The Easy Bake Oven

In the early 90's when I was kid there was one toy that every girl had to have. The Easy Bake Oven was the ultimate play experience, every girl who had an Easy Bake Oven immediately became the most popular girl to play with. I remember making my Christmas list in July with an Easy Bake Oven topping the list. The Easy Bake Oven was an amazing toy for young little girls who liked to play house. The small pink oven would make bite size portions of delicious baked goods. The instructions were simple enough for a young girl to understand, often times you would add water to a pre packaged mix with a bright picture of whatever  baked good it would make on the front, then slide into the mini convectional oven and wait a few minutes for the pink timer to ding when it was finished baking.

The Easy Bake Oven commercials that aired on television consisted of groups of giggly girls gathered around a pink mini oven baking various types of baked goods. It was very clear by the pink colors, girly floral print, and pastel colored cooking utensils that the oven was designed specifically for girls and not for boys. Boys did not typically play with the oven, however they would come and join us girls to help us eat the bite sized baked goods when they were finished. If boys played with this pink oven they were often perceived as feminine, I even had a neighborhood boy that I played with tell me that cooking was something girls did, not boys. The Easy Bake Oven was generally marketed to girls between the ages of six to eleven, I was eight years old when my best friend and I got ours for Christmas.

The oven was definitely seen  as a prized toy to own and it was considered a more mature form of play that young girls really sought to participate in. Instead of turning the knobs on your Fisher-Price oven to produce an imaginary plate of dinner for your "family" you could actually use a real oven and produce a real result, which revolutionized how little girls played. I can't deny the fact that I enjoyed playing with my Easy Bake Oven, but as I have gotten older I can see how the toy supports a stereotype, of women being homemakers and focusing on cultivating their baking skills for their male counterparts and children. The Easy Bake Oven was a toy that encouraged girls to act out domestic roles in play, but after some further research I have found that in recent years The Easy Bake Oven has produced a new gender neutral design. The gender neutral model being marketed is not a girlish pink color but a light blue, and the commercials even feature groups of children consisting of girls and boys playing together. The oven is still typically more popular among young girls but I do think that young boys are beginning to join in the play as well.