Last year, an interviewer asked Elizabeth Moss, one of the stars of Mad Men, if her character, Peggy Olson, was a feminist. Her reply was a revelation:
“She’s a different kind of feminist. She’s the one who works really hard, and concentrates on her job, and wants to move up in the world of her business. And her progressiveness and her brand of feminism — it comes in probably a bit of a more realistic way, you know? Those were the women — there were more of those women than were the hippies who burned bras and picketed. Those women were the ones who were actually, you know, going in and asking for equal pay, and asking for equal rights, and demanding to be treated better in the workplace.”
Sorry, Ms Moss, but you just don’t get it. As someone who has watched almost every episode of Mad Men, I’m disappointed. So where do I start?
Well, feminism is not just a belief in “the legal, social and economic equality of the sexes”, as it says in the dictionary. It is advocacy of women’s rights, as it also says in the dictionary. But has Peggy ever done any advocacy? Well, I have never seen her read a book like The Feminine Mystique or The Church and the Second Sex, I have never seen her write a letter to the editor of a newspaper and call out its sexism, I have never see her write a check to a women’s rights organization . . .
Feminism isn’t just about individual women asking for equal rights and demanding to be treated better in the workplace. It is about analysis of women’s struggles in a male-dominated society and collective advocacy of social justice. It is doing bread-and-butter activities like reading books about sexism and misogyny, discussing them with like-minded friends, writing letters to the editor, joining activist organizations and donating your time and money to them, calling your Representative. . . things I have never seen Peggy or anyone else on Mad Men ever do.
So no, I do not think that Peggy Olson is a different type of feminist – or any type of feminist. She is simply a talented, hard-working, ambitious woman who has no problem using feminist achievements to further her own career. I remember the scene when she asked Don Draper for a raise and said that the Equal Pay Act had been passed, but I never got a hint that she called her Congressman about it or worked with activist groups like The National Woman’s Party or Business and Professional Women (BPW/USA) to make it happen.
It doesn’t bother me that Peggy is not an activist, especially since the point of Mad Men is to show how much the 60’s impacted people who accepted or at least, tolerated the status quo. But what does bother me is that Mad Men has never shown any feminist activism, especially when it has taken pains to show Civil Rights activism.
You would never know from watching Mad Men that Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was a bestseller in 1963, that National Organization for Women (NOW) was started in 1966, and that the Women’s Liberation Movement led a protest of the Miss America Pageant in 1968 and threw their undergarments in trash cans but did NOT burn their bras.
It would not detract from the message of Mad Men to show Betty Draper, say, rolling her eyes when her friends say, “But Betty, some women’s libbers are making a lot of sense.” It would not bog the show down if Peggy’s friend, Joyce, called her and urged her to join NOW. And it would send a powerful message if Joan walked into a YWCA because she wanted to start working out and overheard a consciousness raising session where women talked about how their husbands “forced themselves” on them.
But those types of scenes will never happen until feminist fans push the creators of Mad Men to do them. As far as I can tell, that ain’t gonna happen. The excellent Women in Hollywood blog recently did a critique of women’s roles in season seven but it never said anything about its silence on feminism. There is a lot of buzz in the blogosphere about the possibility that Sally Draper is a feminist, but nobody has called out Mad Men for ignoring the activism that was happening in the late 60’s.
Mad Men is far superior to many other TV series in how it portrays women and their struggles in a patriarchal society. But it is male chauvinistic for the series to ignore feminist activists. And it is inexcusable for Elizabeth Moss to call them “bra burners”, especially since the show prides itself on historical accuracy.
So should I give up on Mad Men? Should we give feminist media critics a free pass when they ignore its silence on feminism because “the show is so much better than all the sexist crap on TV”? My answer to both is NO. As far as I know, they haven’t finished filming the remainder of season seven. So I am going to write Matt Weiner a letter and I urge you all to do the same. And I urge you to act like the women in the consciousness raising groups in the 60’s and challenge feminist fans and media critics to call out the “no activist” policy on Mad Men – if only so that the Elizabeth Moss’s of the world will see what it really means to be “a different kind of feminist.”