It’s been a while, but Victoria and Marcie are back for a new “LesbiSwirl,” this time, to break down Mad Men’s feminism. Alas, Joyce Ramsay (and her finely tailored blazers) may no longer be with us, but there’s still plenty to swirl about.
Mad Men is feminist-but the characters are not. This is a simple, yet vital, distinction in our reading of the show that conveys a larger truth about how feminism as a political ideology has been made palatable to the general public. By turning feminism into a fun, celebrity supported brand, it has lost its potency. Capitalist-driven, repetition and replication-for example, overpriced t-shirts made in sweatshops and donned by swoon-worthy men in the name of feminism-have effectively rendered the term “feminism” meaningless, paving way for its misattribution and misidentification throughout our consumer culture. No wonder, a new Vox poll reported last week, only 18% of Americans identify as feminists. No one knows what the hell feminism even is, let alone what it means.
When it comes to Mad Men, now in its final episodes, there are very clear ways to pinpoint how it is a feminist show. First, the show includes a diverse range of female characters-from white, Westchester housewives to black secretaries; from angsty teenagers to disillusioned 40-something wives; from sexy bombshells to corporate cogs, and everything in between. The female characters are not just diverse. More important, they are complex. And it is the portrayal of their complexity that betrays their humanity-that women are not single-dimensional objects for men’s consumption; they are real people with real lives.
Mad Men passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors. Not only do these women talk to each other about things other than men, they often exhibit a heightened awareness about their own place in the world. Most notably, take, for example, Dawn and Shirley’s verbal acknowledgement of being the only two black women in the office. They know that they are seen as interchangeable as black women, and make a mockery of the office’s racist culture by calling each other by the other’s name:
Mad Men’s women are, arguably, more diverse and more complex than the majority of male characters, whose only desire is to know “what women want” in order to either sell products to them or fuck them.
Today, when only 42% of all speaking and major characters, according to the study “Boxed In: Employment of Behind-the-Scenes and On-Screen Women in 2013-14 Prime-Time Television,” are women, Mad Men’s number of multi-dimensional female characters is a sign of its commitment to representing the variety of women’s lives in 1960s America. Its Dickensian portrait of the decade puts women front-and-center, even though the show presents itself as a drama about “Ad Men.”
Perhaps this is not surprising when a majority of the show’s writers are women. For Season 3, for example, seven of the nine writers were women; in a more recent season, nine out of eleven writers were women. At that time, 80% of prime-time television shows had zero women writers. The 2013-14 “Boxed In” study found that only 25% of television writers are women. The study also showed a statistical correlation between the number of women writers and the number of female speaking-parts.
It is no surprise that Lisa Albert, who has been both a writer and producer of the show for all seven seasons, described Mad Men in an interview with Elle as “stealth feminism of the best kind.”
But, Mad Men’s female characters are not feminists.
Television and pop culture critics have sounded off variously about how the show’s characters are feminists. Peggy Olson has garnered most of that applause, with Time calling her “TV’s most relatable feminist” and Salon deeming her a “feminist hero.”
The seemingly knee-jerk reaction to celebrate Peggy and Joan and Megan as feminists is symptomatic of the kind of culture of feminism pervasive today. It’s not that the “feminist” assignation is slightly anachronistic-Betty Friedan‘s The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963 and the National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded in 1966. Feminism was in the air, but it wasn’t a readily appropriated identity in American culture until the 1970s. It’s just the fact that these characters are not feminists.
Or, to put it another way: Feeling empowered is not the equivalent of empowering women.
Peggy is a woman who “wants to have it all,” the career and the husband-in that order. She always sacrifices her personal life for her career, even choosing to work over going to her own birthday dinner at a fancy New York City restaurant. Her objective is to create a better life for herself; the fact that she’s a woman is circumstantial to the attainment of her career aspirations.
In this regard, Peggy values people based on their use-value for the advancement of her career. She berates Joan for dressing a “certain way,” while working with her to secure certain accounts that, she knows, depend on Joan’s sex appeal. She tries to get her secretary Shirley fired because she mistook Shirley’s Valentine’s Day flowers for her own (when, in fact, she got none). Peggy is hostile to other women, because, if she cannot make use of them for her own work, she sees them as the competition.
Peggy, at best, is a prototype for what the ethos of feminism in the workplace becomes in the 1970s, and beyond. Even Elizabeth Moss agrees; in describing her own character to Elle, she observed: “She’s not marching or burning her bra or trying to change the law. She’s actually down, on the field, in the office, dealing with the obstacles as they come,” Moss said. “She doesn’t know about the glass ceiling. She sort of feels it when she bumps her head against it, and she just keeps going.”
Wanting to have a successful career; wanting a fulfilling love life; eating a cupcake without regret-these are not in themselves feminist acts.
Peggy’s success as a career woman is built on the fact that she is not a feminist. She doesn’t feel solidarity with other women, and she identifies with men, especially Don. After Peggy has Pete’s baby and is in the hospital/home for unwed mothers, Don advises that she erases this experience, and, upon her return to work, promotes her. Peggy’s transformation from a Brooklyn girl sporting a ponytail to creative Manhattan powerhouse wearing a smart bob mirrors Don’s identity theft. Only Peggy didn’t have to steal an identity to shake off her old life. Instead, she leverages her comprehension of womanhood in order to transcend its chains in the professional sphere.
The Ad Man’s job requires that he cast himself in the role of the consumer in order to create a campaign that the consumer will buy. This is precisely what Peggy does when, in Season 1, she on a whim comes up the slogan “basket of kisses” for a lipstick brand when the Ad Men in her office ask her for her thoughts as a woman. With this triumph, Peggy exits the secretarial pool by giving the bosses a woman’s perspective. She understands women because she is one. The difference for Peggy is that while she is a woman, she does not see herself existing among a community of women. It is a difference that allows Peggy to excel at work while trampling the confines of her female status.
Arguably, it is impossible to practice feminism and be a careerist in a patriarchal world. Peggy’s status as an ideal worker emerges from her rejection of the various female identities that feminism, in fact, is an outgrowth of. Because Peggy chooses against being a supporter of other women, a mother, a girlfriend, and a daughter, she in turn, unknowingly chooses against being a feminist.
On the other hand, Don is often a disaster at work, sabotaging his firm’s bid to go public and sinking major pitches like the one to the Hershey Corporation. Unlike Peggy’s, his is a blurred double-consciousness. If feminism is a political consciousness about the condition of women in the workplace, Don is the show’s most likely feminist. He empathizes with women because he sees them as flawed, kindred spirits. Yet, while he supports and promotes women at work, in the realm of his personal life he uses women like rags to sop up and wipe away his long-standing feelings of inadequacy, guilt and pain.
Don can be “Don Draper” without having to ultimately disown Dick Whitman, which is the show’s revelation about the elasticity of masculinity, and, also, it’s most deeply feminist statement. The “all” that Don gets to have includes his past, on his terms-because he is a man. His sins, however great, are pardonable on that basis alone. Masculinity, with its open borders, grants him the freedom first to invent himself and then to lay claim to his origins.
In mid-20th century America, women couldn’t have it all, or do it all, female experienced was stigmatized as something “private” and “taboo.” While the Ad Men all openly live their dirty laundry – Roger is probably the worst offender with all his office affairs-the women cannot. Could you imagine Peggy sitting around at a diner after midnight on a double date rehashing a funny anecdote about how she didn’t know she was pregnant? Or Joan recounting some of the she sex she’s had at the office, especially since it includes being raped by her ex-husband? A successful woman in a sexist context doesn’t get to integrate all the circumstantial pieces of her identity openly. The men of Mad Men undervalue women’s experiences, especially if those experience don’t land the firm new accounts.
The audience, however, buoyed by vapid Twitter “feminism,” fiercely look for signs of the dawning of feminism in these characters, under which they can file the facets of women’s experience represented on the show. For the time being, “feminism” is it. Yet, describing Peggy’s career-mindedness or Joan’s drive and ambition or Betty’s unhappiness as evidence of how those characters are feminist negates feminism as a political stance, making it less important and more amorphous.
The 1960s was a sexist shitstorm for women trying to “lean in” at the workplace. The female characters of Mad Men are each trying to navigate the world to better their own lives. The collective consciousness of feminism, which hits its stride in the 1970s when women take to the street to advocate for equality and fight violence against women and gender discrimination, is absent from their minds. Becoming powerful is not feminist when done in the name of the individual-in fact, it’s pretty much patriarchy.
Yet this strategy is not surprising when women were fighting to just get a seat at the board table. What’s important to remember now, in 2015, when feminism means everything and nothing at once, is that the adjective “feminist” is not some airy-fairy modifier one appropriates to be on fleek. While Mad Men’s female characters function as prototypes of a feminist ethos of empowerment and independence, they are far from being feminists.
And it is critical that we discern the difference, lest we allow the beast of Capitalism to continue to sell “feminism” just as it sells toilet paper.
