It is hard for me now to imagine watching the very first episode of Mad Men four years ago and thinking, “This is an incredibly slick and gorgeous production, but I’m not sure I need to watch vintage misogyny when I get a daily dose of 21st century misogyny as it is.”
I was taken aback by how blatant the sexism was, how all the men leered openly at Peggy Olson on her first day of work; how the women banded together in support of this highly sexualized environment; how Don Draper, this man who seemed to have integrity, had a beatnik mistress in the city while his unsuspecting wife and children slept peacefully in their storybook suburban home.
Just in case you are not a Mad Men fan, but just in case: the show takes place in the early 1960s, and is largely set in the offices of fictional ad agency Sterling Cooper. Its primary focus is Don Draper, the agency’s creative director, and much of the first three seasons have concerned his true identity as Dick Whitman, son of a dirt-poor farmer and a prostitute who died giving birth to him. Don takes extreme measures to hide his past, but it seems throughout the course of the series, one by one people find out. It all came to a head halfway through last season, when Don’s wife Betty discovered his secret shoebox of shame (that he keeps for what reason, guilt?) and went to Reno to divorce him — though I suspect, really, that Betty was looking for a reason to leave Don ever since she met Henry Francis. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Though Don is central to Mad Men, it’s the female characters that keep me invested in the show, the fascinatingly complex, stubborn, sometimes hateful women, and the ways they stand up to, work against, or in some cases work within the intricate power structures of sexism. I was afraid that the show would adopt some sort of Virginia Slims-esque “You’ve come a long way, BABY” stance in relation to the hostile working environment — hostile home environment, for that matter — but I quickly realized that I wasn’t giving the writers and producers enough credit. They’ve given me a character like Ken Cosgrove. Ken is an absolute slime about women in general, but he’s one of the first to recognize and respect Peggy’s copywriting talents. Pete Campbell is worse than Ken, he’s just a weasel you want to string up by the end of the first season, but by the end of the second? I defy anyone to not feel a little sympathy toward Pete. (He blows this surplus of goodwill in Season 3, when he coerces the neighbor’s au pair into having sex with him, and then blames Trudy for his bad behavior because she wasn’t around to keep him in line.)
Mad Men also does not fall into the trap of presenting 1960s New York culture in either a nostalgic glow, drawing a clear line between quaint old-fashioned ideas about gender roles and our ultra-modern “post-feminist” society (and don’t get me started on how much I despite the term “post-feminist”), or in a simplified “they are us” way, hammering into us the idea that we are just as culpable now as they were then. (Even though I think we are.)
Peggy begins the series as Don’s secretary and works her way up to junior copywriter by the end of the first season — the first woman to write for Sterling Cooper since WWII. By the end of season two, Peggy has her own office. By the third season’s end, she’s finally able to negotiate as an equal with Don. Their professional relationship has been an absolute pleasure to watch develop over the course of the series, from the moment in the first episode when Don gently rejects Peggy’s halfhearted come-on (prompted by Joan’s advice on how to better get along in the office), to the moment at the end of season three when he comes to her apartment door, hat in hand, ready to acknowledge and respect her value to him.
One of my unanswered questions is why Peggy lets Pete into her apartment at the end of the first episode, much less her bedroom. Is Pete supposed to be a Don substitute, and sex with him is her way of ceding to unofficial office protocol? It feels as though this is a classic icebox scene — an Alfred Hitchcock phrase, defining the sorts of questions you don’t ask until long after a movie or show has ended, and you’ve gone to the icebox for a late-night snack — that the show’s writers glossed over in order to set up Peggy’s pregnancy. Her surprise pregnancy (which I’d been spoiled for, which has since made me wary of reading anything about upcoming seasons or episodes) seems a handy plot device, as melodramatic a moment as anything in the soap opera scripts Joan reads for Harry in Season 3. Yet it also provides us with a solid crossroads moment at a historical period when not many women had similar opportunities: is Peggy going to choose a family or a career?
She chooses work, and I’ve always thought that the main reason she was kept in a mental hospital after giving birth was not that she’d had some sort of psychotic break, but that she didn’t want her own child. And how DARE she. Drugged and confused, it’s not until Don visits and tells her to move on (“It will shock you, how much this never happened”) that both she and the show are able to do just that. I’m looking forward to seeing what Season 4 brings for Peggy — all I’ve been able to glean so far is that she has a new hairdo. (Honestly, TV media — I know Matthew Weiner keeps a tight lid on spoilers, but surely you can do better than that.)
Peggy doesn’t have it easy after choosing her career. It’s still a hard road to walk, with male colleagues not taking her seriously and female coworkers resenting her promotion. And that’s one of the things I like most about the show, that it puts up all of these scenarios that happen after characters think they get what they want. Peggy has to discover for herself how to balance conducting business like a man, as Don tells her, and like a woman, as Bobbie Barrett advises (in one of the least egregious, most sane things that woman ever says), and she’s not well-liked, or well-respected, until maybe at the very end of last season. Joan marries a doctor, but he’s an idiot, and she still has to support him — never mind that she has to live with the fact that she chose to stay with him after finding out how little he respects her, after he rapes her in Don’s office. (Not that this would’ve been identified as rape back then.) And Betty, Betty who lives the upper-class fairy tale of landing a handsome husband solely on the virtue of her beauty, producing children with him, who halfway through season 1 realizes that this is all there is, and it’s mind-numbingly boring.
One can imagine that this would have been Joan’s fate, had her lout of a husband been worth a damn. (It’s interesting to me that Joan refuses to be kept in a metaphorical cage by Roger yet willingly leaps into the one offered by marriage.) How’s that for irony — if Greg were smart and capable, Joan would be a typical doctor’s housewife. But because he’s an incompetent, petulant man-child, Joan must work and exercise the parts of her that make her our Joanie. She’s intelligent, intuitive, confident, level-headed in a crisis, the ideal office manager. While Peggy is uncomfortable under the male gaze, Joan basks in it, understanding not only that within this patriarchal structure, this is where her power lies, but also that by the same rules, this power is ultimately limited. And she’s OK with that, has no interest in subverting it — doing so would threaten her position and status.
But she’s not exactly free. The person who was supposed to have been her meal ticket is now her albatross. It was implied at the end of last season that Greg would be off to Vietnam, and I can only hope that his character goes the way of Peggy’s baby, never to be mentioned again. Still, what does Season 4 have in store for Joan? At the end of last season, she’d returned to her office manager’s position, coming full circle back to the place where she most certainly ruled, and yet not taking any steps forward. Is this all she’s capable of? I think not.
I recently read a thought-provoking article on Salon.com that argued Mad Men sets up its female characters to be punished and humiliated, as opposed to its male characters who behave badly and get away with it. While I’m not entirely sure I agree with everything in the article, I do think that the show excels at portraying flawed and damaged characters, both male and female, who struggle to come to terms with the consequences of their actions. But if anything takes a hit on this show, it’s the institution of marriage. There isn’t a single couple who is happily married, at least the way we’d like to understand it. I’d argue that at by the end of Season 3, the closest we get to a happy marriage is, surprisingly, Pete and Trudy, while the Drapers are clearly the poster couple for Marriage: You’re Doing it Wrong.
It’s easy to hate Betty Draper. Most of the time she comes across as an ungracious spoiled brat. She refers to herself on more than one occasion as a princess, and its easy to see that she’s employing the same parenting techniques as her mother. I don’t really root for Betty in the same way I root for Peggy and Joan, but I do sympathize with her. I don’t think it’s an accident that she shares a name with Betty Friedan, and in fact most of the time when I watch Betty Draper’s scenes I scream for Friedan to show up and smack some sense into her. The most insight we gain into Betty’s character comes in Season 1, in an episode called “Shoot,” as Betty lies on her psychiatrist’s couch (not suspecting at all that her therapist tells her husband everything) and talks about how her mother, who had recently passed away, raised her to believe that a woman’s worth lies in her physical beauty, but once you get the storybook ending with the handsome man with the good job, the big house, and two kids, then what: “Just sit and smoke and let it go til you’re in a box?” All of Betty’s deplorable actions stem from this dissatisfaction that she perhaps doesn’t feel entitled to have — she got what she wanted, so what’s the problem? And a number of times this is exactly what Don says to her as well, which sort of makes me hate him a little. She can’t exactly say she wants something else, because for her that something else is unfocused and undefined — until Henry Francis shows up.
I’m not sure what to say about a woman who escapes her unhappy marriage by running to another man. It’s completely consistent with Betty’s character, but it worries me. Henry offers financial AND emotional support, whereas Don seems to equate the two (recall how in Season 1 he simply signs over his bonus to Midge, as a sort of farewell present) and doesn’t really do much else to nurture their relationship. Still, no matter how fantastic Henry is (and we don’t know anything about him, really, save he’s sort of a creep who likes to feel up pretty pregnant women), the life he’s offering Betty is most certainly not going to solve her feelings of discontent. I have a feeling Season 4 is going to find Betty looking around her new house and wondering why things aren’t better. Which mostly makes me worry about Sally.
I am brimming over with excitement for Season 4, which premieres this Sunday on AMC at 10:00 PM EST, and am looking forward to discussing each episode with you. What are you looking forward to most?
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