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...
