Weekend Nostalgia: “Mad Men” Deconstructs 50’s Fantasies

The genius of Matthew Weiner took on the sexism of the suburbs, the corporate workplace, advertising, and the male psyche.

Fifties TV was full of fairy-tales and fantasies meant solely to entertain and soothe—and encourage viewers to buy commodities to furnish idealized suburban lives. June Cleaver boosted both the industries in female glamour and Westinghouse appliances by cooking her pies in pearls and heels. No one got cancer, Lassie always came home, and Father always knew best. We didn’t know at the time that Robert Young (slightly later to become the first beloved tv doctor, Marcus Welby) actually struggled with alcoholism, that Ozzie was a domestic tyrant, and that his son Ricky, after a brief but dazzling career as a teen idol, would suffer from drug addiction and a marriage as far from the fictional Nelsons  as Lassie was from my own dog Dakota, who would just as soon wander into another county as come home when I call. 

Young, who played Jim Anderson, the father who knew best in the popular series that ran from 1954 to 1960, was often asked by strangers for advice about social conduct and raising a family. They didn’t ask Jane Wyatt, who played Margaret Anderson or Barbara Billingsley, who played mom on Leave It to Beaver. Mothers were not supposed to be wise; they were supposed to be warm and supportive. Most of the cast members knew this was far from the way things actually were. Young recalls: “Originally the show was supposed to be called ‘Father Knows Best?’” The question mark made the phrase a jab at Father, “who always assumed he is head of the household, but everybody knows that Mother really is.” But the sponsor, Kent cigarettes, objected. It wasn’t just a suggestion; as Young relates it, “the deal rested on that one question mark coming off.”^[i]

More than just the question mark or gender roles was at issue; as writer Mel Diamond put it “As a writer, if you had experience and balls, you got neutered very fast.”^[ii] When Billy Gray (who played son Bud) suggested more realistic teen vernacular (“crazy, man” was happening then, he recalls) he was told no, that “it would offend people.” And when Scott paper became the new sponsor, they weren’t permitted to show their toilet paper (if they did, Billy remarks, “it would suggest people had assholes”). Of course, there were no Blacks or Jews on the show, and the Latino gardener was improbably named Frank Smith. “We were supposed to be in a small town” is Jane Wyatt’s explanation, and adds, somewhat defensively, “There were places like that.” But Billy Gray rejects that explanation, pointing out that the show ran concurrent with the Civil Rights movement. “It was if we were in a vacuum or some kind of enchanted forest. It wasn’t taking into account the reality of the world. It was just an advertiser’s vision of what the world should be.”^[iii]

Barbara Billingsley had no problem with the disinfected world of Leave it to Beaver or her role in it. While she admits that she was portrayed as though she “had no brains,” it “seemed to be a normal family to me. It didn’t seem unusual that the woman would be serving breakfast and be there when the kids came back from school. Sure there were a lot of working women, but nothing like today. Being in a dress all the time was the producer’s idea. They always wanted us to be the ideal, which meant I had to be dressed, no curlers.” And of course there were the pearls, which actually were chosen for pragmatic reasons (Billingsley had a hollow in her neck that created a shadow, and the pearls covered it) but for feminists became a symbol of how far-fetched that ideal of mom was. ^[iv]

These shows certainly didn’t mirror my own reality. Until I was about to enter high school, we lived above a butcher shop in what would become known as the inner city of Newark, New Jersey. I passed two bars on my walk to school and the most green I got to see was at “the track,” where my sister and I scoured the grounds for winning but carelessly discarded place and show tickets. On Halloween, my parent sent us out in the dark alone, oblivious to whether we got our candy from the neighborhood bars or not. They were more afraid of us catching our “death of cold” than they were of other people doing anything bad to us. When I was a preteen, we moved to the Weequahic section, immortalized by Philip Roth. There, the houses actually had lawns and there was a huge park down in the fancy end of the neighborhood, where the families of doctors and lawyers lived (and where a cop once told me and my Black male friend to “get gone.”). Still, it was nothing like the suburbs, where some of my wealthier friends were moving, in white flight from the increasing racial diversity of the neighborhood.¹

Eventually, in the 1970s, television’s representation of the family was to become more diverse. That meant the gentile leads could have Jewish buddies like Rhoda Morgenstern, and family-oriented sitcoms were either ostentatiously ethnic or working class. (All in the Family, Roseanne, and a host of Black family sitcoms were located in the ghetto.) Suburban family life mostly remained the subject of gentle nostalgia in shows like Happy Days and The Wonder Years. Arguably even The Cosby Show, which broke important ground by depicting an upper middle-class professional Black family who lived in a brownstone and did not suffer poverty, reproduced many of the same myths of the Fifties’ family sitcoms precisely by showing that a Black family could be “just like any other American family.” That is: happy with things as they were.

But TV had discovered early on that it had tremendous power to disrupt the very fantasy-world that it created. The fifties didn’t just give us the Cleavers; it also gave us gritty dramas, created by  playwrights and directors, some of whom were to become famous in movies, known for their realism and willingness to tackle controversial issues, from alcoholism and racism to conformism and McCarthyism: Elia Kazan, Delbert Mann, Arthur Penn, John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, Reginald Rose (“Twelve Angry Men”); Paddy Chayefsky (“Marty”), Tad Mosel (“The Petrified Forest.”), Rod Serling (“Requiem for a Heavyweight”). I, being a nerdy kid, loved the drama “playhouses,” which were as formative of my intellectual and political thinking as anything I was reading.

The deconstructive potential of television—its exposure of the myths that the mass media itself had created—wasn’t fully realized again until David Chase’s “The Sopranos,” a show that screenwriter Matthew Weiner, the creator of “Mad Men,” watched with excitement. In particular, the episode “College”—in which Tony Soprano slips away from a (lovingly portrayed) father/daughter trip to murder a man with his bare hands—stunned him. “I just turned to my wife,” he recalls, “and said ‘You do understand what’s going on here. This has never been done, that you would take this hero and father of this TV show…and he’s going to strangle this guy with his bare hands. And we’re going to have to watch him next week and act like we care about what’s going on with him. That is revolutionary.”^[i]

Weiner, inspired by The Sopranos, went on to create and write Mad Men, a show that deconstructs masculinity in a different, but no less revolutionary way. Don Draper (Jon Hamm) isn’t a Tony—he’d never be caught dead eating deli meat with his bare hands, much less kill someone with them. But like Tony, there’s a child-boy with not-so-nice instincts lurking under his polish. And Weiner is clear on where he stands when it comes to those instincts, particularly as they affect the lives of women he has relationships with. In fact, the show offers some of the most explicit pro-feminist narratives I’ve seen on television.

“Mad Men” was the first show that presented what I had experienced as the reality of the post-War period. Work-obsessed father away much of the time. Depressed mother. Racism and Anti-Semitism depicted rather than stuffed away in the closet. And most of all: the multitude of ways, both minor and major, that men treated women (as voluptuous office manager Joan Holloway, played by Christina Henricks ,puts it ) “something between a mother and a waitress, and….” She doesn’t give a word but it’s clear: sex toy. Or perhaps: whore. 

No, Mad Men does not take place in the kind of neighborhoods I grew up in. The genius of Mad Men was not to move the nuclear family to someplace more like Newark, New Jersey, but to flay open the idealized surface of the suburban world of Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver. From the first episode, we are introduced to a corporate culture that is casually racist, anti-Semitic, and gender hierarchical. At home in the suburbs, Betty Draper (January Jones) dresses much like June Cleaver (except at night, when she wears lingerie we’d never have seen June in) and has the same finishing-school manners. But in the second episode she experiences a loss of feeling in her hands that sends her to a psychiatrist, who does nothing but sit and smoke, listen to her ramble, and then reports to husband Don (Jon Hamm) on how seriously disturbed she is. Don doesn’t hang around the kitchen the way the Fifties sitcom dads did—he’s head of the creative department of an ad agency and spends much of his time at the office. But he has mistresses—and dark secrets, both from his past and in his present.

As we will eventually find out, Don is hardly fully evolved, but the men he works with haven’t even left the cave. They spend much of their time hanging out together like frat boys, laughing at each other’s offensive jokes and discussing how they’d like to get under the dress of “new girl” Peggy Olsen (Elizabeth Moss). (“To you, the whole world is like one big brassiere strap waiting to be snapped,” Don tells Pete Campbell, one of the most shamelessly sexist.)

The women appear to expect and welcome what would come to be known as “being objectified,” seeing it as the route to snagging a husband and house in the suburbs. Joan, giving Peggy a tour of the department, advises her to make the most of her “darling ankles” and Nanette of the switchboard pool also comments on Peggy’s legs, adding that “Bet Mr. Draper would like them…if he could see them.” As Peggy is taken from office to office by Joan, she gets the same advice from men and women alike: make the most of your physical assets, sweetie, and don’t be afraid to show that body off. Joan tells her that when she gets home she should get naked, put a bag over her head and assess her flaws in her mirror at home. ²

When Mad Men first aired, some critics complained that the sexism was overdone. And it’s true that there’s barely a scene that doesn’t show men behaving in an entitled, crude way with the women who work in the office. For me, though, and in contrast to the familiar nostalgia for the period (the first season takes place in 1960) the show “got it”—all of it, including the over-the-top sexism and the seeming obedience, even collusion, of the women. Like the women in Mad Men, I craved being the object of male attention, and was willing to overlook what today would be defined as abusive. Far from complaining, I looked for ways to impress my male teachers and the boys at the same time: sarcasm, cynicism, and lots of dirty talk. I also pretty much let the boys I had crushes on do whatever they wanted with me, short of actual intercourse, and whether or not I was enjoying myself. Most of the time I wasn’t.

As for the seemingly more serious, responsible Don Draper, who looks like an urbane Marlboro Man, isn’t interested in going to a strip club with the boys the night of Pete’s bachelor party, and takes Peggy’s hand off his own when she (understandably) gets the idea it’s what bosses want; for much of the episode we are led to believe he is different. When he stays overnight in the city with Midge (Rosemarie DeWitt), the woman who is his artsy, freedom-loving “medicine” (as she describes herself) and says “I wish you would marry me,” we assume he’s single, and she is setting the rules.

Not exactly.

At the very end of the first episode we see Don get off a commuter train, walk down a suburban street, open the door to a pretty but modest home that could be a set for Father Knows Best and go upstairs to say goodnight to—surprise!—his wife. She’s very blonde, very Breck girl, and she’s clearly very used to never complaining when her husband stays late (or overnight) in the city. There are also two children.

The first scene of the episode had shown Don in a restaurant, trying to dream up an approach for Lucky Strike that will distract smokers from the studies that had been linking smoking to cancer. (The surgeon general’s report will come out in 1964, but Reader’s Digest was already making people nervous.) In the background, “Band of Gold” (referring to a wedding ring) is playing, but the episode is called “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” (By the last episode of first the season, the music accompanying the ending credits will be Bob Dylan singing “The Times They Are a’ Changing.”)

Goodbye , June and Ward Cleaver and their perfect marriage. Goodbye, the fantasy that white, suburban women were just fine—no, deliriously happy—with their newly efficient kitchen appliances and well-tended lawns.

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“Mad Men” didn’t only deconstruct the suburban family and workplace sexism. It specifically took on the fissures in the masculine psyche. My favorite episode (and Weiner’s as well): “Maidenform.” It does something that no other episode does: It begins from “within” the experience of women but concludes with an unexpected glimpse into the consciousness of a man, as he is challenged, perhaps for the first time in his life, to consider the effect of male dominance—which he has exercised throughout the episode--—on women.

On the surface, the episode is about the sexual “objectification” of women. It opens with short scenes of each one of the central women characters putting on the constricting bras and girdles of the era, making themselves presentable for the work-day.

But although Peggy is the only one of the creative team who actually wears a bra, she is excluded from a new campaign for Playtex. She’s been assigned to the campaign, but her objections to the male-fantasy inspired idea (lingerie that makes women into a Jackie Kennedy wife by day and Marilyn Monroe mistress by night), are ignored, she isn’t informed about meetings and the door is shut in her face at the audition for models.

After the idea is “sold,” she isn’t invited to the guys’ celebration (at the Tom-Tom club, a stripper bar.) Frustrated, she asks Joan how to get the men to take her seriously, and Joan advises that she “stop dressing like a little girl.” So she glams herself up and crashes the guys’ celebration, where she giggles and submits cheerfully when one of the Playtex reps pulls her onto his lap. If playing femme is what’s required to become a part of the team, she’ll do it. 

In another one of the episodes’ story-lines, Don and Betty attend a country-club fashion show and auction, which features women in bathing suits (true to the era, no muscles and plenty of soft flesh.) Leaving Betty at the show, Don sneaks off to see his mistress Bobbie Barrett, whose aggressively erotic talk annoys him and he lets her know it; then, when she reveals that he has a reputation among the women of her set for being sexually proficient, he becomes furious and ties her to the bed; “I told you to stop talking” he says, and storms off. Although he enjoys depersonalizing Bobbie while they are having sex (he tells her to stop talking several times), he doesn’t like being treated like a sex toy himself. He may want a “Marilyn” for a mistress, but he wants a silent one. As for his wife, he married her because she was a “Jackie” and when, the next morning, he finds her serving cereal in a bikini that she bought at the auction, he doesn’t like it and tells her so, leaving her puzzled and shamed. The duality of the new ad lives in Don’s psyche. 

The episode is one of the many Mad Men episodes, written by a man, that is strikingly attuned to the price women pay for male fantasies and ambivalences about women. But instead of leaving Don unconscious about his need for control and the injustice of his expectations, the double-binds it places his women in, Weiner gives Don a jolt of recognition. Don is shaving and his daughter Sally (Kiernan Shipka) is gazing up at him, adoringly. “I’m not going to talk at all, Daddy” she says, because she doesn’t want him to cut himself. Hearing this, Don’s mood abruptly changes, he stops shaving, tells Sally to leave, and shaken, sits down on the toilet. He’s seen the budding, in his own daughter, of the subservience, the docility, that women learn men expect of them.

Don is having what feminists used to call a “click” moment. Does he want his own daughter growing up silent and obedient to a man?

As Don, sitting on the toilet, stares into space, the camera pulls back to reveal both Don and his troubled reflection in the mirror in the hall. 

If you want more Bordo views on television, check out my other substack posts on TV here. You can also order my book (in which this discussion of “Mad Men” originally appeared; it highlights shows and events from the 1950’s to pandemic tv.)

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1. It’s a fascinating but little discussed fact that the producers who sold the WASP-y suburban vision of American life were themselves Jewish. Yes, the trouble-free, all-white, Christian world of ’50s television was largely the product of immigrants like my own family who created that world from their own fantasies of what it meant to be American, their fears of repelling Christian viewers and/or their ambivalence about reinforcing Jewish stereotypes. Jews were prominent behind the scenes: up until the mid-1980s, ABC, NBC, and CBS were Jewish owned (Leonard Goldenson, David Sarnoff, William Paley, respectively).^[v] But from 1954 to 1972 there was no one prime-time show featuring a leading character who was Jewish. (The one fifties show featuring a Jewish family—The Goldbergs—was cancelled in 1954, after battling for five years against the perception that it was “too Jewish.”)^[vi]

2. Joan also recommends a gynecologist, who gives Peggy Enovid but instructs her not to become a “strumpet” to justify the expense. (His cheery condescension—“Scooch down the table, sweetheart”—sends a special kind of chill in 2020, as “Peggy” has gone on to star in The Handmaid’s Tale.) Later that night Peggy has sex with a very drunk Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) who’s been celebrating his last night as a “free man.” ^[vii]

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^i] Kisseloff, The Box, 334.

^[ii] Ibid., 335.

^[iii] Ibid., 332.

^[iv] Ibid., 333–4.

^[v] David Zurawik, The Jews of Prime Time (Lebanon, PA: Brandeis University Press, 2003), 7.

^[vi] Ibid., 17–47.

^[vii] Matt Zoller Seitz, Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion (New York: Abrams Press, 2017) 25–32.