The third season of TV series Mad Men premiered this Sunday; in it, the staff at ad agency Sterling Cooper is jettisoned into 1963.
Oh, what a year it turns out to be: Housewives awaken from domestic stupor when The Feminine Mystique is published; Camelot tumbles; singer Sam Cooke writes his iconic song A Change is Gonna Come, about simmering racial tension in the South.
Mad Men, a show its creator Matthew Weiner has said is feminist, signals the third season’s tone in the opening minutes, when Sterling Cooper’s lone male secretary mutters, “This place is a gynocracy.”
Though Manhattan was a man’s world, the woman’s life is well-explored: they’re passed over for jobs; pre-marital sex makes them “strumpets”; men rape them; they consider abortions.
Consider Christina Hendricks’ account of how viewers reacted to her character Joan’s rape: “People say things like, ‘Well, you know that episode where Joan sort of got raped?’ Or they say rape and use quotation marks with their fingers … It illustrates how similar people are today, because we’re still questioning whether it’s a rape.”
I chuckled when Joan shows the new-girl secretary Peggy to her typewriter. “It looks complicated, but the men who designed it made it simple enough for a woman to use,” she assures her.
Mad Men was set in a world on the cusp of change, edging its way to free love, desegregation and violent war — but they clung, and still we cling, to antiquated notions. Every generation has its revolution, and ours is now.
It’s Afghanistan, where a law was passed that allows men to starve their wives for denying them sex. It’s a Carleton student, who is suing her school after it allegedly implied she was “asking for” a sex assault by working late at night in a secluded lab. It’s women being interrogated before an abortion.
Mad Men is a mirror, and if we look into it, we will see that our turmoil is as it always has been.
