M ad Men an d Working Women:
Fem inist Perspectives on Historical Power, Resistance, and Otherness.
By Erika Engstrom, Tracy Lucht, Jane Marcellus, and Kimberly Wilmot Voss.
Peter Langy2014
Mad Men and Working Women, a collaborative effort by four female scholars, is a fresh
approach one of AMC’s most popular drama series, Mad Men. Although the series has just
drawn to its end, the show has garnered awards from the media industry, critical praise, and
scholarly attention; this volume delves into the myriad ways Mad Men “relates to, comments
upon, explains, and illustrates philosophy, ethics, work, nostalgia, advertising, materialism,
masculinity, and a host of topics relating to the human condition"(2). Overall, it is a thorough,
creative, and well written contribution to the scholarship examining representations of gender
in this popular series.
As the authors note in the introduction, contemporary dramas such as The Good Wife
(2009 -), Scandal (2012 -), and Nashville (2012 -) depict female leads at work in various
capacities: lawyer nee political wife, a DC crisis management strategist, and country singers,
respectively. Yet in these shows the personal overshadows the political; women’s careers are
assumed rather than explored and contextualized. Mad Men, on the other hand, is different
because “its goal is neither hegemonic reinforcement nor self-consciously contrived
counterhegemony. Like a good novel, it tells a complicated story about complicated people in a
complicated time. Women’s truths are not constructed outside of that complexity; they emerge
from that complexity” (5). The issues and concerns highlighted in the show’s episodes reflect
contemporaneous issues in the lives of men and women that continue today.
The authors’ approach to Mad Men is through the lens of historical portrayals of working
women in the U.S., paying attention to unexplored territory in gender status depicted in the
series by deconstructing the male gaze and examining the “hidden power of women within a
male-dominated industry, mass media’s framing of the “Other,” and stereotypes of working
women that have, and continue to, cast work in terms of gender difference" (7-8). By providing
a reading of pre-second wave feminism (rather than constantly presupposes the show’s
women as victims), this study provides historical context and analysis that shake up traditional
readings by “1) exploring historical constructions of women’s work, (2) unpacking feminist and
non-feminist discourse surrounding that work, (3) identifying modes of resistance, and (4)
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