Modern Women

There is an insightful and interesting article in the Globe Arts section today about how successful women characters (lawyer, doctor, police officer, movie executive) are portrayed on TV. Joanna Weiss, makes dead-on parallels to Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton. Mad Men is the main point of reference, and she has a lot to say about how that show which takes place in the early 60's is a more accurate portrayal of women actually working to work their way up as opposed to say Private Practice (the fluffy, soapy Grey's Anatomy spin-off) where it is established that Addison is a great doctor right away or Lipstick Jungle (the Sex and the City rip off) where Brooke Shields is the head of a film studio. Mad Men is the more relevant one. Very good read.

What the women of 'Mad Men' can teach us about Sarah Palin

By Joanna Weiss, Globe Staff September 21, 2008

If you really care about Sarah Palin - care in the sense that, like most women I know, you've been spending a good chunk of your waking life thinking about her and all that she represents - you might also care about Joan Holloway.
And if you know, offhand, who Joan Holloway is, you're probably part of the cultural elite that Palin's most devoted fans abhor. She's a supporting character in "Mad Men," the AMC series about 1960s-era advertising executives - a rarefied TV taste and an unquestioned media darling. The show draws between one and two million viewers every Sunday, decent but not grand for cable TV. But it's been featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine.
That "Mad Men" lacks mass appeal is, on some level, not surprising. It's beautifully crafted and emotionally intense, but its characters are selfish, remote, and self-absorbed. Episodes unfold with maddening sloth, the TV equivalent of watching lava flow in slow motion. And it's packaged in such a perfect period box that it can feel like a sterile cultural artifact: a look at the way things used to be, viewed safely and smugly from our own enlightened age.
But perhaps, given the joy and consternation about Palin, "Mad Men" would gain more viewers if it weren't mis-titled and mis-billed. This is really a show about women. And work. And the choices they make. And the opportunities they have. And the jealousies they hold. And the judgments they unleash on one another, none of which are so unfamiliar today.
Up to now, the buxom Joan has occupied a sort of middle ground between the show's main female characters, who represent opposing paths for women of their day. Betty Draper, the wife of an ad-agency creative director, gave up a modeling career for the suburban housewife's life. She's a textbook case for Betty Friedan, emotionally estranged from her cheating husband, so bored and miserable that she becomes a terrible mother to boot. (She has also turned into an archetype; last week, the women-centric website Jezebel.com referred to Cindy McCain as "a nouveau Betty Draper.")
Peggy Olson, meanwhile, is a young, talented copywriter who first joins Betty's husband's firm as part of the secretarial pool. In a world where men routinely call women "girls," and sometimes literally chase them though the office, she's not classically-attractive enough to fare well. When she tries to play the game, and sleeps with a married colleague, she gets pregnant. But she hides her belly shockingly well, apparently gives the baby away, and resumes work as if none of it had happened. Now, downplaying her sexuality in girlish dresses with Peter Pan collars, she wins appreciation for her talent and her brain.
Joan, the office manager, has amassed a certain power within the dictates of '60s gender relations. She rules over the secretarial pool with a well-manicured iron fist, and cows the men with her tight skirt and tighter sweater. But Joan is also aging - she's passed the dreaded 30-year-mark, unmarried - and she realizes her options for the future are limited. Her place as office beauty queen is about to be usurped. Her fiance thinks she ought to live the Betty Draper life.
So last week, when Joan got the chance to fill in for a man, vetting TV scripts to plan for placement of commercials, she saw a potential way to redefine herself. She enjoyed the work and did it well, but her male colleague didn't seem to notice: too conditioned to seeing Joan as nothing but a sexpot, he offered the permanent job to another man. And Joan, who had squeezed herself so successfully into the box she had created, lacked the will to fight for a different reputation.
The fascinating thing about Joan's foray into "men's work" is the way she managed to still be a woman: part Betty Draper, part Peggy Olson, and a good bit of Marilyn Monroe. She succeeded not just because she was competent - though she was - but because she was womanly, too, and knew how male clients would respond. In the world of advertising, she had the perfect sales pitch. In political circles, they might have called her a natural.
Admired and resented
That talent defines Sarah Palin, too, in this era of fewer obstacles. The vice presidential nominee's fast rise and vast popularity in Alaska owe to her raw charisma, her ability to navigate the system on her own terms, and her way of being many sorts of women at once. She's the devoted mother on a pedestal, who showers her disabled son with the message that he's perfect. She's the beauty pageant veteran who understands how lipstick modulates a tough interior. She's the ambitious careerist who won't let enemies block her path to power. The sort of woman that some other women admire, and some resent.
And, like Joan, she's quite different - and more intriguing, and more relevant - than the current, common model of successful women on TV.
Network and cable lineups are filled with series about high-powered working women: tough cops and lawyers, skilled doctors, media moguls. The shows aimed most at female viewers - such as NBC's "Lipstick Jungle," which launches its second season on Wednesday, and ABC's "Private Practice," which premieres new episodes Oct. 1 - are almost-absurdly perfunctory about their characters' rise to power. They've already scored the jobs, the fancy apartments, the wardrobe trappings, and the collegial respect; for them, drama still lies in the old soap-opera quest for love. These shows peddle the myth that intra-female battles are in the past. For the most part, fellow women exist, not as skeptical competition, but as a sturdy, estrogenic cheering squad.
If there is intra-gender conflict it stems from the good old generational divide. In this week's "Lipstick Jungle," Brooke Shields's character, a movie studio president named Wendy, discovers that her teenage daughter is sneaking into clubs, and starts leaving the office early to have dinner with her kids. For this, she's excoriated by her mother, a former high-powered business executive, who warns Wendy that in a cutthroat workplace, she stands to lose her job.
That the mother is played by Mary Tyler Moore - who has played every step of the housewife-to-mogul continuum in the course of her own TV career - is presented here with unspoken irony. It's unclear how we're supposed to view her warning: as a useful reminder of a still-cruel working world, or the rantings of somebody steeped in the past. The show seems to lean toward the latter, since Wendy doesn't seem to face much backlash (by the next episode, she's back to high-powered dealing) and tells her mother that she has the right to make different choices.
But Moore's character at least gives voice to the still-burning question of whether women can have it all at once. Her answer, unlike Sarah Palin's, is "no." And in modern political terms, she's much closer to the Hillary Clinton model of female advancement, an older, battle-hardened version of "Mad Men's" Peggy.
Yes, Clinton is a mother, and by all accounts a good one, but maternity isn't a part of her public image. Her 1990s experiments with girlish headbands and chocolate chip cookies felt as artificial as they were. This was a woman who clearly wanted to be in the boardroom or the West Wing, a woman whose ambition was too strong to be derailed by a husband's public philandering.
And her success in the political arena had next-to-nothing to do with femininity. It came to be after her child was grown, once she had stepped out from the role of wife, printed campaign signs with her first name alone, and taken on the androgynous uniform of short haircut and pantsuit. This primary season, her barely-glimpsed cleavage and barely-existent tears made headlines because they diverged from the image she had so successfully crafted.
Being the boss
Her type - female, accomplished, and unfeminine - hasn't always been treated well on TV. (Think of Rosalind Shays, the high-powered and viperous lawyer from "L.A. Law," who met her demise by stepping into an elevator shaft.) Today, a more aggressive sort of femininity is held up as a working women's model. Sarah Palin, with her long hair and her Naughty Monkey peek-toe pumps, looks a lot like the younger stars of "Lipstick Jungle," a show that opens with images of women's feet in high-heeled shoes.
Except that Palin is the loving mommy, too, while for most of these TV characters, motherhood is an afterthought - either abandoned entirely or used as a minor and fleeting plot point. If these women do have children, then by virtue of their wealth, they don't seem to worry about the logistics and cost of child care, the emotional pull of home life, the mental draw of work. Years ago, I interviewed Candace Bushnell, the novelist and "Lipstick Jungle" executive producer, who told me that the antidote to work-life balance issues is to simply be the boss.
It's also the easy way out, a way for network characters to stay likable and safe. For viewers, the question of whether these women are going to get the guy - or which guy is best to get - provides a not-too-taxing form of escape. "Private Practice" is especially sneaky this way, since a good portion of its weekly medical subplots involve sick babies and sick kids. Mommy-viewers still have ample chances to get in a good cry, while the main female characters aren't culpable for any tough work-life decisions.
Throw real-life parenting choices into the drama, after all, and you're suddenly on quicksand. Here is where women start to judge each other, whether they mean to or not. (As any working mother knows, the seemingly-innocent playground question "Does he go to preschool?" is loaded with a thousand tiny judgments, the answer packed with defenses.) It's still hard for women to think of Sarah Palin's life without judging her against other mothers of her generation, to think unpleasant thoughts about choices, priorities, and economic luck.
In Alaska, Palin has turned her office into a de facto day care center and nursed her tiny baby during conference calls. Among conservatives, this wins her a sort of Betty Draper credibility: She walks the walk of family devotion. Liberals raise the question, loaded with doubt, of whether Palin would work to make things so flexible for the rest of us. To them, her motherhood comes across as mocking, a veneer of perfection that covers the struggles most working women face.
In these days of blogs, flame-throwing politics, and dug-in ideological differences, it's hard to find online or talk-show testimony that doesn't view Palin through one of these divides: She's either an aspiration or an insult. But for women watching the race from the sidelines, like so many TV viewers, Palin tugs at strings that transcend party lines. It's not so easy to separate the personal from the political - just as it isn't easy for Joan Holloway to navigate the changing lines between femininity and success .
For women, especially, advancement in the workplace - whether in a cloistered ad agency or in the arena of national politics - is hardly a matter of merit alone. It's telling that the one television show that addresses the subject head-on is set so far in the past.