Pleasant Rowland

Pleasant T. Rowland (born Pleasant Williams Thiele; March 8, 1941) is an American educator, reporter, writer, entrepreneur and philanthropist. Rowland is best known for creating the American Girl brand.

Rowland is known for her philanthropic work in the arts in Madison, Wisconsin and her efforts to redevelop historic properties in Aurora, New York.

Rowland was born in Chicago and grew up in Bannockburn, a suburb north of Chicago. She is the oldest of three sisters and a brother. Her sister, Barbara Whitney Carr, was the former president and CEO of the Chicago Botanic Gardens from 1995 to 2007. Her father was Edward M. Thiele, a Chicago advertising executive who was president of the Leo Burnett ad agency from 1961 to 1971.

After graduating from Wells College in 1962, Rowland began teaching second-grade students at Mattapan Elementary in Massachusetts. From 1962 to 1968, she continued to work as a schoolteacher in several states. She was an on-air reporter and anchor for KGO-TV, the San Francisco ABC affiliate, from 1968 to 1971.

While on assignment, Rowland met a representative of Boston Educational Research, an educational publishing company. She left the news industry to work as director of product development at the publishing company. She was involved in writing and publishing children's textbooks in Boston, Massachusetts from 1971 to 1978. Rowland also published the Children's Magazine Guide.

Rowland created a comprehensive language-arts program called Beginning to Read, Write, and Listen. The program was informally known as the "letterbooks" and designed for kindergarten and first-grade students. "Based on [Beginning to Read, Write, and Listen's] success, Addison-Wesley, another school publisher, approached me about writing a basal reading and language arts program,” Rowland explained. Rowland developed the Addison-Wesley Reading Program until the project was shelved in 1981.

Rowland met her future husband, W. Jerome "Jerry" Frautschi, in Madison in November 1976. Rowland was in town for a press check on the first printing of her language-arts program at Webcrafters, a family-owned printing firm. Jerry's brother, John Frautschi, succeeded their father as president of Webcrafter in 1970. (Webcrafters was later purchased by the CJK Group, Inc., in 2017.) During her business visit to Webcrafters, Frautschi served as Rowland's sales representative. Rowland and Frautschi were married in May 1977.

In 1986, Rowland founded Pleasant Company to manufacture American Girl dolls. She had saved $1.2 million from textbook royalties and invested the majority of those savings into the project. The American Girl product line aimed to teach aspects of American history through a six-book series from the perspective of a girl living in that period. The company would go on to produce dolls, books, and historically accurate accessories (now known as the Historical Characters.) Rowland described the American Girl dolls as "chocolate cake with vitamins": incorporating imagination, play, and history.