The Beautiful Girls – The Complex Women of ‘Mad Men’

Interintellect founder Anna Gát revisits legendary TV series Mad Men to explore the complicated history of midcentury women whose struggles in the workplace and the home foreshadowed many of today’s difficulties and victories. 

Accompanying its characters during one of the most turbulent and transformational decades of the 20th century, the TV series Mad Men lives on in our historical imagination through the many challenges and tradeoffs, humour and drama, these fictional people so inevitably engaged in while navigating it.

In many ways, it feels like Mad Men had to be set in the 1960s so that it could portray the realities of changing professional, class and gender relations so openly on television: the nuances of intrigue and discrimination, falsehoods and addiction, the crumbling set of identities both on the personal and societal levels, bite so painfully not just because they push us to empathise with those who built our contemporary culture, but because we recognise our current selves in them.

At this salon, we will talk mainly about the women of Mad Men: Peggy, Joan, and Betty, but also Megan, Jane, Marie, even Mrs Blankenship. Through them we will explore the treacherous arenas of work and marriage – and men and status, money and reputation, the life of the body and of the mind.

Join us!

To prepare:

• https://www.slantmagazine.com/tv/mad-men-season-4-episode-9-the-beautiful-girls/
• https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6293/the-art-of-screenwriting-no-4-matthew-weiner
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSp6f-t-Rss
• https://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2010/08/advertising-women-mad-joan
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdVUocAerQw
• https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/03/-em-mad-men-em-s-creator-don-draper-represents-american-society/284519/

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