Mad Men and Working Women

This next Wednesday morning (Aug. 10) I'll be on a panel titled "Mad Men, Working Women, and History" at the AEJMC convention in St. Louis--an annual conference for journalism and media educators. Joining me will be Erika Engstrom from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, Tracy Lucht from Simpson College, and Kimberly Wilmot Voss from the University of Central Florida. The panel was my idea. I love Mad Men, and wanted to think about ways that it ties to my historical research on women's employment.

(Despite my previous post about "Working Women" being a problematic term, I used it anyway. It sounded good. It went with "Mad Men." And because it's in common use, people understand it, which is what makes language hard to change.)

Anyway, my part of the talk will focus on secretaries in Mad Men, specifically on how images of the secretary's body evolved over the decades preceding the 1960s. Some of this relates directly to my research in my book, Business Girls and Two-Job Wives. A job primarily for men until the mid-19th century, secretarial work was gendered female with the invention of the typewriter after the Civil War. After that, women (who had been machine operators in the textile industry) were hired as low-paid "typewriters" (the word for both the machine and the women who worked on them) beginning in the 1870s. Gradually the job became overtly sexualized. By the 1920s, women were "office wives" and "business debutantes." Women's magazines told readers that secretarial work was a way to use their brains and take initiative. Men's magazines, meanwhile, advised readers to choose women they didn't mind looking at. (This is, of course, no surprise.)

These stereotypes are pretty obvious on Mad Men. In the talk, I will argue that it is the women at Sterling-Cooper that make "Don Draper" possible. Draper is, I think, both a producer and a product of advertising; selling "Don Draper" is the main project of Dick Whitman--a man who lives by his wit and his wits. He is also the typical 20th-century businessman, emblematic of modern masculinity that relied on constructing women as "Other," reinforcing the domestic social structure of the "office wife."

I have a lot more to say. I'll probably run over my allotted time, which I seem to always do.