The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

by Mallory O'Meara

The problem with being the only woman to ever do something is that you have to be perfect. When I found out about her as a teenager, I thought that for Milicent to be the first and only woman to ever design a famous monster, to be one of the first female animators, she had to be superhuman. She had to have been better than any other woman who ever wanted to design a monster. She had to have been the only one worthy enough to enter that boys’ club. This way of thinking is a maladaptation women have developed over the years to be able to deal with the fact that we’re getting passed on for jobs because we’re female. You force yourself to believe that there just haven’t been any women good enough for the job, rather than accept the fact that the entire system just doesn’t want you in it. Anyone who flouts that system must be an outlier. “Ah!” we think when we see a woman who does the thing we want to do. “Of course. She must be perfect. She’s got a three hundred–point IQ and can levitate and breathe fire. That’s why she got the job. Normal women can’t get jobs like that.” Milicent was the only one, so she had to carry the weight of all my hopes and dreams. She had to be perfect, she had to be a genius, she had to be the very, very best. She was more than a hero, she was a goddess, shedding her human form. That’s the danger in having so few women acknowledged and hired in the film industry. Instead of looking at these women and thinking “Yes, I can get there, too!” girls can ju...