Disney Animation, 1938: No Girls Allowed!

The Beat links to an amazing pop-culture artifact: a 1938 rejection letter from Disney to a woman looking for a job as an animator. Printed on gorgeous Snow White stationery, the letter lays out the company’s policy in brutal detail:

te>Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen, as that work is performed entirely by young men. For this reason girls are not considered for the training school.

The only work open to women consists of tracing the characters on clear celluloid sheets with India ink and filling in the tracings on the reverse side with paint according to the directions.

Well, good thing everything is different now, right? Well, maybe not totally different: The IMDb credits for Disney’s latest No. 1 movie, Ratatouille, list 26 separate animators — of whom exactly zero appear based on first names to be women.

Disney Rejection Letter, 1938 [Flickr via The Beat]
Ratatouille Full Credits [IMDb]