Treatment of Women in Mad Men
From the 1900s to about 1960, American literature seems to organize around four major concepts about the country: That America is new, that America is big, that America is rich, and that America is free (McDonald). The study of the television show Mad Men addresses at least three of these concepts -- new, rich, and free -- but as circumscribed by the boundaries of the advertising world of Madison Avenue. The advertising business has been made new for television. The advertising world has not yet seen the creative revolution in advertising that grew out of the work of agencies like Doyle Dane Bernbach and Grey. The 1959 Volkswagen advertising campaign conducted by Doyle Dane Bernbach altered the face of advertising -- it is now considered an iconic representation of 1960s advertising. The ad-men of Madison Avenue often did very well, becoming rich during their ascension to the top rungs of the advertising world. With that level of rich comes an equivalent level of freedom. Not only was the advertising world free to experiment and create profoundly different advertising tone and technique, but the ad-men themselves experienced the sort of freedom that comes with money, status, and power. For each of these frames that both isolate and combine the effects of a fresh, wealthy, and liberated advertising business dominated by W.A.S.P. men, the experiences of women on the periphery of the business -- as secretaries, assistants, and wives -- were radically different from the experiences of the ad-men at the core. This paper will explore the film "treatment" of women in the Mad Men television show, the period placement of the show, and the cultural showcasing that the show provides.
Are the Women of 'Mad Men' Mad, Too?
The "Mad Men" of Sterling Cooper advertising agency are caught in a time warp between the conformity of the Cold War period and the repression of the McCarthy era in the 1950s. The angst-ridden -- yet breathtaking -- cultural revolution and social upheaval of the 1960s had not yet unfolded. A collective voice of discontent among American women could be heard prior to Betty Friedan's identification of "the problem that has no name" in The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963. Friedan honed in on the 15 years following World War II when women slipped quietly and -- from all appearances -- blissfully into an improving domestic "home" front. Friedan, giving lift to consciousness-raising, wrote,
Nobody argued whether women were inferior or superior to men; they were simply different. Words like "emancipation" and "career" sounded strange and embarrassing; no one had used them for years. When a Frenchwoman named Simone de Beauvoir wrote a book called The Second Sex, an American critic commented that she obviously "didn't know what life was all about," and besides, she was talking about French women. The "woman problem" in America no longer existed.
The Equal Pay Act would not be passed until 1963 and the National Organization of Women would not be founded until 1966. A post-World War II trend saw a precipitous decline in college attendance of women compared to men, from 47% in 1920 to 35% in 1958 (Friedan, 1963). The work of early feminists a century earlier seemed to be forgotten -- put on the back burner in sleek turquoise and sunflower yellow kitchens across America. Where women had fought for the right to attend institutions of higher education, young women in the 1950s went to college to "land" a husband. Friedan (1963) wrote, By the mid-fifties, 60 per cent dropped out of college to marry, or because they were afraid too much education would be a marriage bar. Colleges built dormitories for "married students," but the students were almost always the husbands. A new degree was instituted for the wives -- "Ph.T." (Putting Husband Through). (p.1).
The characters of Mad Men, riding the coattails of the I Love Lucy era, would be comfortable inviting Phyllis Schlafly to dinner. Schlafly's anti-feminism, anti-abortion, anti-Semitic, conservative-conspiracy-theory approach to politics is a point-by-point match to zeitgeist of the Madison Avenue ad-men. Betty Friedan would not be asked to sit down to a meal -- or even meet for drinks at the Italian Pavilion on West 55th Street. Friedan represented a threat to the status of the men on Madison Avenue and every other bastion of
The disparity in income of male vs. female heads of household is striking. Analysis of census data revealed that, in 1949, approximately thirty percent of households headed by white males were living in poverty, compared to just under thirteen percent a decade later. For women, more than half lived in poverty in 1949; by 1959, that figure declined to thirty-eight percent. The prosperity of the 1950s was not universally
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