Women and Dolls

       Three American women dominate the doll market in 1925. Coming from different parts of the country, converging in New York, these three women have opened the eyes of doll manufacturers and doll merchandisers. They have stimulated the toy trade to a degree unprecedented and today head the list of American doll-makers dominating the market.
       I refer to the three American women whose three belles of dolldom are at the present time numbered among the "best sellers": Mrs. Grace Storey Putnam, originator of the Bye-lo Baby doll, the life-like imitation of a three-day-old baby that has set the doll trade by the ears; Mrs. James Paul Averill, inventor of the Wonder Doll that walked and talked its way into juvenile favor and has held high place in the catalogs of the merchandisers for more than five years, and Rose O'Neill, creator of the fat-tummied little Kewpie doll, one of the most popular dolls ever produced.
       Rose O'Neill's doll made a neat little fortune for the woman-artist whose brush first gave it life in the juvenile pages of a woman's magazine. Mrs. Averill's walking and talking doll is the biggest selling high-priced doll ever marketed; while Grace Storey Putnam's three-day-old baby doll is moving so fast that at this writing it may not be too optimistic to estimate that she may realize fifty thousand dollars in royalties from this year's sale of dolls.
       The doll trade has been completely reeducated since the fall of 1924 when Mrs. Putnam first offered her infant doll, only to be frowned on by manufacturers and salesmen alike, who threw up their hands and exclaimed with fierce unanimity: "The thing won't go. It looks too much like a live baby."

Above is a porcelain reproduction, hand-painted Bye-lo Baby.

"THE American woman doll-maker and her American doll are established facts in the toy markets of the world. And the men who handle the manufacturing and distributing ends of the doll business are wearing a broad and ample smile, quite forgetting the fact that sometimes they had to be coaxed, oftener they had to be prodded, and occasionally they needed to be brow-beaten by the women doll inventors before they would consent to give these dolls a trial on the toy store counter."

       But it went and is still going. All of which only proves that this is an age of realism and that women who bring children into the world are pretty good judges of what those children and all children like to play with.
       I tried to classify the three women who created the three popular dolls. Mrs. Putnam would be the sculptress, of course, since that is what she is, having modeled her doll between classes, so to speak, while teaching modeling in the art department of Mills College, Oakland, California. Mrs. Averill would be the clear-headed business woman, for not only did she originate the first walking and talking doll, but entered into the production business for the wholesale manufacture of it and opened up a shop on Fifth Avenue for its retail distribution.
       Rose O'Neill is the painter whose skillful brush realized the wide-eyed elf with the curly top-knot and the fat little tummy of a Chinese idol that won the heart of childhood.
       Yet that rigid classification into sculptress, business woman and painter would not be fair, either. For the sculptress and the painter had sufficient business acumen to make financial successes out of their art; the business woman had the necessary talent to make an artistic success out of her doll and her doll shop. No, they cannot be classified. They are just women who make dolls.
       Because-and rightfully so, since it is eternally but three days old-Grace Storey Putnam's doll is the youngest addition to this coterie of toys, I sought her first. Mrs. Putnam is the wife of Arthur Putnam, a sculptor of fame, and the mother of a twenty-three-year-old daughter and a fourteen-year-old son. Her studio home is on Staten Island, that rocky guide-post to ships that enter and depart hourly from the New York harbor.
       She was modeling an infant's head in wet clay when I found her. A true artist she was indeed, with clay-bedaubed hands, a brown linen smock slipped over her dress. She pinched away a bit of clay here and there, flattened an already snub baby nose, patted the wet clay tendering as she might have patted a baby's cheek and, in answer to my question: "Why did you want a new-born baby for a doll?" she replied: 

Mrs. Grace Storey Putnam in her studio, 1925.

       Oh, they're so irresistible. I suppose it is the price we mothers pay for our own babies that makes all babies precious. I can't tell when the idea first came to me to model a newborn baby. It seems always to have been a part of my consciousness. Even before my own babies were born a new-born baby always gave me a thrill. But a doll? Well, like any other form of art, I wanted to do the thing because something within me kept urging me to and‚ she paused again and her fathomless eyes twinkled‚ and I hoped to high Heaven that it might bring me in some money.

      "Twenty years ago, when my husband and I were living in San Francisco and my little girl was three years old, I made my first doll for her. It was rather crude. First I made a wire frame and covered that with stockinet. Then I stuffed the stockinet to give it form. Head, body, arms, legs, all were made of the pliable stockinet. I pulled out its cheeks, stuffed and tinted them. Pulled out its little nose and stuffed that. Pressed in its eyes and painted them. Then I darned hair on it and, behold, a doll! I was not so proud of it that I would let my daughter take it out of doors when she went to play, but I liked it and she adored it and my husband and I both saw commercial possibilities in it. But I was not yet ready for doll-making. 
       "Later, when my husband's illness made bread-winning a necessity for me, I entered the art department of Mills College. I had taught and studied every branch of art except modeling, having held that in reserve so that modeling might surmount everything. Yet through Arthur Putnam's influence modeling seemed to have become a part of me, and when I entered the art department of Mills  College as a teacher I was given two classes in modeling along with the other branches I taught. But the doll idea kept growing within me. I must make a doll that had a universal appeal. And what appeal so general as that of the newborn infant? So, everywhere I went I studied babies. In maternity wards, in hospitals, in the homes of friends who had new babies I made a study of the babies from life. Yes,"-her eyes grew tender and had a yearning mother look‚-"yes, and in clinics I studied the little ones whose feeble spark had fluttered out. It was all a part of my work. You must know the tragedy of things before you can appreciate the joy of them; before you can give them verity. It is what I call getting 'sand into your work.' Like the coarse fiber in tapestry. The thing that holds it together. Otherwise life and its expressions would be too sugary sweet. That is why I did not want a pretty baby, why I did not want a perfect baby.
       "I wanted to reproduce the baby that all mothers would recognize as their new-born infant. And I found it-three days old in an Oakland hospital. I knew the minute I saw the babe that he was the one I was looking for. He was simply adorable. For two hours I worked feverishly modeling the infant's face. I returned to work all day, the two following days on the head‚ working directly from life as the tiny thing, awake or asleep, lay before me on the hospital pillow. The face of the live baby changed even in those two days. But my Bye-lo Baby is as he was when three days old. I made no change in the face. From that model I perfected one in wax and with the wax model and many letters to toy manufacturers I came I East."
       Most people in the toy trade know the story of Grace Storey Putnam's struggle to convince the doll world that a three-day-old infant was what children wanted. At last she found one big toy-maker who agreed to give her doll a trail, and the Bye-lo Baby was bom. There had been baby dolls on the market for years yet they had not been sensational sellers. But there had never been a three-day-old baby doll until Grace Storey Putnam's doll appeared upon the scene.
       From the moment the tiny little fellow with his life-like bisque head was put on the market, he became an instantaneous and overwhelming success. Parents and prospective parents seized upon him. Children cried for him and got him. His wide, flat nose, his funny little high forehead with its scanty hair, the drowsy eyes, wrinkled neck and button mouth appealed to the mother urge in childhood. And the way he was seized upon by youthful femininity made a decided hit with the masculine adults in the doll trade everywhere.
       "And it is one child that has never kept you awake nights," I congratulated Mrs. Putnam, with a smile.
       "Oh, but it has," she quickly contradicted. "Nights and nights and nights! Contracts and royalties and copyrights and infringements. Rearing two children is a game compared with launching a doll on the market. You see, at first I launched the doll to support the studio.Then, when the New York manufacturers turned a cold and disdainful eye upon it, I had to return to art to support the doll. Now the
doll is supporting the studio again. Something like the hen and egg, or the goose and the egg, for at last the egg has turned to gold."
       "And now what?" I asked. "Will you go on with sculpturing?"
       "Oh, of course," she rejoined. "I am going on with it. I have just finished two commissions, a bust of a woman to be done in marble and a winged figure for the pilot house of a yacht."
       "But you don't do all this work and keep house, too?"
       She nodded. "Yes, I prefer it. For a time after the royalties began to come in, I felt very rich and snobbish. Then I hired a housekeeper. I tried that for three months, but the house seemed so full of housekeeper I had no room for work. She seemed to dominate the picture, which was as it should have been, for she was an exellent housekeeper and entitled to dominate. But somehow I could not create while she was there. Now, I'm my own housekeeper once more, and happy."
       "Perhaps you will make more dolls?"
       "Oh, yes, indeed. I shall make other dolls. But first I must do work along different lines. Then I will make better dolls."
       Mrs. Putnam spoke pridefully of her twenty-three-year-old son, an accomplished musician and musical composer as well. "Bruce has been in California studying for the past six years," she said. "But he's coming to me next month." She talked with continued pride of her son; of his school work, his interests. I suggested that he too would be an artist.
       Mrs. Putnam laughed and shook her head. "Not if he has anything to say about it," she told me. "George is going to do something mechanical, so he tells me. Only the other day he said, with all seriousness: "Mother, whatever you do, don't expect me to be an artist. I'm going to do something decent.' " by Stella Burke May, 1925

• The Inventor of The Walking Doll
• Rose O'Neill's Elfin Little Kewpie

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