Gender roles and inequality in Mad Men's 1960s advertising world

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 masculinity in a society that seemed hell-bent on eroding the rights of women -- rights hard-won on the Western frontier and the converted factories of an America at war. By Friedan's telling, "In the fifteen years after World War II, this mystique of feminine fulfillment became the cherished and self-perpetuating core of contemporary American culture" (Friedan).

Low Concept, High Modernism

The show Mad Men would not be considered high concept -- the Hollywood vernacular for a story that can be pitched, with all the plot complexity understood, in just one to three lines -- it does depict high modernism. The story line is highly iconic, embedded in the interpersonal drama, and does not have the mass appeal of a high concept idea. For instance, January Jones says, "A lot of what I do with Betty is in the eyes. A lot of feelings are unspoken, so that's kind of been fun to play with" (Hardy). A high concept film is not played largely "in the eyes" of a character. The fact that negotiations -- very public negotiations -- for a third season of Mad Men did not begin until the second season had concluded is telling. The threshold for syndication of a television show is often the attainment of a third season (Hardy). As Kevin Baggs, Lionsgate's president of production and programming, said, typically "the money truck would be backing up" (Hardy). As Hardy points out, "with only 13 episodes a season as opposed to 24 for a typical broadcast-network show, Mad Men still has a ways to go." Baggs' assessment is that it "characterizes a classic situation where you have a certain expectation and certain realities that are headed in different directions" (Hardy). Still, it is safe to conclude that even if Mad Men doesn't have the mass appeal of a high concept story, it does have popular cultural relevance to the extent that it has even influenced common language. In the same way that people use "space age" or "Neanderthal," people can use Mad Men shorthand by referring to a pencil skirt as a Mad Men skirt or a three-martini lunch as a Mad Men lunch (and all that it might imply).

The world of the generation that fought World War II -- with their three-pronged focus on settling down, starting families, and taking advantage of the new prosperity -- devolved into a world filled with anonymous, exploited, and alienated people. The characters in Mad Men display the hallmark uncertainty, ambiguity, and fragmentation of the modern personality. Their social relationships are disembedded and are beginning to show the self-reflexive consciousness that will characterize the newly emergent multiple selves of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Nor do those relationships yet exhibit the pin-ball game existence that will characterize the next era where having therapy is de rigueur, divorce approaches normative, and swinging and mate-swapping achieve an embarrassed and marginalized lifestyle status.

The women of Mad Men, especially, are ambivalent and uncertain of their identities. About her character, January Jones says, "Betty's whole life is a facade. If she can't keep up the pretense everything is perfect, she will crumble and die, I think" (Hardy). The women of Mad Men exemplify "the problem that has no name" (Friedan).

Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor. They baked their own bread, sewed their own and their children's clothes, kept their new washing machines and dryers running all day. They changed the sheets on the beds twice a week instead of once, took the rughoolag[footnoteRef:1] class in adult education, and pitied their poor frustrated mothers, who had dreamed of having a career. Their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers; their highest ambition to have five children and a beautiful house, their only fight to get and keep their husbands. [1: A rughoolag is a huge Turkish rug, so Friedan refers to a rug weaving class. ]

The Rashomon Effect

In reviewing the television show Mad Men, it is important to consider the Rashomon effect which helps to explain how different people can have conflicting yet plausible recollections of an event that happened in the past. The influence of the subjectivity of perception has been methodically addressed by science, however, the Rashomon effect derives not from psychology experiments, but from film. In this regard, it is particularly apropos to an exploration of the various recollections about life as an ad-man in a Madison Avenue advertising firm. The Rashomon effect gets its name from the film Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa in which a crime is witnessed by four people who give contradictory recollections of the incident.

While the Rashomon effect may not alter a viewer's willingness to suspend disbelief while watching Mad Men, it can help to explain why some people who lived in Chicago during 1990s and early 2000s will not recall ever meeting anyone from the Mafia -- at least of whom they were aware -- but for others, the television show The Sopranos -- created by David Chase of HBO -- is a perfect depiction of their memories. Mad Men was conceptualized by Matthew Weiner who had become enamored of the period through tales told by his parents during his growing up years. While Weiner was writing script for the HBO show Becker, he began to work on Mad Men as a concept that he would find totally engaging. He wrote a pilot script and unsuccessfully shopped it around Hollywood, piling up rejections in the process. But Weiner had faith in the concept, in his writing, and in his capacity to perfectly manifest the period and the advertising business at the time of the story. Weiner told Bruce Harper of Vanity Press, "I knew the script by heart. I carried it in my bag for four years, every day. I would've given it to anyone. If you and I had sat together on an airplane, I would've given it to you, or I would've talked about it" (Harper). Harper found this confession disarming and wrote that "Weiner refused to move on, evincing the kind of stubborn, even touching faith in his work that is usually knocked out of people in Hollywood by that point in their careers" (Harper). The point is that Mad Men is Matthew Weiner latent and constructed memory of Madison Avenue advertising business. As such, it is one truth. But if an inquiry is made of the men who worked at stand-out advertising agencies in New York City during the Mad Men years, the Rashomon effect is neatly demonstrated.

George Lois is a legendary art director whose covers of Esquire magazine were recently exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and who co-founded the advertising agency Papert Koenig Lois in 1960. Lois described the Mad Men period as pre-Friedan, pre-Millet, pre-Greer, pre-Steinem, and pre-Abzug. In his telling, "The [women's movement] wanted liberation from women's traditional roles. Like any Greek male, I wondered where it would take us. Was there a point where sexual equality would end and confusion begin?" Given that, when George Lois recalls the Mad Men period, he still projects a picture very different from the cultural message relayed by Mad Men episodes.

When I hear "Mad Men," it's the most irritating thing in the world to me. When you think of the '60s, you think about people like me who changed the advertising and design worlds. The creative revolution was the name of the game. This show gives you the impression it was all three-martini lunches. We worked from 5:30 in the morning until 10 at night. We had three women copywriters. We didn't bed secretaries. I introduced Xerox. It was hard, hard work and no nonsense. "Mad Men" is typical of "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," those phone S.O.B.s. I was a Green bigmouth, a Korean War veteran. I used my ethnicity to promote my talent. Before you knew it, most of the great creative talent was Italian, Greek, and Jewish. We broke through the terrible WASO-ness of the business. (Harper)

Lois's view is not shared equally across the industry, and it certainly is not what is depicted in Weiner's personal view of Mad Men.

William Bernbach, a Jewish man who co-founded the agency Doyle Dane Bernbach also remembers a tamer, more seriously-regarded business. Bernbach was the creator of the Volkswagen print ads known as "Think Small" and "Lemon" that became legendary and are, in fact, the object of grudging admiration by the character executives of Mad Men's Sterling Cooper advertising agency. John L. Bernbach, who followed in his father's advertising footsteps to become founder and president of NTM ad agency, offers his recollection of life as a child of an advertising executive great:

What do I think of Man Men? As a soap opera or as an advertising show from the 1960s? I was a teenager then, and our family was very close. My father never took clients out, he didn't travel, didn't entertain. In the show, there's not a scene without somebody smoking and drinking. And it's an overly simplistic view of the process of coming up with ads. You were handling millions of dollars of people's money, and no one took it lightly. Here they're smoking, joking, ogling girls, then they think of a line. (Harper).

Weiner's account is not far from that provided by Jerry Della Femina, age 69, to Bruce Harper of Vanity Fair. Femina has owned six ad agencies -- the most current being Della Femina Rothschild Jeary & Partners -- and wrote a successful account of his 1970s advertising career (Harper). The book title is in-your-face and was a slogan Della Femina proposed for the Panasonic account while creative director at the Ted Bates ad agency: From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor (Harper). Della Femina's take on the advertising agency is likely shaped by his ethnic orientation. He told Bruce Harper of Vanity Fair that,

"Mad Men" accurately reflects what went on -- the smoking, the prejudice, and the bigotry. I interviewed at J. Walter Thompson for the Ford account and was told, "We don't want your kind." It took me two years to figure out that he meant I wasn't a WASP. Before the war, the joke was that a family would give one son to the military, one to the priesthood, and the dolt went into advertising. After the war, Grey Advertising was the Jewish agency, and Doyle Dane Bernbach broke off from Grey. Suddenly, there was a whole infusion of Jewish copywriters and Italian art directors or George Lois, who was Greek. I was part of that group. (Harper).

Della Femina, a charter member of the New York City ad agency Rat-Pack, asserted that drinking abounded. "People had bottles in their drawers. For lunch, we used to go to…where Michaels is [now]," which is the current media power spot on West 55th Street. Della Femina recalls that,

The bar is still in the same place, and the bartender would start shaking our martinis as soon as we walked in. They would literally serve us the first martini as we were sitting down, the second, the third, then we would figure out what to eat. It was such a wild time, and the best period for advertising, so much looser (Harper).

At some point, the reader is likely to notice that each of the "testimonies" give in the narrative above are from men -- whether self-described mad men or mild men -- and none are from women advertising executives. On the one hand, this fact strengthens the veracity of their statements and on the other hand, it establishes limitations with regard to conclusions that can be drawn from the men's portrayals. If history -- and perhaps memory serves -- men tend to be notorious for exaggerating their exploits, although this propensity can be substantively impacted by the contemporary audience. To wit, will one's current spouse, children, or mother read what has been reported? However, the argument regarding the position and influence of women in the world of advertising is made more robust by the absence of any eye-witnesses that can effectively counter the perspectives of the male advertising executives. Would gender-bias have been less in evidence if Bruce Harper had been reporting from the point-of-view of the women who worked in the ad agencies? It is difficult to say, but the absence of this perspective erodes confidence in the narrative, and even in the visual anthropology that characterizes even the smallest details of a Mad Men production.

Marrying Well and Other Mirages

Throughout Weiner's serial narrative, the story is pegged to real life historical events and people. Few capture the imagination of Mad Men viewers so well as John Fitzgerald and Jackie Kennedy. It is not difficult to see Jackie Kennedy in the character of Betty Draper, and "like JFK before him, Don Draper enhances his own cachet by also marrying well" (Edgerton, New Sentimentality). Betty Draper is a former fashion model, an accomplished equestrian, and a Bryn Mawr graduate who speaks fluent Italian. But that's at home -- inside Sterling Cooper, the faceless new girl, Peggy, is secretary to Don Draper. Her desk is just outside Draper's office where the "mid-level office lotharios, the 'junior-account boys," move past her desk with impunity, casually harassing her (Butler). Joan is the supervisor of the secretarial pool, who is fond of towering over Peggy while she sits humbly at her desk. The absence of office-as-private-retreat for the women who work at Sterling Cooper is an expression of their powerlessness -- the "women are pubic and constantly exposed, the men…are able to escape into the dark privacy of their offices" (Perlman). The office as an emblem of corporate power is expressed here on yet another level, and it is reminiscent of the film The Apartment, in which rows of desks in a large open room, totally lacking in privacy, is statement of the relative position of the accountants in the corporate hierarchy.

Mad Men portrays the social construction of women's roles in a moderate patriarchy, just as it illustrates the sexiosocioeconomic construction of men living in an increasingly refined late capitalistic society. "Men construct identities for women and…women struggle for narrative space in and through those representations" (McCabe & Akass, Women in Advertising). The dynamics between Joan and Peggy in the office environment exemplify this struggle. Joan is a force to be reckoned with and excels at "distracting me with her 'to-be-looked-at-ness'…her strategy for asserting her authority inside the male-dominated world of Sterling Cooper" ( McCabe & Akass). Joan tells Peggy to make use of a brown paper bag when she goes home by putting one over her head, getting naked, and then looking in the mirror. Voluptuous Joan wears revealing knits and her generous curves -- thanks to the bullet-bras or rocket-cone bras that were favored at the time -- stand out against the hard-edges of the sleek late '50s modernist office environs (Butler). In contrast, a male co-worker asks Peggy is she is Amish. Competition is the modus operandi in a capitalist culture, and it is everywhere evident in the relationships between the people who work at Sterling Cooper.

Conclusion

As the series progresses over several seasons, the characters manifest their individual character arcs. Overlaying these individual changes are those accommodations to the forces of cultural changes. Where Betty, Peggy, and Joan manifest emblematic positions of women in the late 1950s and early 1960s -- in the home and in the workplace -- Midge displays the confident new voice of an independent woman. And she defines her life in a way that Meagan, Don's fiancee, cannot. Meagan, of course, is Don's secretary -- their relationship will be forever underscored by the unequal status that propelled them together. Midge is not overcome with suburban sadness or the problem without a name, nor is she so independent as to threaten Don's self-assured masculinity -- in fact, he asks her to come to Paris with him and he wants to marry her (Kelleter).

Peggy and Joan rise in the industry, making real contributions to various advertising campaigns, but both are vulnerable to the whimsical behavior of the Mad Men who are unable to permanently reconcile their behavior and their professed values. Don does recognize Peggy's abilities -- and says so straight out to her when he asks her to come with him to the new agency -- indicating that he needs and relies on her talent (South). He asks her to help him (South).

The cultural forms examined through the television show Mad Men permits the viewer to interrogate and transform their conventional understandings of the forms (Stokes). The series is critically sophisticated and also historically knowledgeable about the period and the advertising industry (Stokes). The treatment of gender roles slips easily between irony and parody, increasing the viewers' enjoyment and easing some of the discomfiture that is inescapable in the viewing. The show is mythologized nostalgia more than a postmodern reflection of the conventions of the time. Certainly the show is meta-textual in both presentation and reflection of society, but it simultaneously highlights the Anglo-male centricity of the period. And it is through that lens that we come to understand the "treatment" of women.