After dozens of horror movies with demonic dolls and possessed children, the Kewpie looks borderline screwball today. It has dots for eyebrows, blue wings protruding from its neck, a pointy topknot, and burning cheeks that imply it scurried toward its latest victim.

But in 1909 Americans wanted to tear their faces off the Kewpies were so cute. They barely noticed the illustrator had a feminist agenda.

Born in 1874 in the Missouri Ozarks, Rose O’Neill began drawing at a young age, copying figures out of books and from her own reflection in the mirror. Her father encouraged her passion by hiding pencils and paper around the house. At the age of 13, O’Neill entered a drawing contest for the Omaha World-Herald; her pieces were so good the newspaper made her come in and prove she could recreate them. She won the $5 first prize.

At 19, O’Neill traveled to New York to peddle her first novel, but instead began illustrating for magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and Puck, a humor magazine where she was the only female illustrator. O’Neill’s charismatic, witty, and adventurous personality helped her navigate a career path that was bitterly skeptical of women. Unfortunately, her drawings, particularly the Kewpies, often suggest the talented artist was meek, sentimental, and commercial. In O’Neill’s book of memoirs, Miriam Formanek-Burnell wrote in the introduction, “Rose O’Neill was sentimentalized by fans to whom her Kewpies also became artifacts of an invented past.” In fact, O’Neill was a complex, sophisticated artist whose impact on American illustration has been likened to Norman Rockwell.

Rose O’Neill in 1907. (Gertrude Käsebier/Wikimedia)

In 1909 Ladies’ Home Journal published the first Kewpie comic. Readers delighted in the cheerful little cherub, with his impish side-eye. O’Neill named the character “Kewpie,” a baby-talk version of “Cupid.” She described him as “a sort of little round fairy whose one idea is to teach people to be merry and kind at the same time.” With her art, she hoped to teach people to “do good deeds in a funny way. The world needs to laugh or at least smile more than it does.”

Though Kewpie was male, O’Neill managed to subvert gendered representations; keeping them nude, without a sailor uniform or any genitalia, eliminated the question of gender altogether. As a newly minted Greenwich Village bohemian, she supported the suffrage movement by illustrating posters for the National American Women’s Suffrage Association — many complete with Kewpie babies pleading for their mothers’ vote.