Letters of Note

Letters of Note

Women do not do any of the creative work

A rejection from Disney in 1938

Shaun Usher's avatar
Shaun Usher
Sep 19, 2009
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Retta Scott working on Bambi. (Photo: WNYC)

In 1938, a 21-year-old art graduate and aspiring animator named Mary Ford aimed high and applied for a job at arguably the greatest animation studio on Earth: Disney. This dispiriting reply she soon received, in which she was told to instead shoot for a lower star in the tracing department, was in fact a standa…

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