By Suzanne Helms
“K is for kneel. I like to kneel down and smell the roses.” (Rowlett)
Margaret Rowlett (1897-1963), alumna of North Carolina College for Women (NCCW, now UNCG), was born in Alabama and grew up in Kannapolis, North Carolina, just northeast of Charlotte. An accomplished artist and illustrator later in life, Rowlett described her early life as sad and lonely. Recounted in her records held in the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives, Rowlett’s childhood entailed attending a log schoolhouse for a few weeks at a time alternated with periods of time she spent away from school to pick and chop cotton. Nothing is known about her parents or family, though news articles written years later mentioned an uncle. By her early teens, she worked in a rag mill for a few dollars a week while attending high school. Rowlett subsequently paid her own way through NCCW and graduated in 1925.
In the NCCW yearbook Pine Needles, 1925, Rowlett was described by her classmates: “Margaret is one of our finest girls, and everyone, faculty and students, recognize this fact. And isn’t this the best that can be said of anyone?” Though Rowlett spent much of her childhood in solitude, she was well-loved throughout her life, especially by children.
In her children’s book D is for Daddy, author Margaret Rowlett described the daily activities of a young girl named Cricket. “Cricket” was actually Rowlett’s own nickname given to her as a child by her uncle. As Rowlett grew up, she transformed the lively and enchanted Cricket into the main character of a series of children’s books. And it is quite fitting that Rowlett used the phrase “kneel down and smell the roses” for the K in her alphabet book as she seemed to have a gift for writing and illustrating as if kneeling next to children telling her stories on their level, and always encouraging them to appreciate every good thing.
Following her time at NCCW, Rowlett earned a master’s degree from Columbia University and became an elementary school teacher in Scarsdale, New York. In a July 1947 feature about Rowlett in The Alumnae News, she recounted having had little formal training in art, just a six-week course. She also detailed what inspired her to take up painting: “…I saw a beautiful sunset one day, and wished so much I could paint it. After contending with this nagging feeling for about two weeks, I got out all of the brushes, paints, and so forth that I had kept from the course, and began to splash away at the sunset.” (The Alumnae News) From there, Rowlett began to paint the experiences of her childhood.
Likewise, Rowlett began to regularly paint with her students during the school day. It was during those painting sessions, the earliest years of her teaching career, that she began to develop the character of Cricket.
Rowlett’s paintings were very colorful and full of patterns inspired by the everyday events of a child’s life. It was Rowlett’s goal to write to and for children. She wanted them “to know the smells and sounds of the earth, and to know the touch and feel of many things. This is why children love my paintings—they are in a language they can understand—simple, childlike, sincere; and they are about things children love to do.” (The Alumnae News)
Also notable, Rowlett made a point to always draw Cricket facing away from the reader. She wanted children to be able to picture themselves in her books and believed that this perspective made it easier for children to do so. She described a similar goal with teaching, “I have always tried to make every child feel that he has a place in the group, and to be proud of his own accomplishment in any field. I never tolerate such phrases as ‘the best’ or ‘the poorest’ in my classes.” (The Alumnae News)
Rowlett maintained her connections at NCCW and in a 1947 letter to Miss Clara Byrd, the Alumnae Secretary and editor of The Alumnae News from 1922-1947, she wrote of her newfound success as an author and her love of teaching children. Rowlett also described in the letter her own struggle with an inferiority complex while in college due to the pressure she felt to perform well, as well as how this challenge shaped her as a teacher and her desire to ensure her students found and felt success.
During the very hot summer of 1944, Rowlett had trouble sleeping and used the time to paint. A friend saw some of her paintings hanging in her apartment and suggested that Rowlett attempt to sell them. She matted the paintings herself and took them to Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar magazines, and Lord & Taylor department store, all of which enthusiastically accepted her work despite one editor referring to her paintings as “crude and childlike.” In fact, in the mid 1940s, Lord & Taylor commissioned her to design children’s fabrics for that very reason—that her work was unsophisticated, lively, and likely to appeal to children.
Rowlett’s illustrations were transformed into draperies and upholstery fabrics. She also painted murals to adorn store walls at the Manhattan location of Lord & Taylor’s toy shop and milk bar.
Rowlett’s fabrics were described in a 1944 article in The New York Times reporting on a Lord & Taylor store display entitled “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” in which decorators staged several rooms of a house to market directly to the men and women returning from service and their families.
As a side note, due to SCUA’s focus on women’s history and the Women Veterans Historical Project, The New York Times article was particularly notable for another reason. The female journalist drew attention to the stark contrast between a woman’s life at home and a life in military service when she described one item from the same store display: “a modern glass-topped dressing table in front of a six-foot high triple mirror… suggests hour-long make-up sessions that a Wac [sic] overseas would hardly have time for.” (Madison) It was an insightful sentiment to include in an article about marketing home decor. WAC, the Women’s Army Corps, was the women’s branch of the United States Army from 1943 to 1978, and WACs were actively serving at the time the article was written.
The journalist also described a children’s suite “for little Mary and John, consisting of a large playroom with a tiny bedroom on each side… and a specially designed fabric with a barnyard motif used for curtains and a bedspread in the boy’s room.” (Madison) The barnyard motif was illustrated by Margaret Rowlett and is pictured below.
Rowlett’s textile designs were featured in various publications as well as in the International Textile Exhibition hosted by Woman’s College (formerly NCCW and now UNCG) in 1945 and in a textile exhibition at the Modern Museum of Art and Design in New York City in 1946.
Soon after finding success with selling her paintings for commercial use, Rowlett began to write and illustrate children’s books. In 1947, D is for Daddy was published, followed by When Cricket was Little in 1948. Both were vibrantly colored and featured Cricket, Rowlett’s childhood surrogate. Though she continued to write short stories and poems featuring Cricket, those were her only published works. By age 50, Rowlett experienced debilitating pain from arthritis which kept her away from teaching at times. (Rowlett) Not surprisingly, she received letters from children during these difficult periods—a clear indication of the mutual admiration between Cricket and her many young fans.
Fortunately, SCUA has several of Margaret Rowlett’s original manuscripts and paintings in Rowlett’s collection as well as copies of her two published works. In addition, there are news articles and correspondence that further illustrate the story of this remarkable, talented NCCW alumna.
References:
Byrd, C. (1947, July). The Story of Margaret Rowlett ‘25. The Alumnae News, 8–10.
Madison, M. (1944, September 21). Decorators Achieve Modern Air Despite Wide Use of Antiques. The New York Times.
Rowlett, M. (1947). D is for Daddy. Knopf.
Rowlett, M. (1947b, May 26). Dear Miss Byrd. New York.
Whitaker, J. (2008, August 7). Lord & Taylor – Restaurant-ing through history. Restaurant-ing through history. https://restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com/tag/lord-taylor/