St. Raphael Academy Kewpie Doll: Museum Object and Cultural History

The object in the museum catalogue

By the early 20th century, an alternative system of private schools in the United States developed either from a community’s desire to guide the education of its children or out of necessity due to prejudices against immigrants, non-European, and non-Protestant Americans which resulted in uneven access to public schools. The largest of these networks was the American parochial school system administered by regional Catholic dioceses. Catholics began arriving in increasing numbers in the 1880s, and by the 1930s were almost one quarter of the American population and the single largest religious denomination. While the vast majority of Catholic children attended public schools, religious schools offered the option to learn in a native language that in many places was specifically denied in public schools.

St. Raphael’s Academy was founded in 1924 in the mill town of Pawtucket, Rhode Island by the diocese, to educate Catholic boys only. St. Raphael’s was founded as part of an initiative led by Irish-born Bishop William Hickey of the Diocese of Providence to centralize and Americanize the local Catholic Church by adopting English-only instruction, so students were taught solely in English. It was controversial among some parents and local parish clergy, who were proponents of retaining bilingual curriculum and traditions in Catholic schools that served ethnic communities such as the Greeks, French, and Poles. These proponents argued that children and grandchildren of immigrants should be encouraged to preserve their native languages and Catholic values as a further distinction from the largely Protestant public school system in the United States. Despite this controversy, St. Raphael’s continued to operate as a boys-only school through 1975 and then became a co-educational college preparatory school in 1976.

This St. Raphael Academy Kewpie Doll was given by Roland Rivet to Lillian Parmentier, a student at the nearby St. Jean-Baptiste Academy, Pawtucket, R.I. The doll is dressed in purple and gold, the school colors of St. Raphael high school.

Materials, dates and provenance

• Object Name: doll
• Physical Description: plastic (overall material)
• Measurements: overall: 27 cm x 11 cm x 5.5 cm; 10 5/8 in x 4 11/32 in x 2 5/32 in
• Measurements: overall: 3 1/4 in x 10 3/4 in x 5 1/2 in; 8.255 cm x 27.305 cm x 13.97 cm
• ID Number: 2016.3128.01
• nonaccession number: 2016.3128
• catalog number: 2016.3128.01
• Credit Line: Gift of Lillian and Roland Rivet
• Data Source: National Museum of American History

Sources and reuse

Catalogue descriptions and facts adapted from National Museum of American History through the Smithsonian's official Open Access dataset. This record explicitly marks its metadata CC0 1.0; formatting and selection have been changed.