Before Barbie and Taylor—There Was Doris

I have the rare privilege of being just the third president of the Doris Duke Foundation, a $2 billion endowment created when its namesake left essentially the entirety of her estate to charity upon her death in 1993. We are one of the few major foundations to have been founded exclusively by a woman in her own name.

Yet few remember Doris Duke today. Those that do are more likely to recall sensational personal stories than they are her incredible legacy of philanthropy.

With Taylor Swift in the midst of what might be the most lucrative concert tour in history and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie’s having already grossed one billion dollars at the box office, it’s hard not to imagine that, had she been born in this era, Doris Duke’s story might have been different.

Ms. Duke was born in 1912, the only child of tobacco magnate J.B. Duke (also the benefactor of Duke University). He died in 1925, when she was just 12 years old, leaving to her a significant share of his wealth to be passed down in installments beginning on her 21st birthday.

This act of filial devotion ended any possibility that Doris Duke would live a remotely normal life. From young adulthood onwards, she was hounded by the media wherever she went, often styled diminutively and insultingly as “the richest girl in the world.”?

What reminds me most of Doris Duke’s life in the new trails for women that Ms. Swift and Ms. Gerwig are blazing is the way they reimagine the negative space left by patriarchy—space in which women can live with agency, safety, and psychic integrity. This feminism conjoins femininity and power, but does not cede to sexism concepts like beauty, glamour and splendor.

Many rightfully recognize how Ms. Swift’s music and Ms. Gerwig’s film affirm and empower a generation of young women. But what should not be missed is the way in which Ms. Swift and Ms. Gerwig also challenge prevailing conventions about what power is.

Glamourous and ostentatious beauty is often written off as only a symptom of women’s oppression: the physical embodiment of the male gaze and therefore just another form of sexual objectification.

Ms. Swift and Ms. Gerwig offer us an alternative that rejects objectification but not glamorous beauty. In a recent interview, Ms. Gerwig celebrated the way “Barbie-ism is maximalist,” reflecting that “One thing we really did think deeply about with the set and costume design was exactly that: not diminishing a little girl that just loves the brightness and the sparkles and the too-muchness.”

For Ms. Swift and Ms. Gerwig, glamour can be ethical: it can represent, and confer, self-sufficient agency. (Sings Ms. Swift on her latest album: “When I walk in the room / I can still make the whole place shimmer … They ask, ‘Do you have a man?’ / I can still say, ‘I don't remember’). For them, too, glamour can be epistemic: beauty is a kind of truth; or, to see someone’s own truth, on their terms, is to see their actual beauty.

Doris Duke never really had a chance to join the pantheon of the male philanthropic magnates. Not just because she lacked the abstemious, industrious and calculating mien that we associate with male institutional leadership. ?But because she exuded an unmitigated love of beauty, splendor and glamour.

Ms. Duke has often been discounted as self-indulgent and unserious. She owned two camels, Baby and Princess, who sometimes accompanied her on her private jet. She hobnobbed with celebrities, including Jacqueline Kennedy and, later, Paul Reubens. Like any whole human being with extraordinary means, she had other eccentricities, too, and not a few tragedies.

But Ms. Duke’s story was not one of frivolity. Her love of beauty also drove her to define, shape and impel the avant-garde—a spirit that guided not just her personal life but her profound devotion to the public good. Her entire life, she worked tirelessly for a more beautiful world and society—aesthetically and morally.

This showed in her artistic tastes. She studied with Martha Graham in the 1930s and became a lifelong patron of performing arts that were often consigned to the margins, like contemporary dance and jazz.

It also showed in the evolutionary spirit of her philanthropy. In 1935, then a young woman, Doris Duke contributed to the National Committee for Birth Control. In 1963, she initiated a series of sizable gifts to historically Black colleges and universities. In 1966, she supported the creation of what remains today the largest archive of tribal and indigenous oral records in the U.S. In the 1980s, she funded research on HIV/AIDS.

And it showed in her personal passions. She was a committed environmentalist and avid outdoorsperson, reveling in the beauty and charm of the natural world. She cultivated and developed one of the most common commercial orchids in her father’s repurposed estate in New Jersey. In Hawaii, she swam, took up local outrigger canoeing, and, according to legend, was the first mainlander the legendary Duke Kahanamoku taught to surf.

Through her privilege, she modeled creativity, generosity and zeal.

John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (scion of the elder Rockefeller) supported eugenics. Henry Ford was an outspoken anti-Semite. Doris Duke’s father, J.B., grew wealthy by mass marketing cigarettes. These facts are not secrets, but they are largely irrelevant to each man’s stature as a titan of history.

Good for the boys.

Their enduring legacies, in commerce, in society and in their magnanimous and lasting philanthropic contributions, rightly deserve our understanding, appreciation and perhaps even acclaim.

But the fact that most people know more about Doris Duke’s friends, lovers, and pets than they do her cultural, artistic and philanthropic imprint is to fail the Bechdel Test of history.

Any dismissal of Doris Duke has nothing to do with the content of her life but reflects our myopic and gendered attitudes about what motivates the pursuit of beauty and glamour. The cost of this pure manifestation of sexism is not just to lose the story of another great leader—although it is that, too. It’s to misrecognize and devalue a different kind of power. A power that can be good because it is glamorous, because it is beautiful and because it is celebratory.

Until we eradicate sexism and dismantle the sinews of patriarchy from our society, every era will chart new feminisms. Each will be imperfect, by its own lights and as our horizons widen (“We mothers stand still so our daughters can look back to see how far they have come,” says Rhea Perlman as Barbie-creator Ruth Handler in the film). If we believe in progress, then justice is an asymptote—approached but never reached.

In this moment, Ms. Swift and Ms. Gerwig have synthesized a new feminism with a new ingredient. They are not just claiming male power, but expanding what counts as socially productive power. A power that is beautiful by oneself and for oneself.

I’m sorry that Doris Duke wasn’t here to witness it for herself. In their vision, Ms. Duke would have seen clearly reflected the glamour and the beauty she brought into the world.?