Colour pioneer
The American illustrator responsible for creating the kitsch ‘Kewpie’ doll characters
How American illustrator Rose O’Neill mobilised her Kewpie dolls to help the women’s suffrage movement
Naked, bisque-coloured, cherubically chubby and smoothly sexless. With heads shaped like upturned radishes, rose-petal cheeks, mischievous eyes and a pair of minute wings, Kewpies are emphatically not what spring to mind when you hear words like ‘iconoclastic’ or ‘feminist’. It is possible that they should be.
Kewpies were the brain children of Rose O’Neill and would earn her the moniker ‘Queen of Cute’. Born in 1874 in a small town in Pennsylvania, O’Neill had a poor, peripatetic childhood. She was, however, a precociously talented artist: by the age of 23 she was making a living in New York City as an illustrator for magazines, including the popular humour title Puck, where she was the only woman on staff.
The idea for Kewpies, she later said, came to her in a dream. To her they were ‘innocent, unspoiled little souls’, who ‘do good deeds in a funny way. The world needs to laugh or at least smile more than it does.’ Whether or not this is true, we do know that by 1909 they had begun scampering across the pages of Ladies Home Journal. From there, they took over the world, becoming a 30-year craze of astounding proportions and spawning an empire of merchandise. In addition to magazine and newspaper illustrations, O’Neill was commissioned to include them in advertisements for products including Jell-O and mayonnaise. Discerning buyers from the late 1910s to the early 1940s could pick up everything from Kewpie table lamps and salt-andpepper shakers, to dolls – some five million were made in all – and lapel pins. This pinkish, pale army, in total, earned her an estimated $1.4 million.
What makes them truly remarkable, given the era, is how O’Neill drafted Kewpies into the fight for women’s rights. She argued to a sceptical New York Times that female clothing was too restrictive – O’Neill herself was always defiantly corset-less. (Under the unpromising headline: ‘Leg Emancipation Women’s
New Plea’, she quipped that Kewpies’ roseate nakedness meant they wouldn’t ‘have to waste a lot of energy toting their clothes ’.) Her creations appeared on posters and banners. They beat drums, wore sashes and held up signs reading: ‘VOTES FOR WOMEN!’ Is it possible these swarms of demurely pinkish pale cherubs helped shift public opinion? O’Neill certainly thought so. Kewpies, she said, became, ‘a way to sell a different image of suffrage and who should support it… that it was something compatible with motherhood and nurturing.’ They may not have looked the part, but Kewpies were radicals.