The Prolific Illustrator Behind Kewpies Used Her Cartoons for Women’s
Rights
Rose O’Neill started a fad and became a leader of a movement
By Adina Solomon
SMITHSONIAN.COM
In 1914, a crowd gathered at the fairgrounds in Nashville, Tennessee.
After enduring a wait in the November chill, people looked to the sky as
a plane piloted by famed aviator Katherine Stinson buzzed overhead until
finally, it dropped its cargo: parachuting cupid-like dolls gently
floating toward the ground, wearing sashes advocating for women’s right
to vote. These figurines, known as Kewpie dolls, were the brainchildren
of Rose O’Neill, an illustrator who revolutionized the intertwining of
marketing and political activism.
O’Neill was born in 1874 and grew up in poverty in Omaha, Nebraska. By
the time she turned 8 years old, she was drawing, says Susan Scott,
president of the board at the Bonniebrook Historical Society, a
non-profit dedicated to educating the public about O’Neill’s life. In
1893, the O’Neills homesteaded near Branson, Missouri, at a site they
named Bonniebrook.
She brought her self-taught drawing skills to New York City at 19,
staying in a convent so she wasn’t all by herself in the big city, and
meeting editors throughout the day at the city’s publishing offices.
Much to the likely shock of the mostly men editors, O’Neill took
meetings with several nuns in tow.
O’Neill eventually joined the esteemed humor magazine Puck, where
she was the only woman on staff and where she drew illustrations
supporting gender and racial equality. She earned a reputation as a
sought-after illustrator known for fast work, drawing for magazines such
as Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping and Cosmopolitan,
which at the time was a literary publication.
“O’Neill didn’t have any one style or method,” Scott says. “She was so
versatile. That’s why the publishers loved her. It could be real cutesy
and look real cute, or it could be very strong and bold and look like
something a man artist would’ve drawn at the time, more masculine art.”
She often worked from Bonniebrook as the New York offices didn’t have
bathrooms for women, says Linda Brewster, who has written two books on
O’Neill with a third on the way. While in Bonniebrook in 1909, O’Neill
would illustrate her most lasting creation: Kewpies. Adapted from the
classic “cupids,” O’Neill’s smirking, cherub-like characters with rosy
cheeks came about when a Ladies’ Home Journal editor asked her to
create “a series of little creatures,” as O’Neill recounted in her
autobiography. The editor had seen O’Neill’s drawings of cupids
elsewhere and wanted something similar in the magazine.
In her autobiography, O’Neill wrote that the Kewpie is “a benevolent elf
who did good deeds in a funny way.” The initial iterations of the
Kewpies came with accompanying verses invented by O’Neill. “I thought
about the Kewpies so much that I had a dream about them where they were
all doing acrobatic pranks on the coverlet of my bed,” she wrote.
Those Kewpies leapt from her dreams onto the pages of Ladies’ Home
Journal’s Christmas issue that year. Adults and children alike
became enamored with the drawings. A reader, echoing a popular
sentiment, wrote to Woman’s Home Companion in 1913: “Long live
Rose O’Neill! She enhances the value of your magazine twenty-five per
cent. Hurrah for the Kewpies and Rose O’Neill!”
Magazines clamored for a chance to publish Kewpie cartoons along with
O’Neill’s stories and verses about them. Soon they emblazoned commercial
products too, everything from Jell-O ads to candy to clocks. To this
day, people use Kewpie Mayonnaise, a prized mayo from Japan.
Several toy factories approached O’Neill about creating a Kewpie doll,
and, in 1912, toy distributor George Borgfeldt & Company started
producing the dolls, with royalties going to O’Neill, made of bisque
porcelain. O’Neill and her sister traveled to Germany to sculpt a few
sizes of the toy and show the artists how to paint them. To her
surprise, Kewpie dolls became popular – a fad no one could escape – not
only in the U.S. but in Australia, Japan and places all over the world.
According to Scott, O’Neill held the trademark and copyrights to Kewpies
in the U.S. and leveraged them to make an estimated $1.4 million, the
equivalent to more than $35 million today.
Apart from being a significant moneymaker, the Kewpies, as seen in the
magazines, were cute characters with a message, often mocking elitist
middle-class reformers, supporting racial equality and advocating for
the poor. O’Neill also used the cartoons to champion a cause she felt
passionately about: the fight for women’s right to vote.
“What was neat was that she was able to use this popular character for
suffrage, and it got people’s attention,” Scott says. “Some people would
go, ‘How could she use the Kewpie for suffrage? Why is she getting them
involved in politics?’ And then other people just really didn’t even
notice. They thought, ‘Oh, isn’t that cute? Votes for women. Oh, OK.’”
O’Neill was generous with her fortune. Brewster says she once paid for
everyone in Branson to be immunized against smallpox, and she frequently
gave money to artists in search of success and fans who wrote her
letters.
When she wasn’t spending time at Bonniebrook, O’Neill rented a Greenwich
Village apartment, becoming friends with many of New York City’s
writers, poets and musicians. Being a part of this counterculture scene
allowed O’Neill to participate and march in the city’s active suffrage
movement. Suffragists often held banners at marches identifying their
professions, so O’Neill hoisted the illustrators’ banner at marches for
all to see, says Laura Prieto, professor of history and women’s and
gender studies at Simmons College in Boston.
According to Prieto, it was the more-radical suffragists who added
public marches to the movement. “If you think about an era in which
women were supposed to be domestic creatures in the home, marching
through the streets of the city is a pretty radical act,” she adds.
Kewpies played a role in these activities. There was the 1914 rally in
Nashville where Kewpie dolls wearing suffrage sashes rained upon the
crowd. The next year, a march in New York featured a “children’s van”
decorated by O’Neill with Kewpies. Scott has found accounts of a
billboard in New York that featured the Kewpies marching for women’s
right to vote.
Besides lending a celebrity to the cause, Kewpies helped the suffrage
movement combat the stereotype of a feminist as old, ugly and anti-men,
Prieto says.
in Walnut Shade, MO)
“It
was a way to sell a different image of suffrage and who should support
it, who already supported it, and that it was something compatible with
motherhood and nurtu
ring,” she says.
O’Neill illustrated souvenir programs distributed at marches and
postcards and posters, some involving Kewpies, for the National American
Woman Suffrage Association. She also contributed a Kewpie to a suffrage
exhibit at a New York art gallery.
“That was her putting her creation at the service of the suffrage
movement,” Prieto says.
After women won the franchise, O’Neill continued advocating for feminist
causes. She showcased her art at the 1925 Exposition of Women’s Arts and
Industries, designing the program cover with an illustration titled
“Progress.”
Kewpies were a fad with surprising staying power, but they were still a
fad. Kewpie knockoffs became more common, and people eventually lost
interest in the dolls. O’Neill went on to have exhibitions of fine art
illustrations – considered more serious art than Kewpies – in Paris and
New York. At one point, she studied sculpture under Auguste Rodin in
Paris.
By the end of her life, O’Neill’s famous generosity led her to give away
most of her fortune to not only her family but artists, friends and
admirers who asked for money. She died penniless in 1944.
But her influence and Kewpie dolls remain. As the 1913 letter written by
the reader of Woman's Home Companion stated:
“They are equal to the best sermons, for producing a right condition of
health, and good will and your readers object to them, they need a
physician’s advice; yet I think there is no medicine better for them
than a look at the Kewpies.”
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