TheLoop21.com

By: Raechal Leone (Add to your loop)
Tue, 08/18/2009 - 00:00

Betty, Joan and Peggy are as well written as Don. They just need more girl time.

Leading up to the premiere of the third season of AMC's Mad Men, there was a lot of talk about how the show needs more of the women. "If this season finally gives us heroines as richly written as its heroes, then Mad Men really will be living up to all its extravagant hype," Caryn James wrote at The Daily Beast.

As someone who's been hooked since Mad Men's first episode, I completely disagree that we need more nuanced, deeper female characters. Betty, Peggy and Joan are every bit as well written as Don, Sterling and Pete. The great difference isn't in the quality of writing or the development of the female characters, but in the amount of time the audience is allowed to see the women on the show interacting with each other, without the men in the shot, and vice versa.

This is by design, of course, and a lot of people writing about this have missed that point. Genius creator/writer/executive producer Matthew Weiner has said he keeps the women in the background because at that time women were ... very much forced into the background (as were Black Americans, Jewish people and anyone who wasn't white, male and heterosexual).

So for every 10 scenes where we watch Don and Sterling pouring a stiff one, we get maybe one with Betty and her pseudo friend, Francine. (I can't stand Francine; such a troublemaker.) Or we get a scene like the one Sunday with Joan and Peggy talking in front of the elevator, where for a few brief seconds, Peggy removed the hard corporate persona she has to wear when she talks to the men in the office.

And as close to perfect as the show is, it needs more scenes like that one. They're some sort of cousin (niece?) of the Sex & the City scenes with Carrie and Miranda strolling down the sidewalks of New York; our chance to get a truer sense of what these women consider important in their lives and how they feel about the rampant sexism and everything else in the world around them. Do you think Peggy would have ever uttered a word about the male secretary to Don or even someone like Ken Cosgrove? No way. She knows everyone's looking at her, hoping she'll act unprofessional (like a woman, same thing in their eyes), so they can force her to go back to typing all day.

With the show set in 1963 this season, we don't have too long to wait. As Robert Lloyd wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "Among other things, this is a show about the anxious men and the end of male privilege." Women didn't just wake up one day, decide they were tired of the social order and win all the changes they wanted. Things happened incrementally — the Equal Pay Act of 1963 graciously entitled women to the same pay as men for doing the same work, but four years passed before President Johnson signed an executive order barring government contractors from discriminating against women in their hiring practices.

As you may have read in the New York Times, Weiner would like the show to continue through the 1960s and "handle everything" that happened and how it changes our characters. All I can say is, as the show winds through the '60s, I'll be watching and expecting more scenes with the already well developed female characters talking exclusively and candidly to each other — without the Mad Men in the room.

Raechal Leone is TheLoop21.com's senior editor and content manager. She writes the Inside the Loop blog.

Photo courtesy of AMC.

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