The troublesome gender attitudes encoded within Disney’s animated canon have long been a hot topic for cultural scholars (for a 6-minute crash course, see Sanjay Newton’s video essay Sexism, Strength and Dominance, embedded above). But while the films themselves often telegraph mixed messages (Disney heroines are often stubborn and independently minded, but at the end of the day almost always function as damsels in distress), today Boing Boing’s Cory Doctrow has opened up the floodgates to reveal evidence that the institution that produced these films has always been, by design, an unambiguous boys club.

It all started when Doctrow linked to this rejection letter, on beautiful full-color Snow White-themed stationary, received in 1938 by a young lady who had inquired about Disney’s animators training program.

“Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen,” the letter informs a Miss Mary V. Ford of Searcy, AK. “For this reason girls are not considered for the training school.” The letter goes on to say that although ladies were hired to do basic tracing and coloring in the Ink and Paint department, “it would not be advisable to come to Hollywood with the above specifically in view, as there are really very few openings in relation to the number of girls who apply.”

A Boing Boing reader then went on to point out that this letter was not an isolated incident, but indicative of Disney’s institutional policy of excluding women from all non-inking work. This Disney Studio Artists Tryout book, also dated 1938, firmly states that the Ink and Paint sector is “the only department in the Disney Studio open to women artists.’”

Both of the above examples are almost 70 years old, so it would be easy to write them off as relics. But then there’s the first-hand testimony of Danah Boyd. Today, Boyd is one of the most well-respected technology/social media bloggers/writers/thinkers out there; ten years ago, while a sophomore studying computer science at Brown, Boyd approached an Imagineer recruiting booth at a trade show. As Boyd tells Boing Boing,

I approached and asked if there were internships available, but the recruiter told me that there were no internships available for artists. I responded by saying that I was a developer and that I wanted to code. The response I received was, ‘but you’re a girl.’

“I walked away stunned and midway out of the convention hall, I ran into my advisor (Andy van Dam) and relayed this story. He turned beet red and ran off to ‘make things right.’ Not 15 minutes later, I saw the recruiter at Disney stomping out of the hall. I found out later he was fired. “

Interestingly, three years after Boyd’s incident, Disney inducted Harriet Burns into their Disney Legends hall of fame. This probably qualifies as nitpicking, but check out her bio on the Disney Legends site. After introducing Burns as “the first woman ever hired by Walt Disney Imagineering in a creative rather than an office capacity”, the bio then relegates the actual projects Burns worked on to the fifth paragraph; graphs one and two are devoted to the fact that Burns was “the best-dressed employee in the department.”