The Case for why Peggy Olson is NOT Mad Men’s Feminist Hero
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Peggy Olson (played by Elisabeth Moss). Click on image for credit.
I love Peggy. Throughout Mad Men’s four seasons, she is the character who has undergone the most change, from meek Brooklyn-bred office secretary to powerhouse Manhattan-girl copywriter with her own office and a whole lot of confidence to boot. She looks for opportunities and takes them, and even asks her boss, the show’s main character Don Draper, for equal pay (though she does not get it). But as we learned in last week’s episode, she is dedicated to her job at the expense of her personal life. And while we may have cherished the image of her and Don asleep on the office couch, there are probably few of us who would want to stay overnight at the office on our birthdays.
Peggy is able to get ahead at work not only because she is talented, but also because she gave up her baby. Peggy tells Don that she doesn’t want what she’s supposed to want and that nothing she does feels as good or as important as what happens in the office, and we cheer, and yet we are also rooting for our own harsh dichotomy: be successful in your career or have kids – you can’t have it all. The men in the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce office look at marriage and children as pegs on the ladder to success; a married man is viewed as more stable and having children to support might mean a raise. When a woman gets married, she is expected to leave the office, and not a single woman that we see on the show has a child and still works (aside from Peggy, who was unaware of her pregnancy).
It’s easy to look at Peggy and identify with her as a professional woman or even as a role model as we see what risks she takes in her sexist circumstances, or to hate Betty Draper for the cold way she deals with her children and her seemingly selfish unhappiness, or to blanket-statement say that Joan Holloway is fabulous because we envy her wardrobe. But what we really are seeing are women who don’t have choices, and that is Mad Men’s most sexist element.
Betty is a woman of privilege, yet she has no assets of her own. We learn that she went to college as an anthropology major and worked as a model when she met Don. Once she started having kids, she quit working and moved into suburbia to start keeping up with the Joneses. She gets the opportunity to start modeling again (really she is just being used as a pawn to lure her husband over to a different agency), and learns that she, not even 30, is already too old – lining up behind her are younger women who are also just waiting to get married so that they too can quit working. Betty busies herself with horseback riding and volunteer work but doesn’t feel fulfilled. She is living the Feminine Mystique – a very white, upper-middle-class, privileged symptom – the “problem that cannot be named.” And while it is easy to hate her in her ivory tower, if we were lucky enough we would all be or aspire to be Betty in this era.
But despite her status, is she really better off? She is treated like a child by her psychiatrist, who tells her husband everything she says in her sessions, by her doctor, who tells her that an abortion is not for a “woman of means” like her, and by the hospital who restrains her and drugs her against her will as she’s giving birth. When she divorces Don, we learn that despite the obvious fact that he was cheating on her, she wouldn’t have grounds unless there was hard evidence, and the fact that she was already entangled with another man makes the charges null and void. Don also has the power to take the children if he wanted to, and Betty has to rely on her next husband for financial support. Her agency comes in making the only decision she can – who she marries.
Joan blends a bit of both Peggy’s and Betty’s worlds – she is both respected at the office and married. However, as we learn, this isn’t a balance of choice, but of necessity – Joan’s husband Greg fails to get ahead as a surgeon and Joan must take up another job at the expense of her pride. Of course, having both partners working was a fact of life then just as much as it is now, but we also know that Joan is planning on starting a family. Will she still be running the offices of SCDP with a baby on the way? Will they section off a room for her to pump her breastmilk as she flawlessly puts together a client meeting? And will her value as client bait diminish if she loses her figure?
Joan’s situation is interesting because in wanting “what she’s supposed to want,” she stands to lose the most. I would love to see the office supporting her life decisions, but it’s hard to predict what will happen in such a sexist era. If you remember what Roger Sterling said to Don, arriving late to work after his wife just had their third child, “Betty had the baby, not you.” Mad Men is not the model for work-life balance.
So who, if anyone, is the show’s feminist champion? What would the ideal feminist role model on the show look like? Is such a character even possible? Leave your thoughts below!
Amanda ReCupido is the author of the blog The Undomestic Goddess. Catch all of her Mad Men recaps and commentary here.
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2:19 pm
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11:05 am
I hadn’t seen any episodes of the show until this one, and was definitely a little on the fence about Peggy. Sure she has the job, but she is also treated differently and has to give up so much just because she is a girl. Sad!
12:07 pm
Love this post, Amanda! (Love the show!) I’d say the scene with Joan and Betty in the elevator last week is one of the most insightful and powerful documents of working women’s choices of that era, and how those who are kept down cannibalize each other. Peggy choosing her job – which gives her power, prestige and position over her dorky boyfriend and wretched family, was something that made a lot of sense to me. She was ambivalent about the relationship, that was just a symptom.
My vote for best role model on the show is Matthew Weiner, the writer. For creating complex, vibrant and intelligent female characters fighting realistically for power and survival. He loves to show strong Jewish characters. Don’s first lady, Rachel Menkin of the Department store, and this season’s Dr. Faye Miller. These two women are ambitious and intelligent, and both mentioned strong fathers who gave them options.
1:23 pm
Interesting comment, Nancy. In an earlier episode this season, Don receives an award for an ad that we learn Peggy had much to do with (and receives little of the credit for, if any). Some meditated that this was a meta-presentation from Weiner’s life himself – if you remember around the Emmy’s last season, he and a woman writer (his former assistant) won for best writing, and she was later fired (it was brought to light that they had a relationship). I agree that he creates comlpex characters, but for me, the debate remains open as to whether Weiner himself (and the show he creates from his mind) is feminist. I find Mad Men feminist because I see it as an outing of sexist practices, but others have thought that it exploits such discrimination.
On your other note, it would seem that Jewish fathers (or any supportive fathers) are the feminist heroes. Looking at the characters in relation to family, you may have something, though of course this doesn’t leave the woman herself with much credit. Betty we learn grows up in a very strict and tradtional household and turns into the traditional housewife, carrying on that sexist tradition. Peggy’s father is dead, and she is rejecting her mother who would like her to stay in her class and find a nice boy to marry and pop out babies with. We don’t know anything about Joan’s family, which is interesting – she may be the only main character whose background we have no idea about. Anyways, lots of good things to think about!
1:30 pm
Oh, interesting, I had no idea about Matthew Weiner and his fired co-writer. Re: “Benevolent (Jewish) Father” or at least father who lets tough, ambitious daughter get a career, it does beg the question where is the mother? Seems that allowing an older woman nurture a younger woman would be too radical, and certainly does not fit into the paradigm of the traditional Jewish family.
1:54 pm
“But what we really are seeing are women who don’t have choices, and that is Mad Men’s most sexist element.” Interesting. I’m not sure the show itself is sexist, but rather that it is showing an era where women didn’t have choices. If so, I think it does an admirable job of showing just how stuck women were. Betty was clearly unhappy with her life, and not just because her husband was a lying philanderer.
As for Joan, I’ve always gotten the feeling that she would prefer to work but felt pressure to leave because that is what women did at the time. Yes, she had visions of a life of relative luxury in marrying a doctor, but I think she has always defined herself by her job.
And Peggy, well I have a different take on her too. I always got the feeling that she has never quite wanted marriage and children; that she gave up that baby so easily because she wanted a career more than a family. I don’t get the feeling that she has sacrificed anything but, rather, that she has made a choice–a choice to not have children. That she finds fulfillment in work without feeling the need to have marriage and children is actually a very strong feminist statement in my mind.
And isn’t it great that Mad Men gives us so many women to even talk about! A far cry from many other shows.
4:57 pm
Great post. As a feminist, you can’t help but think these questions each delectable week of this show.
Your questions of who – if anyone – on this show is a “feminist” might be a bit problematic. Fitting a 2010 feminist lens on to a group of women who came of age in the 40s and 50s – in the throes of the civil rights movement and before the women’s lib movement in the US – is a bit unfair.
I think each character exhibits strong feminist elements in her own way, and each is searching. That is the beauty of this show. I think each female lead – Betty, Peggy and Joan – are struggling to come to grips with the oppressive patriarchy they are caught in.
The problem is that they need to participate in it, often obey it, in order to navigate and ultimately transcend it… which is the day we are still waiting for.
10:39 am
I see where you’re coming from in applying a 2010 feminist lens to Mad Men. However, I don’t think it’s unfair because this show was written post-women’s lib movement. Also, looking and analyzing things in the past means that we’re using our knowledge and experience of what we know today. That’s why historians are able to interpret past events repeatedly and differently each time an event is analyzed and criticized.
10:33 pm
It may not be possible to depict a truly idealized feminist woman in the time and place of this show – as you point out, the choices open to women are few and bad. What would be possible, however, would be to tell the stories from a feminist viewpoint. It’s “Mad Men”, after all. The men are the center of the story and the plots, and the women’s stories are wrapped around their central roles and story lines. Imagine how different the series would look if the perspective were shifted and the women’s viewpoint were the center, if their arcs were the major story arcs, if they were the main and central characters. They would still be faced with the same few and bad choices but the storytelling would be about them, not about the men and peripherally/incidentally, the women. Or, the women only as they relate to the men. Imagine the women as the main actors in their own stories, not as supporting characters in the men’s stories. There’s precious little storytelling like that on tv.
8:09 pm
None of them are perfect feminist role models/heroes. They’re women with difficult choices in difficult times, and characters’ lives and mistakes and all-or-nothings and sacrifices illuminate problematic elements of their time and ours. Their imperfection as feminists and as people isn’t celebrated – if anything, it’s condemned – but is simply part of their humanity and the nuance that makes this show unique.