Angel (No Relation)

The World’s Gone Mad:

Sexism and Feminism in 1960s Mad Men

(Spring 2010 // Senior Undergrad: 4,063 words)

Matthew Weiner’s and AMC’s Mad Men is a story that centers around a fictional advertising agency, Sterling-Cooper, in 1960s Manhattan.  While the majority of its plot revolves around enigmatic leading man Don Draper, the three lead females in the series seem to attract the bulk of the attention, with some critics saying that “Mad Men is now actually more about the women” (boasting a heavily female writing staff in a time when 70% of television writers are male).[i] These three women function within the show as stand-ins, representatives of female archetypes the ‘60s would make (in)famous—the housewife, the career girl, and the one caught in the middle, uneasy in her reconciliation of what she really wants (the career) and what she believes she should want (the husband).  Betty Draper, Peggy Olson, and Joan Harris (née Holloway) are the embodiments of “uneasy parodies”[ii] of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique and Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl, both works that epitomize and capture the essence of second wave feminism.  They typify the lives that all women in 1960s America were living.  While they helped pave the way toward greater equality and rights for women in generations to come, the problems they illuminated in many ways persist, and in some ways, the works created new problems of their own.  It is my intention to discuss the implications of sexism in 1960s America through Mad Men, and to explore the ways in which it has continued into the present.

The two works to which it would behoove one to pay special attention in regards to Mad Men are the previously-mentioned Feminine Mystique (1963) and Sex and the Single Girl (1962).  The primary focus of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique is the middle-class suburban housewife.  These are the women who have everything they think that they need and have been told that they want—a man, children, a dog, a house in the suburbs, the perfect wallpaper and the curtains to match it—and yet, for some reason, they feel unsatisfied, “empty, somehow,” “incomplete,” and, “as if [they] don’t exist.”[iii] They were “sure they had no problem, even though they did have a strange feeling of desperation.”[iv] Friedan writes of the Betty Drapers of the world:

If a woman had a problem in the 1950s and the 1960s, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself.  Other women were satisfied with their lives, she thought.  What kind of a woman was she if she did not feel this mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor?  She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never knew how many other women shared it.[v]

Women at this time were born and raised to believe that the only way that one could truly be a woman was in the apt fulfillment of her duties as a wife and mother.  They were never raised to believe that they should have careers; working and education were simply what you did while you tried to find a husband.  This was not just the dominant ideology; this was the only ideology.  Women across the country, however, were suffering.  Very gradually people became aware of the fact that there was a problem, but no amount of studies and speculation could figure out what it was.  Betty Friedan calls it “the problem that has no name,” and the entirety of The Feminine Mystique discusses this, but is likewise unable to truly identify it in any concrete fashion.  In part she points the finger of blame at the advertising industry for fabricating notions of what the good wife has to own in order to be her best, shaping reality to resemble advertisements and not the other way around.  It is telling to relate this picture to Betty Draper, who is married to one of the ad men who perpetuate the myth.

Betty Draper is “Don’s perfect wife—living in his perfect suburban home, with his perfect kids […]; the very image of housewives in the early Kennedy era.”  But Betty suffers, a member of “a generation of women who raised families not only because it was what they wanted, but because it was expected—and was all that was open to them.”[vi] She can identify the existence of the problem that has no name, but she’s at a loss as to what to do about it.  “[My mother] wanted me to be beautiful so I could find a man,” she tells her psychiatrist.  “But then what?  Just sit and smoke and let it go till you’re in a box?”  Betty even begins to exhibit symptoms of something Friedan calls “the housewife’s syndrome,”[vii] a physical manifestation of a purely psychological oppression she feels in her role: a loss of feeling in and use of her hands that she routinely experiences causes her to have a minor car accident while chauffeuring her children around.  In response to this incident, she expresses a terrible fear of what could have happened to them had the accident been more severe, “not that it could have killed the kids,” she says, “but worse.”  Her daughter could have “gotten a scar, something permanent […] she could have survived and gone on living with this horrible scar on her face and some long, lonely, miserable life.”  In the beginning, Don bristles at the idea of Betty seeking psychiatric help for this problem.  “I always thought psychiatrists were people you went to when you’re not happy,” he tells her.  “Are you?”  It is clear from Betty’s ambivalent response to the question that she doesn’t understand why she should feel so unhappy, either.  The comfort that a modern woman should take in Betty Draper’s plight is that, though American women still struggle with their gender roles, the 1960s housewife model of which she is emblematic is no longer considered the only way for a woman to be.

It isn’t difficult to believe why Betty Friedan would (and did) scoff at the Helen Gurley Brown way of life and its inclusion within second wave feminism.  Still, it is just as easy to understand why it turns up in the conversation.  While Betty Friedan helped to destroy the idea of the perfect housewife being the best and only suitable position for a modern American woman, Helen Gurley Brown and her book, Sex and the Single Girl, helped to replace it, removing the stigma from being a career girl and from female sex.  It not only helped make these things feminine—which women had been told up until that time that they weren’t—it made them mainstream and acceptable.  In this light, Brown’s name being mentioned amongst second wave feminists makes sense—this was a step in the right direction, helping to not only bring women out of their restrictive roles as housewives but allowing them to live more like men.  On the other hand, Sex and the Single Girl was still essentially about getting a man, and living a day-to-day existence by basically trading sex for money, power, and respect.  It could be thought of as exploitative.  Brown probably never intended to present her work as some kind of feminist doctrine, but she did so unwillingly nonetheless.  Sex and the Single Girl did not simply say, “Sex is all right.”  It said, “Sex is the best way to get what you want.”  Brown went on to become the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine in 1965 until she was ousted in the late 1990s, though it hasn’t changed much since.  Yes, Brown helped pave the way to the sexual revolution—but she preferred the extreme, on the latter half of the virgin/whore dichotomy.  Friedan mentions in The Feminine Mystique how the quest for the perfect appearance is probably part of the problem that has no name, how women in the early 1960s “were out to fit the clothes, instead of vice-versa.”  A large portion of Sex and the Single Girl is devoted to the appearance, calorie restriction and staying thin, and even at age 85, Brown’s ideal weight was 95 pounds, and one of the things she hated most about herself was her “tummy,” which was, of course, nonexistent.[viii] She may have contributed to the removal of the sexual taboos for the women of the 1960s, but she also contributed to the sentiment that in order to catch a man—which she said, and which Cosmo insists is still true even unto this day, is what you should really want—you have to be thin.  Sex and the Single Girl makes casual sex and careers permissible and was among the first to do so for women in the Mad Men era, but its focus was still, ultimately, on catching and keeping a man, but only a man who could (and would) pay for your dinner, and your jewelry, and your house.  As Matthew Weiner says of Brown, “[she’s] empowering in so many ways, but her end game is: use your sexuality to get everything you can, don’t deny it and what you’re trying to get is a husband.”[ix]

This is a lesson that Joan Holloway, the curvaceous and voluptuous office manager of Sterling-Cooper and queen bee of the secretarial pool, takes to heart.  To say that Joan doesn’t make the best of what she’s got would be to tell a lie, but even Matthew Weiner cites Joan as emblematic of Sex and the Single Girl’s message.[x] Joan sees her sexuality as “a powerful tool, not as a throwback in the push for women’s equality.”[xi] It is clear that, while she is willing to flaunt her sexuality, she is also not to be taken advantage of.  “Joan’s sassy,” says her actress, Christina Hendricks.  “She snaps back.  And men love her because she’s in touch with her sexuality and femininity.  The men in the office can play with her a little bit.  They can tease her, and she’s not going to be in the bathroom crying later.”[xii] In spite of, or perhaps because of, her sexual nature, Joan is still respected around the office.  She performs her job with a finesse and attention to detail so great that any working person, man or woman, should envy her commitment.  Despite this dedication to her work, and her college degree, once she reaches the position as manager of the secretaries, she is unable to advance further.  For the most part, she never claims to want more, telling a new girl that if she makes the right moves, in a few years she’ll be one of the best secretaries at Sterling-Cooper, living in Manhattan, but “if you really make all the right moves, you’ll be out in the country and you won’t be going to work at all.”

In the second season, however, Joan fills in at the media department of Sterling-Cooper, in a more respectable and better-paid position.  Like of all her work she performs this job better than most men could do it, but, in the end, somebody (a man, of course) significantly less capable and intelligent is given the full-time job.  “They did not even think of her,” says Weiner of this slight.  “It was literally like, ‘Oh, there’s a temp.’”[xiii] It never even occurred to any of her male superiors to give the job to her, and like all career women would have done, Joan just hid her disappointment well and went back to her normal job.  “That’s how office life was for women in the sixties,” says the actress Hendricks.  “Women did what they were told.”[xiv] In Mad Men, as is the case of office life in the 1960s, one critic writes, “Men demand subservience, which women provide willingly.  […]  The women accept the insults, as if the natural order of things dictates they defer to men, be they dishonest or drunks, because they are men.”[xv]

And in the end, Miss Holloway departs from her job at Sterling-Cooper when she becomes Mrs. Greg Harris, doting wife of a doctor.  He seems nice enough.  He’s handsome.  He’s an up-and-coming surgeon.  She is even willing to overlook the fact that he raped her in her Don Draper’s office as they were celebrating their engagement.  (This, another sign of the times.  There was some debate amongst to viewers as to whether or not Joan understood that she’d been raped.  Hendricks insists she knew quite well what had happened.  “She’s smart.  She’d think it was awful [….]  But she also thinks, ‘Pick yourself up, comb your hair.  You’ve got a dinner reservation; don’t be a baby.  You know many girls this has happened to.’”[xvi])  As soon as she gets what she thought she wanted, however, she begins to partake in her own chapter of The Feminine Mystique.  Her husband doesn’t live up to her ideals.  He’s not a very good doctor.  He’s uncooperative.  First, he pressures her to quit her job because it’s unfeminine to have a career, and then he pressures her to get the job back when his own career begins to suffer.  He shouts at her, complains endlessly about how cruel he thinks the world has been to him, and eventually this becomes too much for Joan, who takes a vase and breaks it over the back of his head.  She realizes that the world has been cruel to her, too, but she, as a woman, isn’t allowed the luxury of saying so.  He has destroyed not just his own dreams but hers as well.

Meanwhile, Peggy Olson lives a life more unintentionally based on the Sex and the Single Girl model, half the lifestyle Brown endorses in her book and half the lifestyle Brown actually lived.  Weiner notes that Brown did not really practice what she preached—yes, she had a husband, but more than anything she was a career girl of her own, eventually becoming a major feminine powerhouse.[xvii] While she begins as a meek and relatively uneducated secretary from Brooklyn at the bottom of the food chain, one of her male superiors recognizes her talent for writing ad copy on accident.  Within a year she is promoted to junior copywriter, and within two years she has her own office with her own secretary, a view, and her name on the door.  But Peggy is only able to secure this promotion after she gains a lot of weight, becoming undesirable to her male coworkers.  It desexualizes her.  It helps to make her just one of the guys.  Many speculate that perhaps Peggy Olson’s ability to be successful is based on her naiveté, that “much of Peggy’s striving—the grab-it-while-it’s-there quality that allowed her to emerge from behind her secretarial duties to become Sterling-Cooper’s first female advertising copywriter—comes from being unaware of other people’s limits on her.”[xviii] Olson may truly be the “quintessential feminist without realizing it”[xix]—she is the only one of the three women who didn’t attend college, and she was raised without a father, in a house full of women.  Perhaps Peggy truly doesn’t notice exactly how limited she is supposed to feel by her sex, and it is in this innocent belief or lack thereof that she is able to break through—because while she’s certainly smart enough to understand that women don’t have it easy in the working world, she hasn’t been trained to observe the natural subservience to men that Betty and Joan have.  She becomes the ideal feminist without ever intending to have done so.  She learns to embrace and enjoy her sexuality.  She only gets better at her job as time passes.  Once she begins to take care of her appearance, she becomes not so much the Sex and the Single Girl woman as Helen Gurley Brown herself, who, likewise, started off as a secretary and had actually worked her way up into a lucrative career as an ad copywriter before she married and wrote the book.  Olson here is the true role model, the only woman of the three who never allows her gender to restrict her aspirations.  She gets many of her promotions and her office because she stands up and asks for them very explicitly.  “You young women are very aggressive,” says her boss when she requests the office (and he gives it to her).  “There are 30 men out there who didn’t have the balls to ask me.”

Most are careful not to observe Mad Men’s “retro sexism” as entirely outdated.  “You tell me if this is a period piece,” says Weiner of the show.  “The men are asking: ‘Is this it?’  The women are asking: ‘What’s wrong with me?’  You tell me if that sounds like it’s 1960 or 2007.”[xx] He points out that as of 2008, “the starting salary for banking […] is $150,000.  But for women it’s $90,000.”[xxi] This isn’t particularly new information in the type of economy that awards women something like 80 cents on the dollar for the same jobs that men are performing even when they are, by law, supposed to be earning equal pay for equal work.  Workplaces are no longer allowed to discriminate according to gender, legally, but they still do so under the table.  As I noted in the beginning of this paper, seven out of 10 television writers are still male.  The Equal Rights Amendment, which sat on the table in Congress for years and was supposed to lawfully give American women equal rights in all ways never passed.  It simply aged and went unnoticed, the big pink elephant in the legislative branch, until its time was up and it had to be thrown out.  And in the past few years, studies have begun to emerge that simply state that “since the early seventies, women, en masse, have become more miserable.”[xxii] The interpretation of this kind of data is, for obvious reasons, the cause of much debate, a Rorschach test of our times.  A (female) journalist, Ruth Sunderland, says that the information displeases her because it is “a bogus set of measurements that can all too easily be manipulated by reactionary thinkers who believe that women are only truly fulfilled when we are elbow-deep in dirty nappies.”[xxiii] Instead, Sunderland offers the interpretation that the greater opportunity in and of itself hasn’t made women unhappier; it has simply made their lives more complex.  Women still “bear the lion’s share of childcare, housework, and looking after elderly relatives,” and in addition to that, are expected to have an income.  Men benefit disproportionately; they still aren’t often primary caregivers, and now they need to work less to support their households because of a second income from women.  We see from Mad Men that women in the 1960s had it hard, that even if they didn’t have to earn an income in order to survive it didn’t mean they were necessarily happy or complete; however, it is also true that earning an income is likewise not the pathway to happiness.  “It’s not that we’re unhappy because we have too much choice,” says Sunderland, “but because we’ve got too much to do.”

Meanwhile, American women and girls are still facing body image crises.  The policy of changing one’s body to fit the clothes and not the other way around has continued into the present.  It has only gotten worse.  Christina Hendricks, at a trim and unashamed 115 pounds, is far from being fat and is most decidedly not unattractive, but, ironically enough, says she had a difficult time finding work in the industry because of her weight until she found a television show that takes place in the 1960s, where all of a sudden her shape became one of her greatest assets.[xxiv] But the Helen Gurley Brown model of getting a man (though it is now far more acceptable not to marry him) by being thin and perhaps overtly sexual still dominates.  The cover stories on the most recent issue of Cosmopolitan speak for themselves:  “Speak His Sex Language,” it says.  “The Sex Article We Can’t Describe Here!”  “50 Things to Do Butt Naked.”  “Easy, Fun Ways to Fall More in Love With Your Man.”  “Make Everyone Wish They Were You!” it suggests and, my personal favorite, “Sex Up Your Eyes”[xxv]—because every woman should be deeply concerned about the sex appeal of her retinas.  Never once, in 250 pages of fashion, sex, make-up, weight loss, cleavage-enhancing man-catching tips and advertisements is there a photograph of a woman above a size 4.  Sex and the Single Girl’s ideology never disappeared.  It is not a relic of an age far behind us.  It has simply replaced “housewife” as the only way that a woman can be with an on-the-go sex object who still doesn’t have equal rights but should find inequality and dry skin of equal concern.  The 21^st century has taught American women, myself included, that we are unworthy of, that I am unworthy of a good man—which of course I should both want and need, even if he no longer should be my primary source of income—because I have the wrong shoes, the wrong waistline, and the wrong sexual experience.  If I do find him—and a lifetime of Cosmopolitan has told me that I must, that though I may not be a blight on society if I am unmarried by the age of 30 like I might have been in the 1960s, all that has happened is the age has been moved to 40, or 50—I will need to dedicate myself to wearing the clothes he wants to see me in, to having the sexy eyes he wants to look at, to telling him the things he wants to hear even if I don’t mean them.  (The “Fun, Easy Ways to Fall More In Love” article provides me with a wealth of information that will deeply enrich my future relationships:  “Without asking,” it tells me, “swap his empty beer for a fresh one when he’s watching the game.”  “Mini-massage his neck,” it suggests.[xxvi] All of these things will enhance our love for each other.)

This is why it matters (and why it is important to me) in the 21^st century to look back with Mad Men on how things used to be and to ask ourselves:  What has changed, and, more importantly, what still needs to change?  It may be true that Mad Men is set in the 1960s, but none of these problems have disappeared.  Mad Men shows us a not-too-distant past, one far from being dead and gone.  “I wanted to do a story about a woman getting fat because she couldn’t deal with being sexualized at work all the time, and that more important, she was never going to be taken seriously professionally until that happened.  She becomes a guy, and they give her a big punch in the shoulder.  She makes it,” says Weiner of Peggy Olson.[xxvii] In many ways this model is still alive.  How can a woman like myself succeed in the male-dominated show business?  How can she be taken seriously seeking a job writing television, when the vast majority of her peers are men?  It often seems that she can only do this by desexualizing herself, by sacrificing her femininity for the sake of her career.  In the 1960s, women feared having careers because they were taught that doing so was unfeminine.  Ironically, in 2010, sometimes, the only way for a woman to have the career that she wants is to be unfeminine intentionally, to become a man in order to succeed in a man’s world.

If Betty Friedan were to come back from the dead, and write a new, updated Feminine Mystique, one that discussed the plight of the American woman in 2010, what would she have to say?  How much of that second wave of feminism, like the Sex and the Single Girl dogma, begat as much inequality as it conquered?  Would much have changed between the 1963 version and the present?  Has the “problem that has no name” gone away, or has it simply evolved?