Book Review: Mad Men and Working Women: Feminist Perspectives on Historical Power, Resistance, and Otherness, by Erika Engstrom, Tracy Lucht, Jane Marcellus, and Kimberly Wilmot Voss

Abstract

Erika Engstrom, Tracy Lucht, Jane Marcellus, and Kimberly Wilmot Voss Mad Men and Working Women: Feminist Perspectives on Historical Power, Resistance, and Otherness. New York: Peter Lang, 2014. 195 pp.Few series have distinguished themselves as brilliantly as AMC's Mad Men. From its premiere in mid-2007 to the final show in 2015, the cable channel show has received widespread critical acclaim for its writing, acting, aesthetics, production values, and historical authenticity. Mad Men portrays the lives of men and women and reflects the conception of gender in 1960s. Does the show accurately depict women's experiences during the 1960s? Is the show pro-woman or anti-woman? Has the status of women improved since that time? Are the same issues faced by women today? From the perspectives of media criticism and feminism, many scholars and articles have addressed these questions.This book tried to explicate a series of discourses about feminism from Mad Men. In the context of past scholarship on feminism in contemporary media, the four authors of this book approach Mad Men through the historical portrayals of working women in the United States. They have chosen to focus on Mad Men's portrayal of gender to explore the conceptions about women, men, and gender in history. Rather than helping readers understand women's real status in the 1960s, the book offers another perspective to think critically about the society, about some serious issues of working women: how to control their reproductive system, how to choose between career and children, and how to balance their work and personal lives.The four authors focus on different aspects in terms of gender status and difference: stereotypes of working women, the hidden power of women within a male-dominated industry, and mass media's framing of the Other.In Chapters 1, 2, and 6, Erika Engstrom, Jane Marcellus, and Kimberly Wilmot Voss discuss stereotypes of women, especially the secretarial culture and the corporate wife. In Chapter 1, based on three stereotypes of women-the corporate wife, secretary, and token woman-and the historical representations of working women, Engstrom discusses how the female characters of Mad Men present differentiation from these stereotypes, and offers a new way to observe the complexity between media portrayals and the stereotypes.Chapter 2 uses textual analysis to explore the cultural and media construction of secretaries from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, until the 1960s. Reviewing the secretaries' role in media culture, Marcellus addresses the stereotypes of the secretary narrated in Mad Men and argues the persistent gendered discourse in our society, both on Mad Men and our real life.In Chapter 6, Voss focuses on the character Betty Draper, who is the ex-wife of Don, the leading role in Mad Men. Voss addresses the work of middle-class women's club in the history in the United States and explains the multilayers of the character Betty in the show-clubwoman, homemaker, and corporate wife.Given the history of women's role in the advertising industry, Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are about power. Through the analyzing of women's choices about careers and children, and the creative and administrative career, in Chapter 3, Voss reveals the ways in which women become empowered individuals in the male-dominated industry. …