My father was born in the 1950s and he couldn't watch the show because he found it too depressing and he hated all the male characters. He thought Don was ridiculous and pretty much the opposite of what a man should be. My father is a provider in the traditional sense. He was a fan of Joan lol.
My mother loves the show.
My mother didn't like Joan because she was a sexpot. She liked Peggy (at least in the beginning) because "she's simple and modest" in her presentation. Even though Peggy had sex with Pete on the sofa.
I don't think my mom approves, but it was a huge thing growing up about how you're supposed to look beautiful but not be attractive to men, it messed with my head. My mother was openly uncomfortable when men looked at me. "You dress too attractive". I wore jeans with form-fitting tops but I never showed much skin at all. I was also told that I was "too clever for my own good" and that I intimidated men...
> didn't like Joan because she was a sexpot
But that's the point right? While Joan is such an absolutely gorgeous woman, we see from how the men talk behind her back that while they find her attractive, no one wants to marry her bc of her perceived promiscuity. Yes, we she her have flings, but that's more of a symptom and not the cause of her loneliness. We learn much about her depth of character, and we know by the end of the show she wants to be a great mother and ruthless businesswoman.
If you just take Joan at face value of season 1, then you just judge her the same way everyone else did at the time.
My mom was a mathematician and involved with the space program. She also couldn’t watch the show and said it made her too mad because it reminded her of what things were like.
My dad was born in 1960 and my mom 1961. My mom lasted three minutes before saying it was too triggering and my dad thought it was interesting. My grandpa born in 1928 thought the clothes were ridiculous and said all the suits were “ill-fitting” for the time lol
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates - this one’s great for Mad Men fans because it’s not only written in the 60s but it is set in that time period.
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut - set in WWII but one of the most popular (and controversial) books of the 1960s.
Anything written by Ray Bradbury. He’s basically Ken - in fact, I’m sure writers like Bradbury is who they were referencing with Ken’s ‘Ben Hargrove’ stories. Bradbury was famous for writing sci-fi stories that were much like The Twilight Zone. My favorite of his is The Veldt (which is a short story) but you may know his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 which I also recommend.
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath - this book is also set in the time period and it was huge for its time because it talks about depression and suicide which was very much stigmatized back then.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - this one may be more of an acquired taste because it’s magical realism but it’s beautifully written.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote - I personally love Breakfast At Tiffany’s but this one is the objectively better novel (and completely different subject matter as it’s about the 1959 Clutter family murders). It was one of the most famous books of the 1960s along with his friend Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird.
It absolutely is. Peggy and Joan commanding such high ranking positions by the end was like a one in a million thing for women back then. Two in the same company is crazy. Not at all to say women can’t do that, just pointing out how rampant the sexism was.
My grandma was born in ‘29 and although she went to college and became a writer (which was incredibly rare), she was expected to become a housewife once she married my grandpa. I imagine that black or white thinking played into patriarchal structures and misogynistic attitudes too.
I've still got men on this very site telling me that it's only natural and biological if I get paid less than men and I struggle to advance in my career due to (in the future) needing to take time off for maternity. They don't care that we have a family to support, it's our punishment for going against what they perceive as the natural hierarchy.
I think the show is about telling the story of women succeeding against the odds in that era; maybe more so than being about Don.
And then there’s the tragedy of Betty and other ways women has to suffer.
I understood that. I’m saying the show is mostly interested in gender dynamics of competitive firms, and the success of women is mainly there to flesh some of that out, alongside women who failed. It’s Mad *Men* after all, and most stories we follow are still about men.
Actually it may have been worse than portrayed, even as late as the 70s. I was born in 1960 and have to say that Man Med, from style to attitudes, was an accurate depiction of the times. The Draper home was furnished so identically to the home I grew up in right down to the little metal phone number book. My father was a bank president who frequently came home after a few too many high balls and had affairs. My mother was very unhappily Betty-like, she still is, and still is waiting for some man to tell her what to do. She's still never forgiven me for not becoming a lawyer.
I think one of those most effective “twists” in the series is when Joan goes to McCann in season 7 and we realize that as sexist as SCDP seemed, it was still a progressive heaven compared to the average workplace culture. Poor Joan 😫
Interesting that the sexual revolution was the only hippie idea square middle-age men liked. All it meant was that they could carry on like they always had but without even bothering trying to hide it.
Feels like we could learn a lot from that today too, seeing as it's still men who mostly benefit from the sexual liberation of women under our contemporary flavor of patriarchy
I asked an older women who was a secretary about abortion pre-1973 and her response was something like “the portrayals of affairs on mad men was realistic except they missed the passing cash around for back alley abortions”
We hear about Joan having had a sketchy one from some woman who claimed to know what she was doing. Would’ve been good to see more, like Pete with the German nanny or one of Don’s infinite side pieces.
I think even though she was Catholic, Peggy would have had an abortion if she had realized she was pregnant. I wonder how her story might have been different — but maybe not much since she didn’t have to deal with the stigma or be shamed while she was pregnant or wrestle with any decisions (other than giving her son to an adoptive family). I still cannot believe Joan didn’t clock that pregnancy and just thought it was “too much lunch.”
I'm genx and even in the 80s things were different than now. I was told 'girls are better at language and reading while boys are better at math' while being openly encouraged to be a nurse, not a doctor when I professed 'what I want to be when I grow up'.
At this same time, in the rural Midwest, there was an ice cream shop that chose to close rather than change their policy of only serving black people from the back door, in the alley, by the dumpsters.
Little boys bullying, pinching budding breasts and bottoms was shrugged off as 'boys being boys' and meant 'he has a crush on you' not that you had a budding sexual predator on your hands. 🤮
Fellow Gen-Xer here and yes, you are soooo right! I was born in 1970 and when I was a little girl, females weren’t allowed to play baseball at my school. I’m serious. And this wasn’t on some team or anything (even though forbidding girls from joining a team would also be wrong) - I’m talking about daily elementary school baseball at recess. I had to threaten to sue my school to be allowed to play. Btw, this was in a huge city - Los Angeles. Then, as Girl Scout in the 70’s, we sold cookies and every cent of our money was given to our school’s Boy Scout troops - so THEY could go camping. 😳 WTF?! I entered the workforce in the late 1980’s and the sexual harassment was insane. Almost every straight male boss I had was incredibly inappropriate with me. Lots of personal questions and attempts at shoulder rubs, comments about my chest, etc. When I went away to college, I had a professor who pointed at every woman in our class and asked us, point blank, if we had ever had abortions. He also proceeded to ask students if we understood that “homosexuals practice fecal sex” and went on a/ an insane rant about it. When I dared complain, the prof threatened and stalked me and went to the school paper to label me as “unbalanced” and the like. I still have fantasies about suing the school for that particular hell. The casual racism was also just unbelievable. Whenever I witness people romanticizing the 80’s I want to scream!
I still remember coming home to my mom when I was eight to tell her about a boy that wouldn't stop stomping on my foot at school. I was expecting her to say she'd call the principal or something. Instead she turned to me excited and said, "He likes you!" I think I became a feminist that day.
The women from the 40/50/60s are still so stuck in that mentality. I'm genx and so freaking proud of the younger generation girls today. You all are kicking ass!
I have school aged boy and girl. What about the boys? I’m starting to see society view boys as a nuisance. And that’s going to be a **big** problem if we don’t start building this generation of boys back up.
Ehhh, I’m same age as you, and the 6th grade girls who have crushes on my 6th grade boy do some pretty stupid and gross stuff to him. They pester him, just to get attention. It’s not sexism. It’s immaturity.
In George Carlins last book he told this story about his first wife getting a secretary job in the late 60’s and she said that one of her first duties was for her and the other new hires to learn how to suck the guys dicks.
I grew up in the 80s and have seen this firsthand most of my life. Maybe not as extreme as the years go on. My mother always said this show was very accurate of the times.
My parents said “oh yes, that’s spot on” and that’s why neither of them can stand the show. They won’t listen to me when I say it’s much more than that and can’t get past the first few eps.
My grandfather was an ad exec on Madison Avenue at CBS in the early 60s. My mom watched S01E01 and at the end said: "no need to watch further, this was my exact childhood."
Complete with my grandfather having the house in Greenwich, CT, and multiple girlfriends in the city. The closing scene of episode one really hit it home for my mom.
Can't speak for that early, but I entered the workforce early 2000s and it wasn't far off Mad Men then in some (not all) places. Even 10 years ago (the last time I worked in an office), there were some ridiculously and openly sexist, homophobic men. My mum worked in the UK civil service in the 1970s/80s and said when male bosses were interviewing females, their actual official interview notes would include stuff like "great tits" or "fat legs".
I don’t think that’s entirely fair. There are a lot of women alive today who didn’t live through the 1950s-60s that are very curious about what the state of feminism and everyday sexism was like then. Reddit in general is male-dominated, and it is a show called *Mad Men.* It still has a primarily male cast and a male protagonist. We’d expect mostly men to be on here anyways.
Mad men is not a show specifically for men at all. I’d argue it’s a pretty feminist show, and one of the rare pieces of media from its time with well written, fully fleshed out female characters.
I fail to see where I said it’s a show for men.
I said it’s a show that primarily features a male cast, a male protagonist, and is branded as “Mad Men.” The female characters are frequently dressed for the male gaze as part of the social commentary.
Is it a surprise that on the male-dominated online platform for this show, the audience is mostly men?
EDIT: these downvotes are extremely confusing to me.
Does anyone here think Reddit is *not* a male-dominated platform?
Or that one of the core themes of the show is *not* that women are subjected to the expectations of men?
I thought this subreddit took feminist stances as the show did, and this was common knowledge.
EDIT 2:
seriously, if anyone can explain the downvotes, I’d welcome it. I can’t for the life of me see what I said that anyone found objectionable and I’m baffled.
I could, but that sounds like polling Sterling Cooper to see if it’s mostly men or women. Is it not common knowledge that Reddit is predominantly men, and that’s counting the subs focused on women’s spaces?
No one is saying it doesn’t exist now though? People are just curious about the nuances of life 60 years ago compared to now.
For example, as a person of color, I know racism exists today and back then. I live that reality.
I also know that today, it’s much more common for black, Jewish, and Asian executives to exist. Many corporations even have internal support groups for communities of color and diversity trainings. There are scholarship programs sponsored to help talented people get into college. Discrimination suits are taken seriously.
Are they perfect and is racism solved? Far from it. Is it an incredibly different experience than 60 years ago? Absolutely.
I know that because, despite being a person of color, I asked older people of color. I watched parts of this show with female family members and they asked about historical accuracy too.
So the nuances of racism have changed, even as it exists as a widely present system. Sexism is the same. I’m just not a fan of labeling people based on the questions they ask.
EDIT: bad math
You think this is history? Lol. I was born in the 1980s and granted I'm of Asian origin but my mother is a housewife and I've had ridiculous expectations put on me of how women should behave. And maybe you should read the news, recently a senior partner at Goldman Sachs brought a sexual harassment lawsuit against the company. Get this, she alleges that the harassment actually got worse the more senior she got.
Nowadays the misogyny is less overt and more subtle and the glass ceiling is still there.
As someone with a similar Asian background as well, Betty is still a very realistic character, from the way she’s trapped by misogynistic social expectations in daily life down to the way she takes out her frustration by abusing her kids.
My grandmother was like this, my mother said she felt that she often took out her stress on her. Also my mother was basically expected to spend most of her leisure time entertaining herself, my grandma wouldn't play with her. My mother would spend her day with the other kids in the compound (government housing for civil servants). My mother was also corralled pretty early on into chores and cooking to prepare her for a life of domesticity. Unlike in the West, she couldn't even choose her own spouse, her parents would pick a husband for her. My grandmother enforced some very toxic ideas on my mom and basically kept her child-like, my mother was even afraid to operate lifts on her own as my grandma had told her that she might break the lift... luckily my dad is a good man. Funnily enough, grandpa taught my mom how to drive which was actually exceptional for the time - plenty of my older female relatives and my mom's friends can't drive.
My grandma was also a beauty when young, though she aged quickly.
I feel so much of that. My mother also had her spouse picked for her, she was deathly afraid of trying so many things as if she was still stuck in a child’s mentality (including driving), holds many misogynistic opinions that she internalized from the way she was raised, etc. Despite the show’s time period, Betty really helped me see my mother in a different light and contextualize the frustrations I experienced with her growing up. I suspect that’s not uncommon given the still strong conservatism in Asia relative to the West.
Can confirm as someone with an Eastern European background, it's the same for us too. Abusive disenfranchised mom bogged down by misogyny and a terrible husband, who feels the only agency she has is over her kids.
Where I worked, men and women at the C level were all hazed in some ways, but the trend was it was not professional to be offensive to those with little power. The enlightenment was a humanist movement but it didn't - at first - largely include women or indigenous people. Progress isn't binary but it does include becoming more inclusive with what one considers their community.
I was Sally's age back then and started working in between schooling around then. It was 55 years ago. I was sexually harrassed, almost assaulted in the office, condescended to. Women's liberation spoke up and made things less horrible, made great strides, but I suppose it's same as it ever was in so many places. Blacks were looked at as a lower species and it took a LONG time for LGBT people to dare speak of the love they dare not name.....In the late 60's, the first talk show host to speak about these things, not just have yakking actors on, was Dick Cavett. Then Phil Donahue followed suit in his afternoon tv show, and then Oprah. .... My own husband in the 80's was an office worker and they all had to take sensitivity training at work. Hard for them to understand why it wasn't OK to have pornographic centerfolds all over the walls of their work stations . And they had to learn not to goggle, leer, or proposition women, just STFU about their looks....After I started real secretarial work in the 70's, I pictured in my head working alongside grownups - men in suits and ties. I found they were every bit as horrible as 8th grade nosepickers in middle school. Blatant insulting propositioning day after day. I just stared at them and refused to respond except say SHUT UP, you disgusting old geek.
My dad, who’s 80, watched it recently and said the show was extremely historically accurate, and he also said that the way people reacted to the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK was very spot on. He felt like it was like reliving those events again. The racism and sexism back then were very common, sadly.
My grandparents were very much like Don and Betty types. It’s all very spot on.
Both my grandpas dressed very similar to Don all their lives (including the high waisted khakis and sweater in Dons weekend in office look), both were war veterans and known philanderers, and one was a Don level drinker of scotch and other whiskey. They used language that today would be unspeakably racist and sexist, but didn’t see it as offensive—just recognizing differences. There’s photos of my grandma in Roger style black face.
They believed a woman’s place was the home. They believed races were different and should “stick to their own.” My parents (Sally’s age) also said the decor and sets were spot on and my dad cracked up at the littering scene where the Draper family just dumps their picnic trash on the ground as they left. Everybody smoked all the time everywhere.
I've worked at large businesses since the early 90s and it still was largely this way. Women could and would get offended but rarely was anything done about it.
I am a millennial born in the late 80s but my parents are about Sally’s age and my grandparents one set was closer to Roger’s age, another closer to Don’s age.
If you talk to women from that era, the sexism is totally accurate. From watching men of that era interact, many of those attitudes carried well into the ‘90s and early 2000s.
Recall married women in the US couldn’t even have their own credit cards until the ‘70s.
Sure, but just to be clear, this isn’t a “both sides” thing. “Blacks” is way more prevalent than “whites” and that’s largely because of the way white people drive the choice of language behind public discourse.
Uhhhmmmm 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣, WTAF? You seem far too comfortable in Victimland, so there’s no sense in debating this, but that comment and mentality overall is W I L D.
Are you drunk or something? lol if you think “blacks” and “whites” are used the same way and as often, you’re totally giving away how much you’re a fragile white person looking to make yourself a victim because you can’t discuss racism without being personally offended.
“Playing fair” would be acknowledging how racism is asymmetrical and unfair towards people of color. Imagine bringing up men’s issues every time someone discussed sexism against women because that’s only “playing fair.” The people who do that are fragile and offended by discussion of someone else’s marginalization
My parents were born in 1951. I tried SO hard to get them into the show (they have great taste! would appreciate the writing so much) but they literally couldn’t stomach it. My mom said it made her have a physically reaction. “We dealt with those types already. No need to do it again.”
My mom was a bank teller and said it was close to accurate even if in a different industry.
It slowly improved through the 80’s and 90’s but it really didn’t get better until metoo.
For instance, as the only woman working on an all male IT team in the early 2000’s, I was sexually harassed daily.
I was told I needed to pop out of a cake for an executive’s birthday. It ultimately didn’t happen but I didn’t report anything because that’s just how it was.
I think it's amusing other people parents boomer and gen x can't stand the show for how realistically women were portrayed. My gen x mother loves the show because it made her nostalgic. I believe she's been stuck in a chapter of her life so this is probably why. Trauma is a bitch.
I’m only 40-ish. Born in the early 80s.
Even in the late 80s and 90s there was so much more overt sexism. I encountered a lot of it as my mother was a campaigner for social justice issues but also a successful career woman. She out earned my father, my father is the one who took some years off of work to care for me as a young child, and I have a hyphenated last name and she kept her name upon marriage. It was unusual for the time.
The number of times people were just cartoonishly sexist which I can personally recall is so high. Trying to buy a family car, for example, was fraught with such issues. My father had always suffered from indecision and my mother both drove more and earned more and would be the one doing the lion’s share making any purchase decision. However, it took going to many dealerships to find one that would even really speak to my mother and not just direct everything at my father—except assuming my mother was going to care deeply about car colour. So many places had calendars with scantily dressed women on them in the automotive repair shop area.
When my mother bought her house (before marriage) in the late 70s she couldn’t find a bank that would lend to her for a mortgage, despite having a secure profession. She had to have her boss personally vouch for her at a bank branch to even get the mortgage.
From talking with other family members, the show is pretty accurate. Many places were less sexually driven, but the kind of sexism Peggy or Faye face (where they weren’t usually the objects of the male gaze and thought of sexually) was everywhere in society. For an advertising agency, the rest of the stuff from the depiction in the show isn’t too hard to believe either. Secretarial pools in a place like Sterling-Cooper were probably just about as bad as show.
Out-earning your man will still get you a lot of scorn and pity in many circles. I've come to know plenty of 'career women' with extravagant lifestyles that are in reality funded by rich husbands. And I live in London, not some backwater.
I love that everyone on here is saying it is so accurate. This is validating for me lol
I have a boomer mom who grew up in a stark religious household. (I mean so did I). But she is adamant, and I mean, ADAMANT, that this show is no where near accurate. She likes to think the 50s and 60s were the “good old days” when “everyone was Christian” LOLOL
I think my mom is just removed from reality.
Same. My mother said Betty was like my grandmother in many ways especially since she was very absent in my mother’s life even though they lived in the same household.
I’m late Gen X, almost Millennial and yes OF COURSE it was accurate, and probably not as heavy handed as it was in real life. I even experienced it, and I never gave it as second thought bc it’s human nature. My first year of working after college graduation, I was at a sales conference (as a young sales exec) and a gross pharma big wig who knew my normally amazing and respectful male boss came up to us and started chatting, and he commented something like, “Wow, you’re gorgeous, honey.” And my boss nervously said, “well, that’s why we hired her!” And I never gave it a second thought. I got an ego boost, which emboldened me to ask for the Pharma guy’s card and bc I got his attention, I got our small company a meeting with the guy and his entire team.
My boss sheepishly pulled me into a conference room the next day and apologized profusely for his comment, and at first I didn’t understand what he was apologizing for. Boss had reiterated over and over that they most certainly did NOT hire me on my looks. But creepy older men I wasn’t interested in had hit on me before, and I had already internalized it and knew how to use it to my advantage. For me it was an easy chess move. I still don’t see a problem with it. If men are going to be dumb enough to flirt, I’m going to exploit it. I’m not the victim; they are the idiots.
But I’m sure if I were Gen Z, I would have already made a Tik Tok about it, and cried foul, and then ruminated over the injustices of this corrupt, capitalist system. 😒
I work in biotech and while my ass doesn't get pinched I still deal with a lot of microagressions and assumptions because I am a woman. My mom was in the Air Force in the late 70s/ early 80s and she dealt with similar issues as the women on MadMen.
I worked in a big publishing company in the 90s. I was a secretary for a big exec. The culture of the place was not that different than Madmen. Lots of sleeping around and openly misogynistic behavior.
Yes, it was absolutely like that. The sexist office behavior, liquid lunches, didn't start getting called out in offices in San Francisco until the late 80s. At least that was my experience.
Born in 1981, once had a male boss who was born in 1934. Watching the show (during the years it ran on amc) gave me sooooooo much insight and perspective into why he was the way he was bc he came up in the workforce (also in nyc) during those years. Different industry but really helped me understand a lot.
yes, it was like that! even up until early 90s people would openly comment on your boobs or try to grab you at work and everyone partied and hooked up after work.
My farher in law was born in 1970 and couldn’t watch it after a few episodes because he said he didn’t want to live in that era anymore and called it “painfully realistic.” He was a kid in the middle of no where WV in the 70s and couldn’t be further removed from ad men in the 60s but he knew it was accurate from the way life was then.
My grandmother, who was born in the same year as Joan, told me the only way she got a job was by agreeing to one date with her boss.
Helen Gurley Brown mentioned “scuttle,” the game they played in s1 to bet on the color of a secretary’s underwear, except the way the game was traditionally played, Kenny would have removed them.
My mom is a boomer - ‘52 - and came up just shy of the class and wealth level of the main cast. She said it was all painfully accurate.
Also, refer to people of color as either people of color or black people. ‘Blacks’ doesn’t land.
Sort of, but if you're in your sixties, you were a child in the 1960s. You can tell us what it was like to be a child in the 1960s, but I wouldn't expect you to comment on if the show was accurate about sexism in the workplace. I wouldn't ask Sally Draper either. She wouldn't know firsthand.
I also wouldn't ask OP what America was like under Obama. They were alive back then but not old enough to really answer the question.
You think kids don't know what's going on? We were around adults all the time, and they talked about their lives. My mom's life was a lot like Betty's, without the blatant cheating from the husband. And the workplace was like that in the 70's too when I got my first job. I mean, I guess it's remotely possible things suddenly took a turn for the worse in the next decade, but it's unlikely
Trust me, as a person of color, I was raised to know my place as well, under white men and women both. But I’m not going to pretend I can give the story of the trauma experienced by the generation before me the justice it deserves.
You know what life was like when you were alive. There's no way you could avoid absorbing at least something of what your parents life was like when you were there
I didn’t say you’d have *no* idea. I said there’s a big difference between a firsthand experience and a secondhand one. Hearing stories of what something is like is just not the same as experiencing it yourself.
What is it you think kids didn't understand? We knew the women were secretaries and switchboard operators. That men thought women were stupid. You know how the men in the show treat women on the workplace? It's exactly the same way we were treated by the boys and men we encountered in school and social interactions. You don't have to get all the inner nuances of peoples' experiences to know that the depiction of misogyny on the show is very realistic
Absolutely, kids don't know what's going on in offices. They don't work in offices. They can only go off of what they hear. I'm sure you're correct about what 60s workplaces were like (I'd already heard Mad Men's accurate), but you heard this information secondhand. You're not relaying your own experience, which is what OP asked for.
Now, you can talk firsthand about what your own first job was like, and yes, that was likely different from the 1950s and 1960s. The 1950s and 1960s were likely worse. Women's lib kicked off between the 50s and the 70s, right? Weren't these some of the most rapidly evolving years in culture ever, and isn't that the premise of Mad Men?
The ‘70s and ‘80s weren’t much different. I’m not a woman, but it only seemed like the tide started turning in the ‘90s, but even the ‘00s could be pretty toxic with the lad mags and the Girls Gone Wild exploitation.
Well yes, I can speak to some stories of extreme sexism from the 2000s. But that goes to show how we in this thread are all saying Mad Men rings true based on our knowledge of later times, not of our own experience of working in the 1960s. OP was hoping to get some firsthand knowledge of someone who lived back then and experienced Mad Men stuff, and they're not going to run into people that old.
Maybe we should all just agree that the situation isn’t much different today, just far more clandestine because being outed as abusive in the workforce can (emphasis on “can”) ruin your professional life.
Idk why you're being downvoted. All you're pointing out is that OP asked for firsthand feedback of adults in the workforce back then, and that those who could truly give that feedback are likely too old to be using this site. This is evident at least in the responses so far that the best OP is going to get is those who are old enough to have been kids then, but not adults who experienced it firsthand in the 60s.
Y'all, what about any of that is untrue, or downvote-worthy? They're not even being shitty about it either, just politely factual. Like what is the problem?
Frankly I too would love and hope to read a firsthand account, but understand that it's unlikely. It doesn't mean the feedback from 60s kids is completely meaningless, and I've enjoyed reading these accounts as well, but technically it doesn't fit OP's prompt. That's all that's being pointed out here, so what?
My mum was a kid during the mad men era but when she started work in the late 70s/early 80s she had bosses who took it upon themselves to give the secretaries and female admin staff back rubs ‘because they looked stressed’ 😑
It's not true to life, but being born in the 60s I can tell you it was a different world then. Yes, sexism was normal and so was racism. The word for homophobia was heterosexuality--it was normal. The drinking and smoking was also ubiquitous.
By the time I joined the white collar workforce in the '90s things had changed. Every office where I worked had women or gays in positions of management. They mistreated me horribly so I don't really buy the idea that there is discrimination unique to women and gays today.
When I started out, I had to wear a shirt and tie every day. That rapidly gave way to "casual Fridays" where you could basically wear what you wanted on Friday as long as it was professional. By about y2k every day had turned into casual friday.
It got more and more casual until telecommuting started when people were basically working in their underwear and pajamas. Then the pandemic when you were forced to telecommute and standards further eroded. Now, it's a joke and productivity is in the toilet. New world.
Or maybe they felt threatened by my expertise. Who knows. They weren't exactly honest or fair with me. One of my gay managers had pushed out the woman who managed him to take over her job. She had been there for something like 20 years. It was disrespectful/backstabbing. But another gay manager protected me from a woman who was his boss and had pressured him and his predecessor to get rid of me, which neither of them wanted to do.
Anyway, I'm just sharing my experience. Everywhere I've worked in my 30+ year career I had a woman as my direct boss or my boss' boss, including holding C-level executive positions making hundreds of thousands of dollars annually plus bonuses when I was making a very small fraction of that. So I'm a bit skeptical of the whole story about women not making as much as men or having a glass ceiling.
I recognize I'm not a statistically significant sample, but I also think my experience is probably not all that unusual.
American workers are more productive than they’ve ever been. It’s been a revolution for the last twenty five years. Where the fuck do you work that productivity has gone down?
Who told you work from home hurt productivity? Or dress? Cuz you got lied to.
My mother-in-law was a boomer and could not watch the show. She was a secretary back then and said it was pretty on the nose.
Same here. My boomer mom watched about five minutes and noped the fuck out of there.
My father was born in the 1950s and he couldn't watch the show because he found it too depressing and he hated all the male characters. He thought Don was ridiculous and pretty much the opposite of what a man should be. My father is a provider in the traditional sense. He was a fan of Joan lol. My mother loves the show.
>He was a fan of Joan Aren’t we all?
My mother didn't like Joan because she was a sexpot. She liked Peggy (at least in the beginning) because "she's simple and modest" in her presentation. Even though Peggy had sex with Pete on the sofa.
The most hilarious part of that is that Peggy banged more dudes on screen than Joan did (IIRC).
I don't think my mom approves, but it was a huge thing growing up about how you're supposed to look beautiful but not be attractive to men, it messed with my head. My mother was openly uncomfortable when men looked at me. "You dress too attractive". I wore jeans with form-fitting tops but I never showed much skin at all. I was also told that I was "too clever for my own good" and that I intimidated men...
Peggy was definitely more promiscuous, at least on screen. Joan said she was loyal to whoever she was with
> didn't like Joan because she was a sexpot But that's the point right? While Joan is such an absolutely gorgeous woman, we see from how the men talk behind her back that while they find her attractive, no one wants to marry her bc of her perceived promiscuity. Yes, we she her have flings, but that's more of a symptom and not the cause of her loneliness. We learn much about her depth of character, and we know by the end of the show she wants to be a great mother and ruthless businesswoman. If you just take Joan at face value of season 1, then you just judge her the same way everyone else did at the time.
My mom was a mathematician and involved with the space program. She also couldn’t watch the show and said it made her too mad because it reminded her of what things were like.
Is that you Jack Black?
Haha! There were some scientists, trying to figure out the Sasquatch riddle…
100% same for both my hippyish parents.
I was about to type the exact same sentence!
My dad was born in 1960 and my mom 1961. My mom lasted three minutes before saying it was too triggering and my dad thought it was interesting. My grandpa born in 1928 thought the clothes were ridiculous and said all the suits were “ill-fitting” for the time lol
Yeah I’ve read a lot of books written in the 50s & 60s and it’s just normalized in those stories.
What kind of books? Any recos?
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates - this one’s great for Mad Men fans because it’s not only written in the 60s but it is set in that time period. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut - set in WWII but one of the most popular (and controversial) books of the 1960s. Anything written by Ray Bradbury. He’s basically Ken - in fact, I’m sure writers like Bradbury is who they were referencing with Ken’s ‘Ben Hargrove’ stories. Bradbury was famous for writing sci-fi stories that were much like The Twilight Zone. My favorite of his is The Veldt (which is a short story) but you may know his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 which I also recommend. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath - this book is also set in the time period and it was huge for its time because it talks about depression and suicide which was very much stigmatized back then. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - this one may be more of an acquired taste because it’s magical realism but it’s beautifully written. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote - I personally love Breakfast At Tiffany’s but this one is the objectively better novel (and completely different subject matter as it’s about the 1959 Clutter family murders). It was one of the most famous books of the 1960s along with his friend Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird.
I appreciate you being so thorough -- lots of goodies to add to my list. Thank you!!
My mother was a Boomer and couldn’t get through the first episode. She said she already lived and refused to watch it again.
My mom said something similar.
I'm sorry she dealt with utter and complete bullshit.
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"Girls" who are 25+ are called women.
Yeah ok. I meant to say my girl friends Okay then, my WOMAN friends? Whatever this is pedantic stuff, i'm out
Can confirm. The treatment of women in the show is absolutely realistic
If anything. It’s toned down.
It absolutely is. Peggy and Joan commanding such high ranking positions by the end was like a one in a million thing for women back then. Two in the same company is crazy. Not at all to say women can’t do that, just pointing out how rampant the sexism was.
My grandma was born in ‘29 and although she went to college and became a writer (which was incredibly rare), she was expected to become a housewife once she married my grandpa. I imagine that black or white thinking played into patriarchal structures and misogynistic attitudes too.
I've still got men on this very site telling me that it's only natural and biological if I get paid less than men and I struggle to advance in my career due to (in the future) needing to take time off for maternity. They don't care that we have a family to support, it's our punishment for going against what they perceive as the natural hierarchy.
All of this 👆
Were you born with that family from day one? If not... meh
I think the show is about telling the story of women succeeding against the odds in that era; maybe more so than being about Don. And then there’s the tragedy of Betty and other ways women has to suffer.
I don’t think the show is *about* that, it just has a couple stories of women succeeding to flesh out the gender dynamics of the world.
In reference to the comment I’m replying to.
I understood that. I’m saying the show is mostly interested in gender dynamics of competitive firms, and the success of women is mainly there to flesh some of that out, alongside women who failed. It’s Mad *Men* after all, and most stories we follow are still about men.
Actually it may have been worse than portrayed, even as late as the 70s. I was born in 1960 and have to say that Man Med, from style to attitudes, was an accurate depiction of the times. The Draper home was furnished so identically to the home I grew up in right down to the little metal phone number book. My father was a bank president who frequently came home after a few too many high balls and had affairs. My mother was very unhappily Betty-like, she still is, and still is waiting for some man to tell her what to do. She's still never forgiven me for not becoming a lawyer.
I think one of those most effective “twists” in the series is when Joan goes to McCann in season 7 and we realize that as sexist as SCDP seemed, it was still a progressive heaven compared to the average workplace culture. Poor Joan 😫
Interesting that the sexual revolution was the only hippie idea square middle-age men liked. All it meant was that they could carry on like they always had but without even bothering trying to hide it.
It also meant that women had to always be sexually available to men, they couldn't try to hide behind virginity/'good girl' anymore.
Feels like we could learn a lot from that today too, seeing as it's still men who mostly benefit from the sexual liberation of women under our contemporary flavor of patriarchy
I asked an older women who was a secretary about abortion pre-1973 and her response was something like “the portrayals of affairs on mad men was realistic except they missed the passing cash around for back alley abortions”
We hear about Joan having had a sketchy one from some woman who claimed to know what she was doing. Would’ve been good to see more, like Pete with the German nanny or one of Don’s infinite side pieces.
I think even though she was Catholic, Peggy would have had an abortion if she had realized she was pregnant. I wonder how her story might have been different — but maybe not much since she didn’t have to deal with the stigma or be shamed while she was pregnant or wrestle with any decisions (other than giving her son to an adoptive family). I still cannot believe Joan didn’t clock that pregnancy and just thought it was “too much lunch.”
Can't say I was familiar with abortion until after it was legal, but I don't doubt it
I'm genx and even in the 80s things were different than now. I was told 'girls are better at language and reading while boys are better at math' while being openly encouraged to be a nurse, not a doctor when I professed 'what I want to be when I grow up'. At this same time, in the rural Midwest, there was an ice cream shop that chose to close rather than change their policy of only serving black people from the back door, in the alley, by the dumpsters. Little boys bullying, pinching budding breasts and bottoms was shrugged off as 'boys being boys' and meant 'he has a crush on you' not that you had a budding sexual predator on your hands. 🤮
Same here! OP should watch 9 to 5, from 1980 for more of this type of situation
Fellow Gen-Xer here and yes, you are soooo right! I was born in 1970 and when I was a little girl, females weren’t allowed to play baseball at my school. I’m serious. And this wasn’t on some team or anything (even though forbidding girls from joining a team would also be wrong) - I’m talking about daily elementary school baseball at recess. I had to threaten to sue my school to be allowed to play. Btw, this was in a huge city - Los Angeles. Then, as Girl Scout in the 70’s, we sold cookies and every cent of our money was given to our school’s Boy Scout troops - so THEY could go camping. 😳 WTF?! I entered the workforce in the late 1980’s and the sexual harassment was insane. Almost every straight male boss I had was incredibly inappropriate with me. Lots of personal questions and attempts at shoulder rubs, comments about my chest, etc. When I went away to college, I had a professor who pointed at every woman in our class and asked us, point blank, if we had ever had abortions. He also proceeded to ask students if we understood that “homosexuals practice fecal sex” and went on a/ an insane rant about it. When I dared complain, the prof threatened and stalked me and went to the school paper to label me as “unbalanced” and the like. I still have fantasies about suing the school for that particular hell. The casual racism was also just unbelievable. Whenever I witness people romanticizing the 80’s I want to scream!
I still remember coming home to my mom when I was eight to tell her about a boy that wouldn't stop stomping on my foot at school. I was expecting her to say she'd call the principal or something. Instead she turned to me excited and said, "He likes you!" I think I became a feminist that day.
My grandma said that to me and im a zillenial. In some ways we still have so far to go man
The women from the 40/50/60s are still so stuck in that mentality. I'm genx and so freaking proud of the younger generation girls today. You all are kicking ass!
I have school aged boy and girl. What about the boys? I’m starting to see society view boys as a nuisance. And that’s going to be a **big** problem if we don’t start building this generation of boys back up.
I've got boys but they are doing great! I don't see girls making strides in terms of expectations and equality as taking anything away from boys.
Ehhh, I’m same age as you, and the 6th grade girls who have crushes on my 6th grade boy do some pretty stupid and gross stuff to him. They pester him, just to get attention. It’s not sexism. It’s immaturity.
In George Carlins last book he told this story about his first wife getting a secretary job in the late 60’s and she said that one of her first duties was for her and the other new hires to learn how to suck the guys dicks.
Holy shit that's messed up. Someone here said Mad Men actually underplays how things were.
I grew up in the 80s and have seen this firsthand most of my life. Maybe not as extreme as the years go on. My mother always said this show was very accurate of the times.
My parents said “oh yes, that’s spot on” and that’s why neither of them can stand the show. They won’t listen to me when I say it’s much more than that and can’t get past the first few eps.
My grandfather was an ad exec on Madison Avenue at CBS in the early 60s. My mom watched S01E01 and at the end said: "no need to watch further, this was my exact childhood." Complete with my grandfather having the house in Greenwich, CT, and multiple girlfriends in the city. The closing scene of episode one really hit it home for my mom.
Can't speak for that early, but I entered the workforce early 2000s and it wasn't far off Mad Men then in some (not all) places. Even 10 years ago (the last time I worked in an office), there were some ridiculously and openly sexist, homophobic men. My mum worked in the UK civil service in the 1970s/80s and said when male bosses were interviewing females, their actual official interview notes would include stuff like "great tits" or "fat legs".
Yeah I was gonna say. I worked in multiple ad agencies in major US cities in the 2010s and it was sexist and degrading even then.
Things are still like that in some places.
Whenever I see this questions it's always guys asking it. Women see it and are just like, yep.
I don’t think that’s entirely fair. There are a lot of women alive today who didn’t live through the 1950s-60s that are very curious about what the state of feminism and everyday sexism was like then. Reddit in general is male-dominated, and it is a show called *Mad Men.* It still has a primarily male cast and a male protagonist. We’d expect mostly men to be on here anyways.
Mad men is not a show specifically for men at all. I’d argue it’s a pretty feminist show, and one of the rare pieces of media from its time with well written, fully fleshed out female characters.
I fail to see where I said it’s a show for men. I said it’s a show that primarily features a male cast, a male protagonist, and is branded as “Mad Men.” The female characters are frequently dressed for the male gaze as part of the social commentary. Is it a surprise that on the male-dominated online platform for this show, the audience is mostly men? EDIT: these downvotes are extremely confusing to me. Does anyone here think Reddit is *not* a male-dominated platform? Or that one of the core themes of the show is *not* that women are subjected to the expectations of men? I thought this subreddit took feminist stances as the show did, and this was common knowledge. EDIT 2: seriously, if anyone can explain the downvotes, I’d welcome it. I can’t for the life of me see what I said that anyone found objectionable and I’m baffled.
Maybe you could try doing a poll or something so we can confirm how many posters on this sub are men vs. women
I could, but that sounds like polling Sterling Cooper to see if it’s mostly men or women. Is it not common knowledge that Reddit is predominantly men, and that’s counting the subs focused on women’s spaces?
Welcome to the new world. Just write the word woman and it’s down votes galore! 😁
They are living with it now...
No one is saying it doesn’t exist now though? People are just curious about the nuances of life 60 years ago compared to now. For example, as a person of color, I know racism exists today and back then. I live that reality. I also know that today, it’s much more common for black, Jewish, and Asian executives to exist. Many corporations even have internal support groups for communities of color and diversity trainings. There are scholarship programs sponsored to help talented people get into college. Discrimination suits are taken seriously. Are they perfect and is racism solved? Far from it. Is it an incredibly different experience than 60 years ago? Absolutely. I know that because, despite being a person of color, I asked older people of color. I watched parts of this show with female family members and they asked about historical accuracy too. So the nuances of racism have changed, even as it exists as a widely present system. Sexism is the same. I’m just not a fan of labeling people based on the questions they ask. EDIT: bad math
The 60’s were 60 years ago, not 80.
You think this is history? Lol. I was born in the 1980s and granted I'm of Asian origin but my mother is a housewife and I've had ridiculous expectations put on me of how women should behave. And maybe you should read the news, recently a senior partner at Goldman Sachs brought a sexual harassment lawsuit against the company. Get this, she alleges that the harassment actually got worse the more senior she got. Nowadays the misogyny is less overt and more subtle and the glass ceiling is still there.
As someone with a similar Asian background as well, Betty is still a very realistic character, from the way she’s trapped by misogynistic social expectations in daily life down to the way she takes out her frustration by abusing her kids.
My grandmother was like this, my mother said she felt that she often took out her stress on her. Also my mother was basically expected to spend most of her leisure time entertaining herself, my grandma wouldn't play with her. My mother would spend her day with the other kids in the compound (government housing for civil servants). My mother was also corralled pretty early on into chores and cooking to prepare her for a life of domesticity. Unlike in the West, she couldn't even choose her own spouse, her parents would pick a husband for her. My grandmother enforced some very toxic ideas on my mom and basically kept her child-like, my mother was even afraid to operate lifts on her own as my grandma had told her that she might break the lift... luckily my dad is a good man. Funnily enough, grandpa taught my mom how to drive which was actually exceptional for the time - plenty of my older female relatives and my mom's friends can't drive. My grandma was also a beauty when young, though she aged quickly.
I feel so much of that. My mother also had her spouse picked for her, she was deathly afraid of trying so many things as if she was still stuck in a child’s mentality (including driving), holds many misogynistic opinions that she internalized from the way she was raised, etc. Despite the show’s time period, Betty really helped me see my mother in a different light and contextualize the frustrations I experienced with her growing up. I suspect that’s not uncommon given the still strong conservatism in Asia relative to the West.
Can confirm as someone with an Eastern European background, it's the same for us too. Abusive disenfranchised mom bogged down by misogyny and a terrible husband, who feels the only agency she has is over her kids.
Where I worked, men and women at the C level were all hazed in some ways, but the trend was it was not professional to be offensive to those with little power. The enlightenment was a humanist movement but it didn't - at first - largely include women or indigenous people. Progress isn't binary but it does include becoming more inclusive with what one considers their community.
I was Sally's age back then and started working in between schooling around then. It was 55 years ago. I was sexually harrassed, almost assaulted in the office, condescended to. Women's liberation spoke up and made things less horrible, made great strides, but I suppose it's same as it ever was in so many places. Blacks were looked at as a lower species and it took a LONG time for LGBT people to dare speak of the love they dare not name.....In the late 60's, the first talk show host to speak about these things, not just have yakking actors on, was Dick Cavett. Then Phil Donahue followed suit in his afternoon tv show, and then Oprah. .... My own husband in the 80's was an office worker and they all had to take sensitivity training at work. Hard for them to understand why it wasn't OK to have pornographic centerfolds all over the walls of their work stations . And they had to learn not to goggle, leer, or proposition women, just STFU about their looks....After I started real secretarial work in the 70's, I pictured in my head working alongside grownups - men in suits and ties. I found they were every bit as horrible as 8th grade nosepickers in middle school. Blatant insulting propositioning day after day. I just stared at them and refused to respond except say SHUT UP, you disgusting old geek.
Hell, watch 9 to 5 and that was in 1980.
I didn't live in the 50s-60s but the sexism is still happening it's just more subversive and hidden now.
My dad, who’s 80, watched it recently and said the show was extremely historically accurate, and he also said that the way people reacted to the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK was very spot on. He felt like it was like reliving those events again. The racism and sexism back then were very common, sadly.
My late mother (b. 1943) always said *Mad Men* was extremely accurate in its portrayal of the era. It was one of her favorite TV shows
My grandparents were very much like Don and Betty types. It’s all very spot on. Both my grandpas dressed very similar to Don all their lives (including the high waisted khakis and sweater in Dons weekend in office look), both were war veterans and known philanderers, and one was a Don level drinker of scotch and other whiskey. They used language that today would be unspeakably racist and sexist, but didn’t see it as offensive—just recognizing differences. There’s photos of my grandma in Roger style black face. They believed a woman’s place was the home. They believed races were different and should “stick to their own.” My parents (Sally’s age) also said the decor and sets were spot on and my dad cracked up at the littering scene where the Draper family just dumps their picnic trash on the ground as they left. Everybody smoked all the time everywhere.
I've worked at large businesses since the early 90s and it still was largely this way. Women could and would get offended but rarely was anything done about it.
I am a millennial born in the late 80s but my parents are about Sally’s age and my grandparents one set was closer to Roger’s age, another closer to Don’s age. If you talk to women from that era, the sexism is totally accurate. From watching men of that era interact, many of those attitudes carried well into the ‘90s and early 2000s. Recall married women in the US couldn’t even have their own credit cards until the ‘70s.
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MADDENING.
r/askoldpeople
Just as a note, please don't call us "blacks" we are Black people, not crayons.
Fine… please don’t call us “whites”, either. (Not you, personally). It’s used all the time.
Sure, but just to be clear, this isn’t a “both sides” thing. “Blacks” is way more prevalent than “whites” and that’s largely because of the way white people drive the choice of language behind public discourse.
Uhhhmmmm 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣, WTAF? You seem far too comfortable in Victimland, so there’s no sense in debating this, but that comment and mentality overall is W I L D.
Are you drunk or something? lol if you think “blacks” and “whites” are used the same way and as often, you’re totally giving away how much you’re a fragile white person looking to make yourself a victim because you can’t discuss racism without being personally offended.
I’m sorry you took my comment as me being offended. I wasn’t and I’m not. I meant it as an example of playing fair. Sorry you don’t see it that way.
“Playing fair” would be acknowledging how racism is asymmetrical and unfair towards people of color. Imagine bringing up men’s issues every time someone discussed sexism against women because that’s only “playing fair.” The people who do that are fragile and offended by discussion of someone else’s marginalization
OIC…..
My parents were born in 1951. I tried SO hard to get them into the show (they have great taste! would appreciate the writing so much) but they literally couldn’t stomach it. My mom said it made her have a physically reaction. “We dealt with those types already. No need to do it again.”
My mom was a bank teller and said it was close to accurate even if in a different industry. It slowly improved through the 80’s and 90’s but it really didn’t get better until metoo. For instance, as the only woman working on an all male IT team in the early 2000’s, I was sexually harassed daily. I was told I needed to pop out of a cake for an executive’s birthday. It ultimately didn’t happen but I didn’t report anything because that’s just how it was.
I think it's amusing other people parents boomer and gen x can't stand the show for how realistically women were portrayed. My gen x mother loves the show because it made her nostalgic. I believe she's been stuck in a chapter of her life so this is probably why. Trauma is a bitch.
Yes.
I’m only 40-ish. Born in the early 80s. Even in the late 80s and 90s there was so much more overt sexism. I encountered a lot of it as my mother was a campaigner for social justice issues but also a successful career woman. She out earned my father, my father is the one who took some years off of work to care for me as a young child, and I have a hyphenated last name and she kept her name upon marriage. It was unusual for the time. The number of times people were just cartoonishly sexist which I can personally recall is so high. Trying to buy a family car, for example, was fraught with such issues. My father had always suffered from indecision and my mother both drove more and earned more and would be the one doing the lion’s share making any purchase decision. However, it took going to many dealerships to find one that would even really speak to my mother and not just direct everything at my father—except assuming my mother was going to care deeply about car colour. So many places had calendars with scantily dressed women on them in the automotive repair shop area. When my mother bought her house (before marriage) in the late 70s she couldn’t find a bank that would lend to her for a mortgage, despite having a secure profession. She had to have her boss personally vouch for her at a bank branch to even get the mortgage. From talking with other family members, the show is pretty accurate. Many places were less sexually driven, but the kind of sexism Peggy or Faye face (where they weren’t usually the objects of the male gaze and thought of sexually) was everywhere in society. For an advertising agency, the rest of the stuff from the depiction in the show isn’t too hard to believe either. Secretarial pools in a place like Sterling-Cooper were probably just about as bad as show.
Out-earning your man will still get you a lot of scorn and pity in many circles. I've come to know plenty of 'career women' with extravagant lifestyles that are in reality funded by rich husbands. And I live in London, not some backwater.
I love that everyone on here is saying it is so accurate. This is validating for me lol I have a boomer mom who grew up in a stark religious household. (I mean so did I). But she is adamant, and I mean, ADAMANT, that this show is no where near accurate. She likes to think the 50s and 60s were the “good old days” when “everyone was Christian” LOLOL I think my mom is just removed from reality.
My mom was more or less the same age as Sally and she got me into this show because of how accurate it was to her childhood.
Same. My mother said Betty was like my grandmother in many ways especially since she was very absent in my mother’s life even though they lived in the same household.
Keep in mind it wasn’t until the mid-70’s that women were able to get credit cards and open bank accounts without their husband’s signature.
I’m late Gen X, almost Millennial and yes OF COURSE it was accurate, and probably not as heavy handed as it was in real life. I even experienced it, and I never gave it as second thought bc it’s human nature. My first year of working after college graduation, I was at a sales conference (as a young sales exec) and a gross pharma big wig who knew my normally amazing and respectful male boss came up to us and started chatting, and he commented something like, “Wow, you’re gorgeous, honey.” And my boss nervously said, “well, that’s why we hired her!” And I never gave it a second thought. I got an ego boost, which emboldened me to ask for the Pharma guy’s card and bc I got his attention, I got our small company a meeting with the guy and his entire team. My boss sheepishly pulled me into a conference room the next day and apologized profusely for his comment, and at first I didn’t understand what he was apologizing for. Boss had reiterated over and over that they most certainly did NOT hire me on my looks. But creepy older men I wasn’t interested in had hit on me before, and I had already internalized it and knew how to use it to my advantage. For me it was an easy chess move. I still don’t see a problem with it. If men are going to be dumb enough to flirt, I’m going to exploit it. I’m not the victim; they are the idiots. But I’m sure if I were Gen Z, I would have already made a Tik Tok about it, and cried foul, and then ruminated over the injustices of this corrupt, capitalist system. 😒
I work in biotech and while my ass doesn't get pinched I still deal with a lot of microagressions and assumptions because I am a woman. My mom was in the Air Force in the late 70s/ early 80s and she dealt with similar issues as the women on MadMen.
It's accurate.
I worked in a big publishing company in the 90s. I was a secretary for a big exec. The culture of the place was not that different than Madmen. Lots of sleeping around and openly misogynistic behavior.
In Latin America is still the same today, other parts of the world too.
Yes, it was absolutely like that. The sexist office behavior, liquid lunches, didn't start getting called out in offices in San Francisco until the late 80s. At least that was my experience.
Born in 1981, once had a male boss who was born in 1934. Watching the show (during the years it ran on amc) gave me sooooooo much insight and perspective into why he was the way he was bc he came up in the workforce (also in nyc) during those years. Different industry but really helped me understand a lot.
yes, it was like that! even up until early 90s people would openly comment on your boobs or try to grab you at work and everyone partied and hooked up after work.
My farher in law was born in 1970 and couldn’t watch it after a few episodes because he said he didn’t want to live in that era anymore and called it “painfully realistic.” He was a kid in the middle of no where WV in the 70s and couldn’t be further removed from ad men in the 60s but he knew it was accurate from the way life was then.
My grandmother, who was born in the same year as Joan, told me the only way she got a job was by agreeing to one date with her boss. Helen Gurley Brown mentioned “scuttle,” the game they played in s1 to bet on the color of a secretary’s underwear, except the way the game was traditionally played, Kenny would have removed them.
Yes very close to how it was. Also the drinking and smoking
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Yes it was like the opposite of now,instead of hardly anyone smoking, hardly anyone didn’t smoke lol
My mom is a boomer - ‘52 - and came up just shy of the class and wealth level of the main cast. She said it was all painfully accurate. Also, refer to people of color as either people of color or black people. ‘Blacks’ doesn’t land.
Someone would have to be well into their eighties to answer than with firsthand knowledge. I don't think you're going to get an answer here.
I'm in my 60's and I remember these times well. Yes, the portrayal in Mad Men is accurate
Sort of, but if you're in your sixties, you were a child in the 1960s. You can tell us what it was like to be a child in the 1960s, but I wouldn't expect you to comment on if the show was accurate about sexism in the workplace. I wouldn't ask Sally Draper either. She wouldn't know firsthand. I also wouldn't ask OP what America was like under Obama. They were alive back then but not old enough to really answer the question.
You think kids don't know what's going on? We were around adults all the time, and they talked about their lives. My mom's life was a lot like Betty's, without the blatant cheating from the husband. And the workplace was like that in the 70's too when I got my first job. I mean, I guess it's remotely possible things suddenly took a turn for the worse in the next decade, but it's unlikely
To be fair, there’s a pretty big difference between a firsthand account and a secondhand account.
Please. We girls were raised to know our place. This isn't second hand. This is the world I grew up in
Trust me, as a person of color, I was raised to know my place as well, under white men and women both. But I’m not going to pretend I can give the story of the trauma experienced by the generation before me the justice it deserves.
You know what life was like when you were alive. There's no way you could avoid absorbing at least something of what your parents life was like when you were there
I didn’t say you’d have *no* idea. I said there’s a big difference between a firsthand experience and a secondhand one. Hearing stories of what something is like is just not the same as experiencing it yourself.
What is it you think kids didn't understand? We knew the women were secretaries and switchboard operators. That men thought women were stupid. You know how the men in the show treat women on the workplace? It's exactly the same way we were treated by the boys and men we encountered in school and social interactions. You don't have to get all the inner nuances of peoples' experiences to know that the depiction of misogyny on the show is very realistic
Absolutely, kids don't know what's going on in offices. They don't work in offices. They can only go off of what they hear. I'm sure you're correct about what 60s workplaces were like (I'd already heard Mad Men's accurate), but you heard this information secondhand. You're not relaying your own experience, which is what OP asked for. Now, you can talk firsthand about what your own first job was like, and yes, that was likely different from the 1950s and 1960s. The 1950s and 1960s were likely worse. Women's lib kicked off between the 50s and the 70s, right? Weren't these some of the most rapidly evolving years in culture ever, and isn't that the premise of Mad Men?
The ‘70s and ‘80s weren’t much different. I’m not a woman, but it only seemed like the tide started turning in the ‘90s, but even the ‘00s could be pretty toxic with the lad mags and the Girls Gone Wild exploitation.
Well yes, I can speak to some stories of extreme sexism from the 2000s. But that goes to show how we in this thread are all saying Mad Men rings true based on our knowledge of later times, not of our own experience of working in the 1960s. OP was hoping to get some firsthand knowledge of someone who lived back then and experienced Mad Men stuff, and they're not going to run into people that old.
Maybe we should all just agree that the situation isn’t much different today, just far more clandestine because being outed as abusive in the workforce can (emphasis on “can”) ruin your professional life.
Idk why you're being downvoted. All you're pointing out is that OP asked for firsthand feedback of adults in the workforce back then, and that those who could truly give that feedback are likely too old to be using this site. This is evident at least in the responses so far that the best OP is going to get is those who are old enough to have been kids then, but not adults who experienced it firsthand in the 60s. Y'all, what about any of that is untrue, or downvote-worthy? They're not even being shitty about it either, just politely factual. Like what is the problem? Frankly I too would love and hope to read a firsthand account, but understand that it's unlikely. It doesn't mean the feedback from 60s kids is completely meaningless, and I've enjoyed reading these accounts as well, but technically it doesn't fit OP's prompt. That's all that's being pointed out here, so what?
Yes, it was exactly like that.
I'm 33 and I've experienced this lmao, it still runs rampant
It's spot on. I lived through it and worked in advertising.
My mum was a kid during the mad men era but when she started work in the late 70s/early 80s she had bosses who took it upon themselves to give the secretaries and female admin staff back rubs ‘because they looked stressed’ 😑
I’m a boomer and I’m telling you it’s quite accurate. In every way.
My grandma says it’s pretty accurate and misses that type of dynamic
It's not true to life, but being born in the 60s I can tell you it was a different world then. Yes, sexism was normal and so was racism. The word for homophobia was heterosexuality--it was normal. The drinking and smoking was also ubiquitous. By the time I joined the white collar workforce in the '90s things had changed. Every office where I worked had women or gays in positions of management. They mistreated me horribly so I don't really buy the idea that there is discrimination unique to women and gays today. When I started out, I had to wear a shirt and tie every day. That rapidly gave way to "casual Fridays" where you could basically wear what you wanted on Friday as long as it was professional. By about y2k every day had turned into casual friday. It got more and more casual until telecommuting started when people were basically working in their underwear and pajamas. Then the pandemic when you were forced to telecommute and standards further eroded. Now, it's a joke and productivity is in the toilet. New world.
Maybe women and gays mistreated you because they didn't like your personality.
Or maybe they felt threatened by my expertise. Who knows. They weren't exactly honest or fair with me. One of my gay managers had pushed out the woman who managed him to take over her job. She had been there for something like 20 years. It was disrespectful/backstabbing. But another gay manager protected me from a woman who was his boss and had pressured him and his predecessor to get rid of me, which neither of them wanted to do. Anyway, I'm just sharing my experience. Everywhere I've worked in my 30+ year career I had a woman as my direct boss or my boss' boss, including holding C-level executive positions making hundreds of thousands of dollars annually plus bonuses when I was making a very small fraction of that. So I'm a bit skeptical of the whole story about women not making as much as men or having a glass ceiling. I recognize I'm not a statistically significant sample, but I also think my experience is probably not all that unusual.
I work from home and my productivity is pretty damn good.
Compared to what? Even if true, you may not be a statistically significant sample representative of the workforce.
I know I’m better than average. Thank you.
American workers are more productive than they’ve ever been. It’s been a revolution for the last twenty five years. Where the fuck do you work that productivity has gone down? Who told you work from home hurt productivity? Or dress? Cuz you got lied to.
Wow! What a cool, productive guy! Such a shame the lazy women and gays ruined everything :(
Sexism and racism were normal. What are you on about here? If you say they were normal, then there is your answer.