For those of you who don’t know who Stephanie Coontz is… Google is your friend. For those of you who have never watched True Blood… shame on you, it’s the most pro-gay, pro-woman, wonderfully written show on today’s television. Get out and buy the DVDs now.
For the rest of you, this is Ms Coontz in the Washington Post, that paragon of feminist theory, making an arse of herself, but interestingly…
Why ‘Mad Men’ is TV’s most feminist show
Mad Men’s writers aren’t sexist. The time period was. There wasn’t even a word for the sexual harassment the character Joan experiences.
Some critics complain that the show perpetuates stereotypes of career women as uninterested in children and concerned only with their own advancement. But when the character Peggy gave up her out-of-wedlock child in Season 1, she was doing what an estimated 25,000 women did each year during the 1950s.
When Betty Draper plops her children in front of the TV or slaps her daughter, it is an accurate reflection of 1960s parenting.
Some viewers have come to hate Betty for displaying the traits of the dependent housewife that Betty Friedan critiqued so vividly in her 1963 bestseller, “The Feminine Mystique.” But we should be glad that the writers of Mad Men resist the temptation to transform their female characters into contemporary heroines.Historians are notorious for savaging historical fiction. We’re quick to complain that writers project modern values onto their characters, get the surroundings wrong, cover up the seamy side of an era or exaggerate its evils — and usually, we’re right. But AMC’s hit show “Mad Men,” which ends its fourth season next Sunday, is a stunning exception. Every historian I know loves the show; it is, quite simply, one of the most historically accurate television series ever produced. And despite the rampant chauvinism of virtually all its male characters (and some of its female ones), it is also one of the most sympathetic to women.
