It’s not that the female characters aren’t fleshed out either, but very few of them even attempt to challenge the male dominance that was an accepted part of life in the early sixties. However, they do get their own way by various ways and means, mostly sexually, an arena where the men positively flounder.
As a TV drama Mad Men is at its most uncomfortable when history intrudes on the mythical advertising world they inhabit, especially when race is the issue. The announcement of Martin Luther King’s assassination comes during an advertising awards show and guest speaker Paul Newman’s overtly political spiel is interrupted by a question from the floor that spills the news of the atrocity. The reaction of the exclusively white advertising audience is of concern and well, more concern, but the awards show eventually resumes as nobody knows what else to do.
The sirens wailing in the background and live TV pictures of buildings on fire in Washington are as specific as it gets about the incendiary situation on the streets. Joan trying to embrace a black employee typifies the discomfort in the office – but then it all simply evaporates and the focus returns to the machinations going on in the imaginary advertising world.
The end result is that the historical events that you know actually happened don’t seem to have the verisimilitude of the fantasy they intrude on. Luckily we don’t rely on Mad Men for a view on history – yet.
While it could be argued that men are almost entirely responsible for creating society as we know it, the lust for power still drives men to dominate every position on offer and share as little as possible with the female of the species.
Mad Men’s Peggy Olson could probably be perceived as a prototype feminist. Peggy’s a woman with brains and ambition who keeps on butting her head against unreasonable male demands and strictures. The irony is that when she finally has the opportunity to be in charge herself, she naturally models herself on the only style she’s ever known – the male style - and is dismayed to find that her (male) subordinates hate her.
Women have so much to offer this society yet they are constantly repudiated and belittled by the current crop of Mad Men. Our own Mad Abbott fairly frothed at the mouth recently when attacking Professor Gillian Triggs in the Australian Parliament. He was rightly called for serial misogyny by the previous but one PM but it seems he just can’t help himself. There’s an article in The Age on that subject I’ve been asked to direct you to and you can draw your own conclusions.
I will say that it very much depends on your upbringing as to how you perceive women’s role in society. Dick and I in our formative years had the good fortune (by default) to be raised by two women, our mother and grandmother respectively, and I’m sure that coloured our perceptions about women holding the reins of power. I know men who have been reared in patriarchal families who cannot tolerate the notion, let alone the actuality of female doctors, lawyers, judges etc.
It’s left up to our schools to change those perceptions, but I fear that sometimes they don’t get very far because of the child’s upbringing. That the country’s Parliament provides such a bad example is unhelpful. It’s tempting to think we’ve moved on since the era of Mad Men, but I fear that not a lot has changed