I saw this on Digg and just had to post it here.  This is a 1938 rejection letter sent by Walt Disney Productions to a woman who queried about a position in the animation department:

I’m trying to imagine what it would feel like to get a letter like this from a literary agent or a  mazagine or publisher to whom I’d pitched a story:  “Sorry, but women currently do not write any of the work we publish.  The only work open to women is signing rejection letters to applicants.”  Because notice, if you will, that the signature on the letter is a woman’s.  I wonder how she felt, sending such a letter that basically told another woman she wasn’t good for anything but paint-by-numbers.

Somehow, this is made all the more horrible by being on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs stationery.  I suddenly feel like my little collection of rejection letters isn’t so bad.  Not even the one I got from the editor of a cat fiction magazine (that’s right, I did try — and fail — to get a work of cat sci-fi published) signed “meowishly yours.”  At least he criticized my story for being too description-heavy and, frankly, pointless, which I can work to improve, and not my gender, which I can’t change.

It almost makes me reconsider using L.R. Burt as my nom de plume.  Maybe I should be Lisa Burt and embrace the fact that I am a woman and that has no bearing on my ability to be successful at creative work.

Speaking of which, I’d better get back to outlining my novel.