Peggy Olson

Sexism in America: Peggy Olson, Hillary Clinton, Mom & Me

Peggy Olson in the secretarial pool.
Peggy Olson in the secretarial pool.
Peggy Olson
Peggy Olson punches the Madison Avenue glass ceiling in Mad Men.

Beyond the booze, the babes, the cool, retro clothes, and the slick mid-century modern Madison Avenue backdrop,  AMC’s Mad Men is a story about office work and sexism at the dawn of the feminist era– before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), before Roe v Wade, before Ms Magazine, and before the Equal Rights Amendment’s (ERA) revival.

Mad Men’s Peggy Olson is the quintessential poster girl for working women and office survival. As Mad Men begins, Peggy is the Plain Jane secretarial school graduate who is assigned to be the secretary for handsome cad, sex addict, and creative genius Don Draper. As the episodes unfold, Peggy breaks out of the secretarial pool– with Draper’s help– to become a copywriter. Even in her success, Peggy isn’t given the respect she deserves. Initially, she shares a tiny office with the copier, suffers through Draper’s  unrealistic demands that rob her personal life, and works primarily on women’s products– stockings, bras, make-up, and cleaning products. She presents at pitch meetings when they need someone to give “Mom’s opinion.” Fighting sexism and entrenched behaviors, roles, and ideas in the ad agency office, Peggy claws her way up the career ladder and against-all-odds becomes a sought-after creative genius in her own right toward the end of the series.

Mad Men presents a more honest view of the 1950s-60s than the moralistic TV shows of the period– like Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet, or Lassie...

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Arizonans are the last people on earth who should act surprised about Trump.

Surprising? Not to me!

Joanna Allhands, like many of her colleagues in the Arizona MSM, is simply mystified by the success of Donald Trump.

But why? That’s the question I keep asking myself.

We could blame it on our pocketbooks. Most of us feel worse off than we were eight years ago, despite assurances that the economy is on better footing. Wages have stagnated. We’re working longer hours with fewer benefits. And for what?

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Anatomy of the “both sides do it” strategy

Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

Birther Pie Chart

At long last, it appears that the Birther conspiracy is enough of an embarrassment to the GOP that they are not only dropping what seemed to be an official position of tacit tolerance, if not encouragement of it. Republicans are now actively distancing themselves from it and the way you can tell for certain they are is they have shifted into full “Democrats do it too!” mode. More specifically, they are accusing one Democrat – none other than Hillary Clinton herself! – of manufacturing the whole thing. I first noticed it on MSNBC’s UP with Steve Kornacki this past weekend, when GOP flack Amy Holmes was quick to raise the accusation when the conversation on the panel turned to the Birther topic. I thought her response was interesting, to say the least, and it turns out that Republicans, including none other than GOP primary front-runner Donald Trump(!), have been pushing this line hard lately, as Dave Weigel explains in the Washington Post.

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Male politicians may shy away from attacking “women” but many will attack the hell out of certain women (contains link to my radio interview)

Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

Carly Fiorina

I got asked to be on KJZZ, the Phoenix area’s public radio station, on Wednesday morning to discuss the upcoming election season and how the two major parties would be targeting female voters. This is because the National Federation of Republican Women is in town for a conference this week.

I think I did okay and was glad for two things: That this wasn’t the typical situation where I’m on a panel with two Republican men (it was just me and Here and Now host Steve Goldstein chatting alone in the studio after he played a taped interview with a Republican strategist) and that I had anticipated that we would be discussing the contrast between Hillary Clinton and rising GOP primary candidate Carly Fiorina and prepared accordingly by reading up on both their campaigns.

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Sorry Trump fans, but it’s good having grownups in charge

Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

“The fundamental cause of the trouble in the modern world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”—Bertrand Russell.

I brought a handful of books to Sedona with me when we were up there but the one I read from start to finish was Jimmy Carter’s A Full Life: Reflections At Ninety. As the title suggests, it’s a straightforward account of Carter’s entire life spanning his childhood on his family’s farm in Plains, Georgia, to a career as a submariner and nuclear engineer in the Navy, and then his lengthy career in public service. I have to admit to rolling my eyes through parts where he would describe his religiosity and the pride he took in his missionary work (not my thing) and puzzling over a few occasions where he described his “moderate views on race” during the Civil Rights era but, for the most part, Carter’s account of his life left me more impressed with the guy than I already was.

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