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| LOS ANGELES, CA - SEPTEMBER 18: Actor Jon Hamm of 'Mad Men' on September 18, 2011 in Los Angeles, California. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife) |
Eleanor Clift writes about coming of [professional] age in the era in 'Mad Men' Goes Back to the Office on The Daily Beast
About the experience of hanging out at the set and comparing it to how life was back then:
The two days I spent hanging around the set of Mad Men were like entering a time capsule that took me back to that period in the ’60s, everything from the pencil skirts and stockings with garters to the electric typewriter that was the latest technology. Critics have assailed the way everybody on the show smokes, glorifying a nasty habit that carries significant health risks. But that’s the way it was then. The public high school I attended in Queens even let us out for a smoking break. Mad Men' Goes Back to the Office
I think there are a couple of points to make here. Life was different in the 1960s. And, it changed abruptly mid-decade. I don't know why, but I recall cotton dresses one year and polyester knit the next. One year we had a choice between Shredded Wheat and Kellogg's Corn Flakes and the next year we had Quisp, Quake, Cap'n Crunch and so on. We were constantly, I believe, assaulted by more and more sugar, more and more processing, more, and more ,and more of everything. And, more and more places to buy it. Smoking and drinking were acceptable, vegetarians were usually thus because of religious belief, Women wore the descendant of the corset but not less of a torture device: a girdle. It required absolutely no muscles and actually caused atrophy. There is no comparison between one and the other—if a Girdle is life in prison, SpanxⓇ are community service, outside, in a park, on a nice day.
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| Cap'n Crunch regular flavor cereal (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Another point is that women's role in our society changed. While I didn't work in the sixties, I did in the seventies as a summer phone tech for ATT. I was verbally abused by most of the men I worked with, I was told that women were the cause of war, recession and in general everything bad that had ever happened, starting with Eve. I promoted and supported the ERA. Women could not be airline pilots in the 1960s and the 1970s. The first one was so harangued she quit shortly after taking off. Does anyone else recall a 1964 movie with Fred MacMurray and Polly Bergen, Kisses for My President. Polly Bergen wins election and the first family moves into the White House, but she resigns the office on learning she is pregnant. What a difference between the 1960s and today!
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| wikipedia.org wiki Kisses_for_My_President |
Then in the 1980s, working at a public sector job, I was called honey and sweetie all the time. Seems innocent enough, but like the ads in the article referenced below, there was a subtext. I came from a lower-middle class blue collar family with three daughters. It was absolutely expected that we would go to college and then become secretaries or cosmetologists, marry and have children. My sisters, at least, exceeded parental expectations—one became the CEO of a regional banking corporation and a the other owns several business and professional colleges. I gave up working to go back to school and somehow ended up in non-profit volunteer work, painting and well, blogging.
We were the beneficiaries of the work of so many women: Steinem, Friedan, and Senator Abzug. Work that didn't require us to fit one mold or another but which allowed us to choose. Work that freed us from the "pink collar" if we wanted to work and from the nursery if we CHOSE not to have children.
I know many young women today who, probably weren't at all cognizant that in our recent past women had very different life choices available to us. They don't really get the significance of Roe v. Wade or the ERA in much the same way women of my generation probably don't get how important getting the right to vote was. The victors in a conflict write history. Now if we only know who won.
Life was different, Society was different, the Economy was different.
This is a really interesting gallery of advertisements that were not just sexist but, I think, subtextually sexual: www.thedailybeast.com Mad-Men era sexist ads appearing in Newsweek.
The Wrap offers: Mad Men' Gathers No Dust in 17 Months on the Shelf
Flavorwire brings you Everything We Know About Mad Men Season 5
