Linguine In Vodka Sauce With Shrimp and Asparagus

Mad Men

I have a secret indulgence. On Monday nights I prepare a dish that requires an hour of baking, place it in the oven, pour myself some Mad Housewife Merlot in an elegant cut-glass tumbler, go to my bedroom, and close the door. Everyone—even the dogs—know I am not to be disturbed.

I turn on the television and watch Sunday’s episode of Mad Men.

I love this show. The AMC series purports to be about advertising executives on Madison Avenue, but I think it’s really about their women—housewives and career women, all bordering on mad. The show should really be called Mad Women.

First there is Betty, wife of Don Draper, the disillusioned ad man who is the show’s central character. Betty is the archetypal Mad Housewife of the sixties, right out of the 1967 classic Diary of a Mad Housewife. She is bored, over educated, drifting into a fantasy life, tempted by infidelity, underutilized, underappreciated, quietly going mad.

Then there is Peggy Olson, the first female copywriter at the firm, who is by turns cautiously feeling her way and violently throwing herself into her liberated womanhood. She tentatively asks for a raise and a special assignment, then nearly cries when rejected. She jumps into bed with an ad executive whom she knows only wants to use her to get back her boss. She tries to be a good Catholic girl, but comes alive when she smokes pot. If her overbearing mother doesn’t make her mad, the boys at the office will.

There’s Salvatore’s wife, young and in love, who watches her husband act out Ann Margaret in Bye, bye, Birdie, and realizes why he is less than amorous.

And then there is Joan Holloway, the sexy office manger, doomed to frustration. She has the body and demure restraint of a woman in the fifties, but the drive and spirit of a woman in the sixties. Ahead of her time but trapped in the past. Charming and capable, she can play “C’est Magnifique” on the accordion, or apply a tourniquet while everyone around her panics. She excels as a career girl until she marries a doctor, then realizes that she has given up her freedom and power for a putz. She is smart, funny, sexy, and competent, but something keeps her from using her brilliance to take on the world.

My mother was one of these women—perhaps your mother was, too—doing the job she thought everyone expected of her, often getting no compensation or recognition, feeling—like the women in Mad Men—not exactly bitter about it, but slighted, confused, and frustrated.

My heart breaks for Joan Holloway. Why does she feel so modern? Have we become our mothers? When I think about the women of Sex in the City¸ which aired between 1998-2004, and then the women of Mad Men, I wonder if the subject and popularity of the shows reflects a difference in how women feel about themselves. Whereas during the economic boom, women confidently sauntered down the street, arm-in-arm, ready to take on the world, women now feel torn between roles, between career woman and mother, trying to be all things to all people, much like the women of Mad Men—quietly going mad.

Thank goodness there’s always a glass of Mad Housewife wine waiting, and a new recipe to try out.