Every Sunday evening, the women of the hit series Mad Men parade across the screen in authentic clothes of the 1960s. Packed into girdles; nylons attached by garters; eyebrows plucked to thin lines; and hair flipped and teased, the "girls" of corporate America walked into the secretarial pool, sat down at their IBM Selectric typewriters and kept their eyes open for a possible husband amongst the male denizens who prowl the offices like hunters at a private game preserve. The girls are hoping to meet a man who will eventually take them away from the preserve to a nice apartment or house in the suburbs.
Mad Men, the self-named title for those who worked in the advertising industry in New York City's Madison Avenue, follows the clients and employees of a fictitious agency through the early 1960s. The attention to detail and historical context shows a world far removed from today - even though it was less than fifty years ago. A woman in the workplace faced far more than the mythical "Glass Ceiling." She faced a wall as solid as concrete if she wanted to climb the corporate ladder. Mad Men is a history lesson and a homage, IMHO, to the women who put up with and eventually broke through that barrier to success and well-paying jobs.
When I started working at the phone company during the early sixties, I was attending university and working part time. There was a "company union" because the full time operators (all women) were considered to be working for "pin money." It took years and several unsuccessful organizing campaigns to educate and bring these women forward to realize that their work was worth better pay and recognition. It was also a time when women sought and finally achieved (after a class action suit) the chance to work in the "craft" jobs like switchman and frameman. Notice the titles. That particular ceiling was broken back in the sixties, but the women who took these jobs came to be called switch witches and frame dames. Their work ethic, qualifications and sexuality were questioned by men who got their jobs right off the street - because they were men. These pioneers stayed in those jobs and progressed, many achieving managerial positions or top craft jobs.
One of the female characters in Mad Men is the embodiment of the beginnings of the women's movement. Peggy starts her career at Sterling Cooper in the secretarial pool. (She does make one very serious mistake: she has a brief fling with a soon-to-be-married account executive.) She recovers from that to assert herself to write copy for an ad campaign. She shows that she has a better handle on the woman's perspective (Duh!) and she's soon given other tasks, but she has to do this all outside her regular secretarial work, while the mad men she is making look good sit in the conference room, drinking and assessing the physical beauty of the secretarial pool. At the end of the first season, her work is finally rewarded and she is given a very small raise and promoted to her own desk in a shared room with another copywriter. It's a small start, but appropriate to the times.
In the second season, she is learning and evolving into a first class writer and a major asset to the firm. For that, she gets the cold shoulder from the secretarial pool she came from and left out of many of the meetings and extracurricular activities of the mad men. One of those "Hell, yes!" moments comes at the end of the fifth episode when she says to the man whom she was once secretary to, after a meeting where she presented her pitch, "Thank you, Don." The expression of shock on his face was priceless.
There was also a memorable quote from account executive Don Draper when a woman who ran her father's successful department store came to the ad agency to change the image of the staid but well-established store. She disagreed with one of the suggestions, to which Draper, stood up from the conference table and left the room saying, "No woman will speak to me like that!"
And if you think that's bad, you should see how they treat Jews, blacks and homosexuals. All very true to the attitude in the 1960s. I remember it well; I was there. I was Peggy, but without the affair.
