Mad Men, Downton Abbey - Highlighting Women's Roles At Home and At Work

Truth Thursday

I trotted downtown to my office recently wearing capris and black ballerina flats, feeling oh-so Mary Tyler Moore as Laura Petrie, circa 1966.

But what I was really channeling was another show set in 1966 – at least at the start of its current season. That would be my newest obsession … Mad Men.

I jumped on the Mad Men bandwagon almost half-heartedly a couple of seasons ago. While I found it compelling, it never quite lit the spark for me. But this season’s teasers reeled me in, and just as the season commenced, I also started to re-watch it from the very beginning (thankful for video streaming on demand, despite the silo-like place my house has become with everyone watching their own thing. But that’s another topic for another day.)

I am now completely, entirely, 150% obsessed.  A Maddict, if you will.

I can’t stop watching, gobbling episodes like they’re candy. And when I’m not watching it, I’m thinking about it. I’m rehashing the clothes, the décor, the lines, and the characters -- their lives, their loves, their losses.  Analyzing its every detail on Facebook, with my other obsessed friends.

I am stunned by how much online commentary one episode can generate. And I read it all, lapping it up greedily whenever a new Slate essay appears.

There are so many layers to this show, so many nuances. Like an English class assignment, you really have to see each show several times to unpack it all.

I think what I find most intriguing is that I was born at the time of the beginning of the series (or near it – 1963.) My life has been taking the same arc that the show is taking, although I was much too young to understand the tides of change that washed over our country in the 60s and early 70s.

Observing the role of women in society, both in the office as well as in the home (and in Don Draper’s bed) is particularly fraught for this feminist , raised on “59¢” buttons and “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle” posters. I am stunned by the hurdles Peggy Olson has to climb, everyday, to be heard, to be taken seriously, and to believe that her ambition has merit and worth. I am charmed by the clothing changes, as we move out of tight, corseted A-line dresses into mod, swingy numbers. And I am horrified by the cigarette smoking loneliness of the housewives like Betty Draper (now Betty Francis)  and her neighbors. This is what they went to Bryn Mawr for? (I had heard rumors about M.R.S. degrees when I was in college, but even in the early 80s they felt like a relic of a different era.)

Switching gears, and eras, I have also been completely obsessed with Downton Abbey this year. It’s the Upstairs Downstairs of my generation. I used to watch U-D with my mother, who loved every detail. So I sat down when the first season of Downton came onto Netflix and spent three nights ingesting the entire season from start to finish. I hadn’t expected to get so drawn in, but between the soap opera story, the luscious Edwardian costumes (I really was born in the wrong era, sartorially-speaking) the scenery, and of course, Lady Grantham’s cutting and hilarious barbs (thanks to the great Maggie Smith) it’s enough to make one swoon.

But the thing that really gets me at Downton, much as on Madison Avenue and Mad Men, is the role of women in society.

In turn-of-the-20^th-century England, women were not allowed to inherit estates. This is the core of the opening tension in Downton – will Lady Mary be able to inherit her family’s estate, or will distant cousin Matthew, who came to light after Lord Grantham’s heir, James Crawley, and his son Partick, perished on the Titanic, become the heir? (I told you it was a soap opera at its core.)

Mary is stuck, as are her sisters, Sybil and Edith. They were born and bred to be showpieces, beautiful, shiny objects in a dying society, with no skills and literally no worth.  The downstairs kitchen staff and maids at Downton are more independent and in some ways, have more options.

When World War I arrives and Lady Sybil finds she actually is a good nurse, she breaks out of the familial cocoon and winds up marrying the chauffeur. The war turns everything upside down, including what is expected of women. The many unused rooms of the Downton mansion become a nursing home for officers. with bloody bandages draped on stairway posts instead of the usual decorative floral arrangements.

All this societal analysis and gender bending behavior has given me much to ponder as I continue to delve into the lives of the Crawleys and Don Draper and his extended family. I have always thought of myself as having been born in a “bridge” generation – not really a Baby Boomer (although my birth year qualifies) and not really a Gen Xer (although I’m probably closer in temperament.) And I never thought that I had much to offer from a generational viewpoint.

But this “bridge” on which I’ve tottered my whole life actually spans the years between the time when it was okay to use racial epithets to describe people whose skin color was not white, to call women “girls” and expect little of them except a roll in the hay in the workplace, to be the “man” in the family so that you could call your wife’s psychiatrist and ask him to report to you on her sessions, to fear and loathe all who were unlike you and to expect your little cadre of colleagues and friends to do the same … and today, where we have an African American president, laws legalizing same sex marriage being passed across the country and inter-racial marriage no longer much of a conversation stopper. Young girls like my daughter reaping the enormous benefits not only of the changing role of women both in the workplace and at home, but of the all-important Title IX, which has literally given girls a leg up in the world. Girls today are athletes from a young age – learning not only about the sports themselves, but of the value of competition and teamwork – and using those skills to get a better start in the world of work, formerly an all-male bastion with not just a glass ceiling but an opaque ceiling until my generation broke it through.

This bridge also has been built over the roiling waters of technological change that is so fast-paced at this point, you can purchase a new gadget one day and practically have it become obsolete the next. I am comforted by the heavy, black telephones of both Downton and Mad Men – they remind me of the red corded phone my mother held onto for many years after the breakup of Ma Bell – not realizing that she was still paying “rent” on this antiquated phone when in fact she had bought others.

At Downton, the pace of change seems almost glacial, and on Mad Men, it is merely threateningly slow. Today, it is relentless. Perhaps that’s part of the appeal of these two shows – they remind us of times when, despite the obvious and appalling disadvantages, especially to women’s lives, the world moved a little more slowly and regally.

My bridge generation, like my parents’ before it, spans the tides of a time unlike any in our history. But that’s always the case – we don’t know what we’ve had until it’s changed. 

But one thing is certain – thanks to the mod 60s, and given their propensity to highlight a women’s ankles, my ballerina flats seem to stay in style forever.

 

Photo by stevegarfield via Flickr

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevegarfield/5027289805/sizes/m/in/photostream/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Debbie Tropp]

Oh Karen, this is just great. Again, you tapped, almost frighteningly, into the inner workings of my psyche. I am, of course, and predictably, both a Mad Men and Downtown Abbey addict (what else would you expect from a child of the 60s who graduated from Bryn Mawr.) I find Mad Men so compelling because as someone who is four years older than you, I actually HAVE the dimmest recollection of the years that Mad Men covers, remember accepting as absolute truth in my grade school years that women could only become secretaries, teachers and nurses (if they were *forced* to work at all), that I would only as worthy as the man I could attract and marry, that I should always defer to men intellectually, that I should grow up to be a lively and attentive conversationalist and companion, that pants were unbefitting a young lady unless the temperature was SO cold that you might be in danger of serious frostbite (we were prohibited from wearing pants to school until the seventh grade unless the daily high temperature was expected to fall below 20 degrees.) The tone of the show seems SO right to me. OTOH, I *also* remember how glamorous and convivial adult life appeared to be at that time--the emphasis on dinner parties, "wine and cheese" gettogethers, dressing up. Adults didn't let their kids dominate their lives but gave primacy to *their* entertainment. People made time for family cookouts, picnics, relaxation, simple pleasures. A fascinating mixture, to be sure.

[Stacy]

Great, observations, as usual, Karen. These are the only two TV shows I watch, and, like you, I've been obsessed with both of them. Last year I blogged about Mad Men, and, again like you, I was struck most by the "mad women" and their lives.
See "A Working Mom's Mad Men Obsession," at http://www.currentmom.com/currentmom/2010/07/mad-men-and-working-moms.html/

[Keith]

Great article. I too have been obsessed with Mad Men and Downton Abbey. I didn't at first see the connection. Then the other day I realized that if one were to choose the 2 decades of the 20th century when women's rights surged, it would be the 1910s (ending with suffrage), when DA takes place, and the 1960s.
In both shows, while the men (Don Draper and Lord Grantham) are the central characters, they are not the movers. They stand still while the women in their lives cause and struggle with the changing roles of women in society.
I'm pleased to see others made this connection.
And of course the shows have in common complex characters, great plots, great dialogue, etc.

[David and Deb White]

Themes and scenes from Downton Abbey, Upstairs Downstairs and others inspired us to write a new travel guidebook: Beyond Downton Abbey (www.BeyondDowntonAbbey.com). No Mad Men travel book, so far, but someone's going to write it!