the creation of Barbie in the first place. [Ruth Handler](https://time.com/6293762/barbie-movie-ruth-handler/), who created Barbie, basically bought a doll in Germany on vacation, came back and redesigned it and called it Barbie and then tried to sell it in the U.S. ### **How will future historians describe this period we're living in?** Future historians will be A.I., so they'll write some very boring history. I'm not the person who says you must wait 50 years. The last essay in this collection, which is called “The American Beast,” is my reading of the [January 6 insurrection committee report](https://time.com/6243426/jan-6-committees-plan-to-stop-the-next-attack-on-democracy/). Historians have an obligation to make sense of what's going on in the present within the absolutely explicit and abundantly confessed constraint that we don't know enough right now and we will know more later. That's why I do what I do, because I believe we have an obligation to try to make sense of the relationship between today and yesterday. ### **Is there a historical figure or historical event you think would make a great movie?** I've heard there's this really good biography of Jane Franklin. \[Benjamin Franklin's sister; Lepore wrote it.\] She gets pregnant at 15, marries the boy next door, who I believe had raped her, and what you had to do when you got pregnant was marry the rapist. She went on to have 12 children with that guy, who ended up in a lunatic asylum. She was poor her whole life. In the letters that Jane Franklin did leave behind, she had a kind of political awakening during the American Revolution, when she came to feel that she should not suffer. That is a story about what ordinary life in the 18th century actually is. It's not the story that Benjamin Franklin tells us in his autobiography. She was the person that he wrote to more than to anyone else, and he just completely erased her from the story of his life because it's inconsistent with his allegory for America that he wants to make out of the story of his rags-to-riches life. ### **Are you on Facebook or Twitter?** No. ### **Why not?** Back to your question about future historians, I think \[the social networks\] will be looked on as having been fairly catastrophic. Facebook's business model is to monetize loneliness. And I don't want to participate in any way in that business model. If tobacco companies had some great, fun, free thing that was seemingly free, but was actually selling tobacco products to children, I also wouldn't buy that. ## Transcript My Barbie needs more time. Okay. Not looking punk, I don't think I'm in love with what I've done. I think my farthest of hurts all expectations and I just I'm so proud. I don't want it. I don't want can Oh my God. Okay, now what is punk? I'm not a fashionista you guys but I think I know Punk. When I see it. I actually do. Love the look, I don't know if it's but I thought about it. So I would I would love like a quick 45 minutes with like I need a Lynn bread and then I can really show you what this rust can look like on a girl with blue hair. To me, no, offense to the Met Gala. This is what I Met Gala outfit. Looks like I chose a big helmet shoes. Are a bag. We're open at 7, the band with a little bit of crack out this one hops. Wow. I feel like she's, she's got like a contract. She can fly back and they want to just like it's like they were the mini dresses cuz they're not trying to do the gown dress code, but they left like the edges exposed. I thought about sunglasses but then it's like, you know, she's an up-and-coming independent film actress. So how are the Getty Image Photography is going to recognize her if she wears sunglasses? So, she took them off last second, Pirates. Understanding of this world is so nuanced. I have no recollection of playing with the pain but don't tell him that I love him. No, very handsy. So cool. Come on, Barbie. Oh my God. So hard to get her feet. How do we have? The dexterity is kids to do that? We had, we had nothing else to do. Is it a four-year because she facilitated the end of the writers strike. My Barbie is obviously a singer at this moment. She's hitting the high note. I am a Barbie girl. So mine has infiltrated either the government of North Korea or an alien invasion and their government. She's warned their outfits and she's worked herself like a Manchurian Candidate into the highest levels of leadership and taking them down from the inside because they took it from her, okay? It wasn't. And she lost the back of her pants and a fire, okay? So but you went straight from that to the time cover. Shoot. Yes. My Barbie wrote a book called women. It's about women, any idea you've ever had about women, any problem you've ever had with a woman, she she fixed all of it with her book and she's just signed a deal with Netflix for a film adaptations called woman. She's kind of the face of women everywhere, but she's wearing her sunglasses because she's like, who am I my email? And my lady is the first female president of the United States. And she wear policy so she's wearing a l movie. That's right. I definitely have worried about you be going up, Dale kind of turned into weird, Bobby off. I got played with a few times. What's cooking good-looking welcome, welcome to my house. Let me see, weird Bobby. We mean like a Bobby has been played with too hot and the real world and they hands up being a little messed up and maybe they got some Crayon on their face and scissors. Markers other stuff, you know, you missed your Barbie. I heard someone who looked like, whoever it was was amazing and I really don't like it when someone else does my hands or feet or maybe I was trying to do my earnings but yeah, the foot should I got all three of us like how many times but like the Chrissy Teigen sweet nothing like it was a screen. Grab of my feet in front of the shower and it was like I need to know everything about this. Like how many take? So she harness with Lola and we probably did? I don't know? Maybe eight takes. No, I didn't wasn't wearing a harness but I did hold on to like a ball when I got back to that. I was still steady holding, it would be like tomorrow. It probably is I'm at once again. Joker. Okay, she is a superhero. Her name is hot girl. She gets really hot. Literally it's baked potato Couture. She's burning evil. Evil know. She's burning that she's melting it down to liquid. Heat proof glass. We're going to see My superhero is. That's her name of the ability to inflict cramps on men. So she dress. Provocatively, the pimp then and then she's like texting. So he his superpower is to be invisible, which is why he's not wearing anything? Because when he goes invisible then you see the clothes walking around. So he has to be naked all the time with my boy, like to see a no, because it's attached to it goes invisible, might be out for the count. This is some sandwich girl. Okay, so her superpowers, you always have to give to someone who needs food, but the problem is, she also looks like a flasher when she goes up to someone and she's like a, you want something? I got something for you and they're like, they run away and she's like, oh, it's a sandwich here. Like we don't believe you and she's like, This is animal, she can turn into any type of animal giving cheetah, she's giving leopard. She's giving polar bear realness instead of like roaring. She does run. So she'll be like I'm impressed with the creativity. That's been put on display here and has been brought out of all of us. Grown people just the presence of the dolls and the clothes it really is an incredible thing. I needed me to it's a productive. 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