Why 'Mad Men' is TV's most feminist show

As for Peggy, when she gave up her out-of-wedlock child in Season 1, she was doing what an estimated 25,000 women did each year during the 1950s, usually because they had no alternative. And when Faye told Don that she "chose" not to have children so as to have a career, that sacrifice was one that women with professional aspirations were often forced to make in 1965: Employers, after all, were well within their legal rights to fire women who had babies.

Having risen as high as a secretary could reasonably hope to rise, Joan uses her sexuality to get perks she could not otherwise earn, following precisely the advice that Helen Gurley Brown made famous in her best-selling 1962 book "Sex and the Single Girl." But the scriptwriters also show us the price she is made to pay: When Joan tries to take the initiative in bed, her fiance rejects her overtures and seems unable to regain his sense of masculinity until he rapes her in her boss's office, telling her to pretend that he is her boss. She is also subjected to constant sexual innuendo and outright harassment by male co-workers ("What do you do around here besides walking around like you're trying to get raped?" one asks her).

If anything, "Mad Men" sometimes gives its female characters more decisiveness and self-confidence than most women would have been able to muster in 1965. Except for an early scene in which she turns to a 9-year-old neighbor for validation, Betty Draper is uncommonly self-assured. Unlike the women I interviewed for my book, she never beats herself up wondering what she did to drive her husband to infidelity. Joan, for her part, has the self-confidence to confront her boss and sometime-lover about his boorish behavior. In real life, this might have cost her both her lover and her job. When Peggy articulately describes the discrimination she faces as a woman, only to have her supposedly progressive suitor respond sarcastically that maybe there should be "a civil rights march for women," she takes offense at his ridicule rather than being shamed by it, as most women of that era would have been.

I'm betting that all these women will grow in interesting ways in the coming seasons. But if "Mad Men" continues to be as true to the period as it has been thus far, we can expect them to keep paying a price for that growth -- even as the show's men are beginning to pay the price for their privilege. In the long run, little Sally, the Drapers' daughter, may be the one to watch. It was, after all, the daughters of 1950s and 1960s housewives who, determined not to end up like their mothers, grew into the "mad women" -- mad-as-hell women, that is -- who became the most militant feminists of the 1970s.

coontzs@evergreen.edu

Stephanie Coontz teaches family history at the Evergreen State College. Her next book, "A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s," will be published in January.