Reposting some of my favorite past writing - originally written in 2010:
With all the controversy surrounding the March 2010 cover of Vanity Fair, this article by Patricia Zohn on the female Walt Disney Inkers, Painters, and Animators of the 1930’s and 40’s has been overlooked. It’s a fascinating read in its own right, describing how women were the backbone of the studio, working 85 hour weeks to release Snow White (the first animated feature longer than an hour!) and other pioneering cartoons. She writes:
Much has been written about the prodigiously talented men who brought Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, and Dumbo to the screen. But if behind every good man stands a good woman, behind Walt Disney and his “boys”—the all-male assembly line—once stood 100…. ever nimble but never showy, their job was to make what the men did look good.
In many ways, it was a magical kingdom where they might be summoned to help lay down sound effects for a dancing elephant or a witch’s cackle, or fling their hands in the air with a pair of castanets to show how the female figure moved. All the while, they were inking and painting minor miracles that would become part of our collective visual consciousness: the curve of Mickey’s ears, the sympathetic lines of Goofy’s face, the flap of Dumbo’s trunk, the downy spots on Bambi’s back, or perhaps the most storied, the fairy dust that has endured as a symbol of enchantment, if only we wish hard enough.
The anecdotes and stories from these early women animators are strikingly similar to the stories of the early ENIAC programmers and the early female “computers” that made headlines when first revealed in 1997:
The ENIAC, the world’s first computer, was invented to calculate ballistics trajectories during World War II – a task that until then had been done by hand by a group of 80 female mathematicians. The six women who were chosen to make the ENIAC work toiled six-day weeks during the war, inventing the field of programming as they worked. But although they were skilled mathematicians and logicians, the women were classified as “sub-professionals” presumably due to their gender and as a cost-saving device, and never got the credit due to them for their groundbreaking work.
These two groups of influential and pioneering women were contemporaries in the 1940’s: a hundred female calculators on the East Coast, sequestered together crunching numbers on missile ballistics and trajectory while in Hollywood, hundreds of female inkers and painters lived a similarly invisible but impacting existence drawing the outlines and painting the foundation of our much-loved characters.
Both sets of stories are further linked by the lack of recognition these women received for their critical enabling work. At Disney, “though they had been the backbone of the film, hardly any of the junior staff were invited toSnow White’s star-studded premiere, at the Carthay Circle Theatre on December 21, 1937—and they hadn’t been able to afford the preview prices ($5.50 a ticket), either.” A 1938 rejection letter from Walt Disney Productions to a young female applying to the studio makes it clear that in that time, the women inkers and painters were not seen as creative artists. Instead, their work was described by management as simply tracing and filling in with paint according to directions. Furthermore, women were not allowed to proceed up the ranks to become animators since “preparing cartoons for the screen…that work is performed entirely by young men.” Somehow the management did not recognize inking and painting as necessary preparations to get the cartoons on the screen? Imagine if the efforts of these awesome women had been valued and their skills recognized – if, instead of crediting Walt Disney and his army of male animators, some of the talented female inkers and painters like Reidun “Rae” Medby or June Walker Patterson were given their due and equal billing for their supporting work.
Meanwhile on the East Coast, the female programmers were completely excluded from the official military record of the ENIAC story. Never introduced, acknowledged, or mentioned in any history, they were forgotten until the mid 1980’s when a curious female computer scientist named Kathy Kleiman began asking who the women in the photographs with the ENIAC were. As the story goes, everyone just assumed that the women were just models posed in front of the machine to make it look good – they were “refrigerator ladies.” Its amazing that in forty years, programming went from a lowly position performed exclusively by sub-professional female clerks to a discipline in which female participation was assumed to be only as decoration and adornment to the machines themselves.
The ENIAC women were inducted into the Women in Technology International (WITI) Hall of Fame in 1997 as a late but formal recognition of their work. As Anna van Raaphorst-Johnson, a director of WITI, then explained to Wired Magazine, “Somebody else stood up and took credit at the time, and no one looked back. It’s a typical problem in a male-dominated industry. And there’s still a lot of frustration with men taking credit for women’s ideas – it doesn’t seem to have changed much over the last 50 years.”
With the story of the female inkers and painters behind Walt Disney’s magic just now coming to light, I wonder how many other stories like this exist in our collective history. Certainly Mickey, Minnie, and Donald are among the most ubiquitous cultural icons in Western society – it’s astounding that the women who outlined and defined these characters were not given full credit until now. I know that computer science has a sizable history of women achievements and innovations being ignored, now I’m adding Disney animation to that list – but what else? In the last 50, 60 years, how many stories of women’s work have gone untold or claimed by someone else?
And now – how is this still happening? From my personal experience working and living in a Chinese factory, I know that all of the products we use, the clothes we wear, the reality we experience – is all created by the literal handiwork of countless women workers. From the labor of their fingertips, their backs, their steady hands and unwavering eyes come all of our daily essentials. Within engineering, manufacturing is never presented as a gendered issue – but sociologists, anthropologists, and journalists often write books on the impact and significance of women as the primary wage-earners in factories. Through their work, these women in manufacturing are shaping the world, yet the focus and recognition is always on the predominately male designers and engineers. Will this change in the next sixty years? Next time you go shopping and pick up a sweater or a gadget, will you think a woman made this or a man designed this?
But perhaps a better parallel from women’s work of days past to present can be found in the fields of biological physics, biomechanics, and bioengineering. These areas tend to be considered low science by those in the mainstream “pure” fields of physics and engineering, and as a result, discoveries in these “softer” fields are not as respected or lauded as findings in theoretical physics or classical mechanics. Is it a coincidence or a cause that higher percentages of women can be found in these fields? Is this how the past tendency to ignore the valuable work conducted by women is manifesting itself in our present day? In sixty years, if the discoveries in biological physics have led to fundamental innovations that change the way people live their lives – who will take the credit? Will history recognize the talented and brilliant women who thrive in the field, or will history continue the pattern of overlooking them in favor of the men traditionally considered to be leaders?
The only way to be sure is to start recognizing and publicizing the work of women in math, science, and engineering. Tell your stories NOW or who knows, you may need to wait some sixty years like the ENIAC programmers and Disney inkers and painters to finally be recognized for your contributions.
[Vanity Fair: Patricia Zohn's Coloring the Kingdom]
[Flickr: Disney Rejection Letter, 1938] via [Sociological Images: Disney Rejection Letter, 1938]
[WIRED: Women Proto-Programmers Get their Just Reward]
[The Journal of the American Ordnance Association, 1961: The ENIAC Story]
[WITI Hall of Fame: The ENIAC Programmers]
[Journal of Technology and Culture: When Computers Were Women]
[Sociological Images: Burtynsky - Factory Work In China]
[Amazon: Assembling Women - The Feminization of Global Manufacturing by Teri L. Caraway]
[Amazon: Juki Girls, Good Girls - Gender and Cultural Politics in Sri Lanka's Global Garment Industry by Caitrin Lynch]
[Amazon: Factory Girls - From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang]