Rose O'Neill (1874 - 1944)
American cartoonist, illustrator, artist, and writer;
the first published female cartoonist in the USA,
in 1909 she created popular "baby Cupid"
comic strip characters called Kewpies;
a toy company soon began producing Kewpie dolls
which were a sensation and one of the first
mass-marketed toys in the United States;
active in women's suffrage, she has been inducted into
the National Women's Hall of Fame;
as a comics pioneer, she was also inducted into
the Eisner Awards Hall of Fame.
That's quite a life! Social and entertainment pioneer.
ReplyDelete👏✊️💪 Hooray for Rose and her fight for women! I think the comics were cute, but I always cringe at the Kewpie dolls. I have a really negative visceral reaction to them. Plastic demons!! Be gone from my sight!! 😱
ReplyDeleteHer dolls were once mainstays at carnivals, where you could win one for knocking over a milk bottle, shooting a decoy duck, etc.
ReplyDeleteThe cartoon image of the dolls was cute, the real life ones less so!
ReplyDeleteI had no idea that those once ubiquitous dolls were designed by a woman! A suffragette, no less!
ReplyDelete