Mad Women

I've recently discovered the AMC series Mad Men. The series is a lot like visiting another country. Everything is strangely familiar yet maddeningly foreign in a way which makes you homesick for even some of the more hellish aspects of home.

When I first started watching the series, I was shocked by the abundance of cigarette smoke and abundance of misogyny--which is arguably more cancerous on a figurative level.

My grandmother was valedictorian of her high school class. I didn't know this until I graduated as one of the valedictorians of my own high school class. Like most women of her generation, she rarely speaks of herself having been raised to put others before her. After her graduation, my grandmother went to secretary school and became a secretary working in Los Angeles in the 1950s. Two generations later, my reward for my diligence and intelligence is a near free ride to UCLA, one of the top public universities in the country. I can't help but wonder what my grandmother thought about her eldest granddaughter's post high school opportunities. She would probably shake her head in a bemused wonder at my generation predilection for public introspection in blogs like these. Two generations and two worlds apart.

I can't help but admire my grandmother for being a woman during this time period. It doesn't matter which character she was most like. She could have been a Peggy, or a Joan, or a Betty.

Again, it doesn't matter. She had to be quiet.

The only thing that I could possibly envy in the life of Mrs. Don Draper from Mad Men would be elements of her wardrobe. And those dresses would never be worth her the life she leads.

Named Elizabeth, often called Betty, nicknamed Birdie by her husband, Mrs. Don Draper is everyone and no one at the same time. She quietly trembles, gossips softly with an air of malicious contempt about a new addition to the neighborhood with her gal pals, calmly attends therapy sessions with an analyst who provides reports to her husband behind her back, and serves fish sticks with a smile all while smoking.

She seems incredibly alone and isolated. Fashionable--but alone.

In one episode she is given an opportunity to re-enter a career in modeling, but she does not realize that she is only being used to get her husband to move to competing ad agency. So when he doesn't make the move, she is told that they are going to go for someone with more of an Audrey Hepburn look. Being more of a Grace Kelly, Betty is clearly bothered by the rejection, but like all good women of the time seems to sweep that sadness/frustration under a rug.

Her chance out of suburbia, albeit to be a model and the epitome of objectification, is extinguished.

The beginning of the episode featured the neighbor's homing pigeons. I didn't need my degree in American Literature and Culture to tell you that those birds would return!

You can destroy a bird's symbolic value with a cage or with a gun. The writers of the show apparently like guns more (I'm not just talking about Chekhov's Gun*), especially guns in the hands of Grace Kellyesque suburban housewives wearing their whisper thin nighties in the middle of the afternoon in the middle of their manicured back yards. She is smoking a cigarette and aiming at the neighbor's homing pigeons. Plot wise, she seems to be getting revenge on her neighbor for threatening to murder her children's dog for going after the precious pigeons. Symbolically, she is trying to bring down the Birdies. If she can't be free, why should they?

I thought of that scene today as I drove home with a screaming five year old in the backseat of my care after a particularly frustrating day at work.

You might think that I might write about the illusory nature of freedom here. But it would be a lie (and--frankly--a bit of a cliche) to characterize freedom as an illusion. We have the freedom to change our lives; we just don't have an easy time doing it. Instead of dealing with the struggle, we opine and whine about how freedom is a joke or an illusion or only for the rich. Betty could change her life, but it would be very, very, very difficult.

What I actually thought about was how fortunate I am to be a woman and a mother today. I have a career and a family. Both carry frustrations. But today is it socially acceptable to vent. Today I can sit down and compose multiple paragraphs about a fictional television show set in the past as a way for me to work out my frustrations about my current reality. My grandmother had no such outlets. Neither did Betty Draper, and she went a wee bit crazy in her backyard.

To conclude: Today was a bad day, but I didn't end up clad in a nightie smoking a cigarette and shooting at pigeons. My bad day was not really that bad of a day.

It is all about perspective. I'm not trapped.

*Do I get points for having a degree in American Literature yet still knowing about Chekhov's gun?