Mad Men - Season 2

The Second Sex, Second Season: Mad Men and the Making of Women

At the center of Mad Men’s second season sits a sales pitch, and in it the season’s whole theory of gender. The Sterling Cooper men, trying to land Playtex, decide that every woman is either a Jackie or a Marilyn. She is either the poised wife or the bombshell, the one you marry or the one you want. They pitch it with the confidence of men describing the weather. The idea is crude, the kind of thing that sounds shrewd in a conference room and fails the moment it meets an actual woman. The show knows this. Season 2 puts this two-headed fantasy in front of four very different women and watches it fail to fit each of them in a different way. What results is some of the most intelligent television ever made about how femininity gets manufactured, both by advertisers and by the slower everyday work of offices, marriages and bodies.

Simone de Beauvoir’s famous line, that one is not born a woman but becomes one, could be the season’s epigraph. That is not because the show is an illustrated feminist tract. It is because its characters are so visibly in the process of becoming. Season 2 takes place in 1962, a year before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and decades after Beauvoir had described the machinery precisely. For Beauvoir, the basic structure of patriarchy is that man posits himself as the Subject, the one who acts, chooses and projects himself into the future, while woman is cast as the Other, defined relative to him. Sterling Cooper is a building full of men who have never had to think about this, because the arrangement treats them as the default. The Jackie/Marilyn pitch is Otherness in its purest form: two ways of being a woman, and both are ways of being for a man.

Peggy, or the price of transcendence

Peggy Olson carries the season’s central argument, and her arc follows Beauvoir’s “independent woman” so closely it can feel like a case study. Beauvoir distinguishes immanence from transcendence. Immanence is the cyclical, maintenance-bound existence culture assigns to women: housework, reproduction, the endless repetition of keeping things as they are. Transcendence is the condition of a free subject who acts on the world through projects. Peggy wants transcendence in the most literal terms the show offers: an office, an account, a byline, a seat at the table where the work gets made.

The season is unsentimental about what that wanting costs. The first season ended with Peggy giving birth to a child she had not known she was carrying, and Season 2 reveals, in fragments, how completely that fact has been sealed away. Don Draper’s advice to her in a flashback hospital scene is the most chilling sentence in the season: she should move forward, because it will astonish her how thoroughly this never happened. It is advice offered in kindness, and it describes exactly the bargain available to a woman who wants to be a subject in 1962. She can do it only by disowning the body that makes her legible as a woman. Beauvoir wrote that the independent woman is torn because society will not let her be both fully a human being and fully a woman. Peggy resolves the tension the only way her world allows, by amputating one side of it.

The season’s best scene follows from this. In the finale, as the Cuban Missile Crisis turns Manhattan into a waiting room for the end of the world, Pete Campbell declares his feelings for her. Peggy answers with the truth: she had his baby and gave it away. What matters is the structure of the moment. Pete offers her the role Beauvoir called “the woman in love,” the woman who finds her meaning by making a man her absolute. Peggy declines, and does so by finally naming what was meant never to have happened. It is not a triumph, since she remains haunted and alone. But it is a choice, made by a subject, and the show treats it with the gravity it deserves.

Here Herbert Marcuse complicates the story in a way Beauvoir alone cannot. For Beauvoir, the exit from immanence runs through work: the free woman makes things and acts on the world. But what is Peggy’s work? She writes advertising. She is good at it precisely because she understands the desires and anxieties of women consumers, which means her liberation consists of manufacturing what Marcuse called “false needs,” the wants that consumer capitalism implants and then profitably satisfies. Her transcendence is fed straight back into the machine that produces Jackies and Marilyns. One-Dimensional Man (1964) argued that advanced industrial society is uncannily good at absorbing its own opposition, turning potential rebels into productive contributors. Peggy is the system’s most promising recruit. Season 2 never resolves this tension, and its refusal to resolve it is one of its strengths. Peggy’s rise is real, and it is also a kind of capture.

Joan, or the virtuoso of the front stage

If Peggy refuses the myth, Joan Holloway seems to wear it like the fitted dresses she is famous for. She is the office’s acknowledged Marilyn, and the season makes the link explicit when she is quietly devastated by Monroe’s death. A strict Beauvoirian reading would put Joan near the figure of the narcissist, or charge her with complicity: she is the woman who has accepted being an object because objecthood brings real power, admiration and protection.

Erving Goffman offers a richer account. His Presentation of Self in Everyday Life describes social life as performance, with a “front stage” where we manage the impressions others form of us and a “backstage” where the performance relaxes. Joan is the most accomplished performer at Sterling Cooper, man or woman. She runs the secretarial pool, manages the partners’ moods, and controls every room she enters through calibrated displays of warmth, authority and sex. Goffman would not call this bad faith. He would call it skill, the competent handling of a role, which is what every social actor does. That correction matters, because it guards against a condescending reading in which Joan is simply a dupe.

The season then tests Goffman’s framework to destruction in two moments. In the first, Harry Crane asks Joan to help evaluate soap-opera scripts. She does it brilliantly, with a sharpness about story and audience that reveals a mind her role had never been allowed to display. Then Harry hires a man for the job without considering her. Her front-stage mastery has a ceiling, and the ceiling is her sex. In the second, her fiancé Greg rapes her on the floor of Don’s office. That is the backstage of the workplace, the one place where her authority should have been most secure. Afterward she goes forward with the marriage, and her performance of the contented bride-to-be resumes without a visible crack.

This is where Beauvoir answers Goffman. Being excellent at a role is not the same as being free within it. Joan’s virtuosity is real, but it is virtuosity at playing the Other, and when the role turns violent, her skill becomes the means of concealing the violence. The scene is hard to watch and quietly staged, and the show refuses either to sensationalize it or to look away. Joan is not complicit in her subordination. She is trapped in a situation that makes the performance of satisfaction the only rational strategy. Beauvoir always insisted on the distinction between a person’s choices and the situation that limits them, and the season respects that distinction as precisely as any television drama has.

Betty, or the slow awakening of the object

Betty Draper begins the season in the role Beauvoir analyzed in “The Married Woman”: the wife whose existence is housekeeping and appearances, beautiful and bored, waiting for a husband who goes off into the world while she stays behind to maintain it. Betty is also a former model, a woman trained from girlhood to experience herself as something looked at. When she discovers Don’s affair with Bobbie Barrett and throws him out of the house, it is the first time we see her act as a subject rather than react as an object. The season gives her small, strange acts of self-assertion, and some of them are not admirable.

The finale tests this most sharply. Betty learns she is pregnant, which for her is immanence returning just as she had begun to imagine life beyond Don. Then she goes to a bar and has sex with a stranger in a back office. Read through Marcuse, this is close to a textbook case of repressive desublimation: a sexual freedom the system can easily absorb, a transgression that leaves the structure intact. She will take Don back. The baby will come. Nothing changes. Read through Beauvoir, the scene is more generous and more ambiguous. For once, Betty’s body is not being looked at, or ruled by pregnancy, or offered up for marriage. She is using it for her own desire. It is a gesture toward freedom, borrowed in form from her husband’s own sexual sovereignty. It is not yet freedom. The show lets both readings stand, and that double vision is typical of Season 2’s maturity.

The man who can disappear

Don Draper, Beauvoir’s absolute Subject in a tailored suit, is a strange figure in this scheme, because his selfhood is itself an advertisement. His whole identity was stolen from a dead man in Korea. In a Goffmanian sense, he has no backstage at all, only a series of fronts. Season 2 sends him to California, where he slips out of his life for a while, shedding his name and obligations and visiting the one person who knows who he really is.

The contrast with the women is pointed. Don can vanish and come back. Peggy can vanish only by erasing her own body. Betty cannot vanish at all, and when she tries, for a single night, pregnancy brings her back. In this world, the freedom to reinvent oneself is distributed by sex. The man’s invented self is tragic but sovereign. The women’s selves are invented for them, in conference rooms like the one where the Jackie/Marilyn pitch was born.

Where the season stops

The season’s achievement is considerable: the patience of its storytelling, the economy of its imagery, the trust it places in its audience to understand what is left unsaid. It has limits, though, and the philosophers help identify them. Marcuse in particular would be suspicious of the pleasure the show offers. Season 2 is gorgeous. Its period surfaces of cocktails, cigarettes and curves are themselves a commodity, and part of its appeal lies in letting contemporary viewers feel superior to 1962 while enjoying its aesthetics. This is precisely the kind of critical consumption that one-dimensional culture absorbs without trouble. The show is aware of this risk, but awareness is not immunity.

The season also mostly confines its analysis of becoming a woman to white women with access to offices and suburbs. Carla, the Drapers’ Black housekeeper, and Sheila, Paul Kinsey’s girlfriend, who is involved in the civil rights movement, stay largely at the margins. Their situations would have tested the Jackie/Marilyn binary in ways the show does not take up here. Beauvoir herself has been criticized for this kind of blind spot, so the omission is in a sense faithful to the tradition. It is still an omission.

These are the limits of an exceptional work. Season 2 understands what Beauvoir understood: femininity is not a nature but a situation, produced and maintained by institutions, rituals and the countless daily performances Goffman taught us to see. It adds something Marcuse would recognize, a sense that the industry producing these images is also producing the people who live inside them, including the women who manage to rise within it. The pitch says every woman is a Jackie or a Marilyn. The season answers that no woman is either, and that every woman is nonetheless forced to negotiate with both. Few television seasons have stated that argument so precisely, or with such evident sympathy for the people caught inside it.