Female Inventors

Rose O'neill

Inventor of the Kewpie Doll

From 1912 to 1914, the Kewpie doll was an absolute craze. People were buying Kewpie books and Kewpie rattles, Kewpie soap and Kewpie dishes, Kewpie pianos and Kewpie salt-and-pepper shakers. Women began plucking their eyebrows to mimic the surprised dot brows of the little porcelain cherubs. Poet/artist Rose Cecil O'Neill made $1.5 million from the munchkin dolls, which she first invented as magazine illustrations and patented in 1913.

Rose O'Neil was born in 1874 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Throughout her childhood, she was encouraged in her artistic bent, and at age fourteen won a drawing contest sponsored by the World Herald newspaper in Omaha (where the family then lived). Soon she began seeing her cartoons and illustrations published in mid-western newspapers and magazines.

Seeking a wider audience for her art, O'Neill moved to New York City in 1893. She referred to city dwellers as "the wolves," however, and looked forward to her stays at the family's retirement estate in the Ozarks, called Bonnie Brook. There she married Gray Latham in 1896 and began signing her drawings, "Latham O'Neill." Many readers assumed Latham O'Neill was a man.

By this time, Rose was selling her drawings to Puck and Life magazines. After her divorce from Latham in 1901, she began an intense correspondence with her editor at Puck, Harry Leon Wilson, and married him in 1902.

The Wilsons lived in an opulent literary whirl. Rose wrote a novel called The Loves of Edwy (Harper, 1904), and Harry wrote a best seller, The Spenders. Harry also collaborated with Booth Tarkington on The Man from Home, which was a hit Broadway play, and it was thanks to Tarkington (albeit indirectly) that the Kewpie doll was created.

Tarkington had presented the Wilsons with a white bulldog, which became a spoiled house pet. As her first attempt at pottery, Rose made a bisque statuette of the pup, calling the piece "Kewpie Doodle Dog." After separating from Harry Wilson in 1907, Rose began using the cute Kewpie concept in her stories and drawings for The Ladies' Home Journal.

The little Kewpies from Kewpieville did good deeds like keeping birds' eggs warm and recovering lost babies; they were immediate sentimental favorites of the magazine's readership. Ladies' Home Journal publisher Edward Bok suggested that Rose begin making the bique dolls of the Kewpies, which were first manufactured in Germany. Rose gained fame for visiting overseas factory workers and telling them to be extra careful with the tiniest dolls" because they were for the porest children."

Porcelain and bisque Kewpie dolls began being manufactured in Belgium and France after the outbreak of war; celluloid, wood, and paper models were made in the United States. With her royalties, Rose bought a home in New York's bohemian Greenwich Village and a villa on the island of Capri. She upgraded the Bonnie Brook estate in the Ozarks, calling it "a good place to unbutton." Rose considered herself a patroness of the arts, holding salons for poets and scupltors. She liked to appear in public wearing flowing robes and in bare feet, and she launched a second career writing romantic poetry and Gothic novels.

Rose O'Neill went through her entire fortune by 1936, and she returned to the Ozarks to spend her last years at Bonnie Brook with her devoted sister, Callista. Rose completed her memoirs in 1944, and she died that same year of heart failure at age seventy.

Female Inventors