by Stephanie Mastrostefano, PhD Candidate, Department of English
During the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood saw unprecedented uprisings among specialized trade workers. The entertainment boom that began in the 1910s and was sustained throughout the First World War and the Great Depression had driven hordes of laborers to the motion picture business. Backed by half a century of labor activism, enthusiasm for organizing had unionized nearly every corner of the entertainment industry. From writers to projectionists and background artists to musicians, creative professionals had entered the labor movement. But a smaller, newly developing corner of entertainment missed the initial wave: animation studios. And Walt Disney was the biggest employer of animators in Hollywood.
The Disney Studios entered their Golden Age during the late 1920s with the innovation of synchronized sound cartoons, and they galvanized their position as a leader in film with the release of the first feature length animated film in the United States: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). But what is often overlooked in historical accounts of the studio’s rise in popularity is the monumental role that women held in the production of animated films. Between the studio’s first breakout success (Steamboat Willie 1928) and the release of Snow White, the Disney Studio had grown from 80 to nearly 1,200 employees, of which the majority were inkers and painters.
The Ink and Paint department at Disney was comprised almost entirely of women. Studio write-ups describe the “tedious and detailed work” of ink and paint as work that was “best suited for women” as they were “considered more sensitive to detail than men” (Johnson 13). During the first decade of the studio, women were almost exclusively hired in Ink and Paint and saw few opportunities for advancement. But the work of inking and painting was physically demanding and undervalued; women often suffered from eye strain, back pain, and severe exhaustion and were discouraged from participating in recreational activities that could impact their steady hand, such as smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, or even bowling. In exchange for these sacrifices, their labor was uncredited on the finished films, and they were among the lowest paid workers in the industry.
Like their work on the films themselves, women’s multifaceted and complex role in the unionization of animation workers is often overshadowed by men. Studio lore claims that Art Babbitt, the revered lead animator (and close confidante to Walt Disney), led the drive to unionization at the studio after he saw a woman pass out at her desk from hunger due to her inability to afford lunch. The historical account of the infamous 1941 Disney Studio Strike follows Babbitt’s leadership and recounts a platform that strove for more equitable wages among studio workers—including the ink and paint girls. But these narratives exclude the women’s own participation in their liberation—or their resistance to it. Further, records of the studio strike omit the domestic labor of the animators’ wives: women who labored at home to support their husbands and who organized themselves into a network of mothers that ensured the strikers had food, water, and proper childcare in place.
During the summer of 2019 I had the opportunity to read some of these women’s stories and to uncover the hidden labor of working mothers and doting wives during the Disney Studio strike. These records constitute the basis for my second dissertation chapter which examines the complex and sometimes contradictory roles that women held during this tumultuous moment in Disney history. Women in the burgeoning entertainment industry of the 1920s–1950s participated in the building of powerful empires. They labored in their careers, in their homes, and sometimes in the careers of their partners. Through my research I aim to show that we need to rethink the primitive categorizations of “work” vs. “women’s work” by collapsing domestic and public spaces.
My dissertation examines women’s labor in the early animation industry as it intersects with racism, domestic work, and emerging technologies. To this end, I aim to read an alternate history of animation’s development into a fully rationalized industrial complex from the perspective of the women that built it. The multiplicity of women’s labor—as artists, as activists, as mothers—built the foundation of the animation industry in the 1920s and 1930s and then sought reform in that same industry in the 1940s and 1950s. Placing women as central to the formation of entertainment empires and the efforts to reform them, I argue, presents a more nuanced and accurate historical view.
—Stephanie Mastrostefano is a PhD candidate in English. She received a 2019 Graduate Student Research Grant from CSWS.