mad times

As a perennial late-comer to TV shows, I've just discovered AMC's hit program Mad Men. Chronicling the lives of a group of Madison Avenue advertising execs (and their friends and families) in the early 1960s, the show is a fictionalized snapshot of a particular segment of American life at a pivotal period of our history.

There's a lot I like about Mad Men; the buffet of midcentury furnishings is enough by itself to make a design nerd like me drool. But one aspect of the show that I find especially fascinating is its depiction of women in the 60s. The wives, girlfriends, and secretaries of Mad Men live in a world in which women are systematically disempowered. Where men don't exercise complete control (in one scene, a gynecologist threatens to cut off a character's birth control prescription if he feels she's "abusing" it) they retain a subtle power over the women in their lives: it's assumed that the women will defer to their men in every situation. To think that a woman nearly won her party's nomination for the presidency a scant 48 years after the male-dominated world of Mad Men (to put that in perspective, Ms. Clinton was 13 years old in 1960, the year the show's first season takes place) is a stunning example of how far we've progressed. It's also a reminder of the attitudes that underlay our perspective today.

I can't wait for Season 2!