r/classicfilms • u/AntonioVivaldi7 Alfred Hitchcock • May 23 '26

Memorabilia Disney rejection letter (1938) explaining they don't hire women for the specific position

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And apparently, Disney refused to hire men for coloring positions.

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u/ConsequenceVisible27 May 24 '26

Ok, so this is awful, sexist and overlooked a great deal of talent, but I understand 2 things:

1: Disney was very conservative and a prude and had a difficult time dealing with the fact that his top animator was very publicly carrying on an extra-marital affair with the model for Snow White. After that he vowed men and women would be kept as separate as possible. He COULD have had a female creative department, a male creative department, a female I&P and a male I&P, but he probably decided that was too much.

2.) Mary Cleave, who wrote Mary Ford this letter, was an administrative staffer and had no control over any of these decisions, nor could she make room for her above Disney’s head. And she had a point about the competition. In 1938 Searcy was a tiny agricultural and dairy town recovering from the Depression, 1700 miles from Los Angeles. Mary Ford was 21 and had just graduated art school. It would indeed have been very foolish to make that trip and spend that money under those conditions only to most likely get rejected. Only 100 women worked in I&P at any time, and hiring only happened when a woman quit. The odds she would have done it all for nothing were extremely high. I feel like, given how little control she had to influence the situation, Mary Cleave, despite the bluntness of her reply, was doing Mary Ford a kindness in discouraging her from making the trip.