There is a story circulating that the Raggedy Ann doll came about because of a little girl who was vaccinated for smallpox near the turn of the 1900s and the vaccine gave her the disease it was supposed to protect her from. Well, that actually happened. The doll was patented by her father right after the death of his daughter. He had been working on it before her sickness and death. It never had the intent to symbolize a dead female child. Here is more detail of why it simply is not true that its intent was as a anti-vaccine statement : Is it true that the Raggedy Ann doll was used to represent the anti-vaccination movement? Raggedy Ann has been historically associated with the anti-vaccination movement, and there is some truth and some fiction associated with this belief. The tragic truth that still wrenches our hearts to this day is that Johnny Gruelles little daughter died after being given a mandatory smallpox vaccination at school. The child was just 13 years old, and her loss was devastating to Johnny Gruelle, who then became a proponent of the anti-vaccination movement. However, there is an absurd school of thought that asserts that the Raggedy Ann doll was created as a limp and lifeless-looking creature to symbolize Gruelles dead child. This is certainly not the case, and Gruelles registered patent of the Raggedy Ann character occurred right around the time of Marcellas death. Evidence indicates that he had been working on perfecting Raggedy Ann prior to this tragedy in his family. I have never seen any documentary evidence that Johnny Gruelle, himself, used the image of Raggedy Ann to protest mandatory vaccinations. However, he did make his stance quite well known to the publishers of Physical Culture magazine, who asked him to illustrate an article about vaccinations. He responded to the request with a grim, political-style cartoon showing a small child hanging in the balance of a scale held by an ape-like figure. Modern anti-vaccination proponents have, indeed, used Raggedy Ann dolls to illustrate their position, but this was certainly not the original idea behind the doll.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Nov 2014 03:10:38 +0000
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