Mad Men, Sane Women - Feminism and Retro Television

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. So begins Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. That opener also works as a coda on post-World War II period-piece television and women. It was an era of sweeping historical and political change. WWII had opened doors for women like never before, because all the men who could fight were in battle. Millions of men were on the front lines all over the world. Women were keeping the home fires burning–and working outside the home doing everything from the iconic "Rosie the Riveter" munitions work to clerking for the military to breaking codes for the war effort. For the first time in any century women were largely free of men and the sexist constrictions of being female. They could do what they wanted and not face opprobrium because they were aiding the war effort, they were working toward the same end as the men who were fighting.

No one questioned them and that freedom was heady. Women banded together, forging friendships they would never even have had access to in other circumstances. Sometimes those friendships were sisterly, sometimes more romantic, but regardless, they were driven by the intensity of the times and the unprecedented freedom that came with it.

And then the war ended.

That changed everything. When the men came home, the women were sent back to the lives they’d had before. Husbands and families expected women to do as they were told, just as they had done before that taste of total autonomy. But many women found that difficult to do.  

One period drama focusing on this era of roiling change just began its new season, PBS’s The Bletchley Circle.

The Bletchley Circle is one of the most subtly feminist series you’ll see on TV. The seriesexplores this very period, taking the viewer back to the war years, but situating the story in the present of 1952 when everything has settled back to "normal"–as if anything could be normal again after the deadliest war in human history in which 60 million people were killed, 2.5% of the world population at the time, and every man was suffering from what had happened to him.

The women who comprise The Bletchley Circle, Susan, Millie, Lucy and Jean,are housewives–now. But in the war years they were the British’ secret weapon against the Nazis, the women who were the decryption experts, the code-breakers who worked at Bletchley Park, the central site of the UK’s Government Code and Cypher School.
Churchill said these code-breakers helped to win the war several years earlier than expected because they broke the Third Reich’s infamous Enigma machine.

These code-breakers were also loyal to a fault. They kept true to the Official Secrets Act. No one knew who they were or what they had done. Even their own families had no idea. In November 2013, one of the surviving women upon whom the series is based, Mavis Batey,  died at 92, her service finally revealed and recognized. Batey had volunteered to be a nurse in 1939, but was instead assigned to Bletchley Park, where she became one of the lead code-breakers whose work helped pave the way for D-Day. Her work and that of the other women of Bletchley Park was not noted by the British government until 2009; almost no one knew of their work.

It’s this secrecy and the hidden lives it spawns that forms the foundation for The Bletchley Circle.

These women vowed never to be "ordinary," never to go back to their stultifying lives after the intense excitement of breaking major codes. But that’s not what happens. Life resumes and they have little choice: misogyny and gender stereotypes beckon. Their husbands, returned from the war, have no idea what it is their wives had done during the war, nor that their skills helped win the war as dramatically as the husbands fighting on the front lines.

Susan Gray (Anna Maxwell Martin) leads the group of women who savored that victory.
And when a series of seemingly unrelated murders happens, she thinks there is a pattern. The police do not, dismissing her findings. So Susan commandeers the old group to help her solve yet another puzzle, break yet another code. This time not just in solving the murders, but freeing men wrongly charged for the crimes, and finding the right man. At one point Millie uses a bright red lipstick to trace a line on a train map of where the serial killer hunts. The lipstick is dual purpose signifying the trappings of femininity and the blood of the killer's victims.

 Rachael Stirling (Tipping the Velvet) as Millie in Bletchley 

This work is the same, yet different, from their war work. It’s edgier, out in the world, putting their lives on the line. They are rogue decoders. In season one, both Susan and Lucy find themselves in real danger, with a killer they’ve set up to be caught. In season two, another code-breaker from Bletchley Park, Alice, is on trial for murder. Did she commit it, or is she hiding a different secret altogether? Jean leads the team to uncover the truth.

But the work is done secretly–just like their code breaking during the war. They lie to husbands, proffering shopping trips and ration books as excuses. (Husbands don’t present themselves well in this series. Their resentment of their women is palpable. They expect a kind of treatment that no longer exists, because the women can’t fully return to the lives they once led. They’ve tasted too much freedom.)

When Mad Men began its final season this month, the reviews continued to focus as they always have on the men of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, and especially Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the man who so epitomized a period, with his glass of scotch in hand and ready cigarette nearby. But over the past six seasons,Mad Men, the cable show that proved cable could win awards and compete with network, it’s the women who have been the series’ backbone and moral compass. While Don Draper is Mad Men’s antagonist keystone, it’s the women in his orbit who drive the show’s narrative as much as anything.

In season 7 the show has fast-forwarded to 1969 and the dawning of the Age of Aquarius is in full swing–along with Vietnam. Nixon is president, JFK is long dead as are now both his brother and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Change is coming rapidly to SCDP and nowhere is this  more evident than in the progression the women have made over the past six seasons. Feminism is very much in play. The world in which men snapped their fingers at nameless women demanding coffee or sex is fading, and a new era in which women are ascendant is dawning.

Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) has long been the series’ counterpoint to Don. Except as Don has been on a downward spiral, Peggy has been on the rise, working her way through the ranks to become Don’s peer. The man who had it all is now in a static place, while Peggy has been climbing rung-by-rung up the ladder. And all of it without a wife, while Don has had two.

Joan (Christina Hendricks), too, has propelled herself forward, out of the steno pool and into the role of businesswoman. More than any of the other female characters, Joan evinces what it is to be a sexy, attractive yet ambitious and smart female in the period between the late 1950s and the late 1960s.

She’s gone through it all–an affair with the head of the company, marriage to a man who heads off to Vietnam, an accidental pregnancy that causes her to contemplate abortion. And all the while working, working, working her way to a different place, forging a career in a field where there has never been a place for women before.

Betty (January Jones) has been married twice, had three children, and been the power behind Don. But Betty gave up her career as a model to marry Don, and as the 1960s draw to a convulsive close, she finds herself trapped, a remnant of an era of which she never really wanted to be part.

Other period series have also situated women, their work and their sexuality at the forefront. Call the Midwife, Masters of Sex, andThe Hour all put women in that straitened world of the 1950s and early 1960s when being a "career woman" meant being neutered sexually and derided socially. Don and Peggy might both be married to their work on Mad Men, but it’s expected of Don, while Peggy is considered less of a woman for doing so. (And in fact, Peggy is forced to make choices Don never has to make–she gets pregnant and gives her child up for adoption. Affairs end badly for her. The comfortable family life Don had with Betty and then Megan eludes her.)

Period pieces on TV have become a nexus for portraying female characters in their true historical context. What is new, is that they are being portrayed at all. The actual TV shows of the late 1950s and early 1960s featured women only as window dressing–homemakers who vacuumed the house in pearls and high heels like on Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best and The Donna Reed Show and who remained ever-calm and never raised their voices. These women were not Betty Draper Francis, having trouble with her teenaged kids and wondering when her life went so far off track.

What these period series tell us is how women really were living as opposed to the series of the time, which told us how men wanted women to be living. From the perspective of another era we see how second-wave feminism was bound to bloom, and imminently. Betty Draper Francis and the women of The Bletchley Circle want more than they have. Just as Don Draper is chasing skirts along with advertising accounts, these women are seeking their own excitement. Betty has an affair, but it doesn’t help. Susan, Jean, Lucy and Millie solve a few murders and it does. Joan Holloway is the first woman among these to truly have it all, but we see at what cost, the price she has to pay.

Lizzy Caplan as Virginia Johnson in Masters of Sex 

The life described in 1963 by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, "the problem that has no name," is shown in bold relief in these drama series. Women are languishing, their intellects and talents restricted or obliterated.

As the women of Bletchley Park soldier on in civilian life, along with their counterparts in Call the Midwife and The Hour, the women of Masters of Sex and Mad Men are being shoved forward, into a new era, where women can at least reach for the brass ring of everything life has to offer, even if they can’t attain it. But what each of these series shows, unlike the series of the period in which they are set, is that women chafed madly at the restrictions placed upon them by society husbands and families. They were never the women in their pearls and high heels vacuuming and re-vacuuming the same spot on the carpet, hoping for a new and better result while slowly going mad. Nor were women like Peggy, Joan and Susan suffering from that Freud-inspired penis envy dropped like a pall over every career woman.

Call the Midwife 

They were women trying to find themselves, to find the secret to a fulfilled life, just as the men around them were doing. But it would be another decade or more before that code would even begin to be broken.
 

Victoria A. Brownworth is an award-winning journalist, editor and writer. She has won the NLGJA, the Keystone Award, the Lambda Literary Award and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She won the 2013 Society of Professional Journalists Award for Enterprise/Investigative Reporting. She is a regular contributor to The Advocate and SheWired, a blogger for Huffington Post and a contributing editor for Curve magazine, Curve digital and Lambda Literary Review. She is the author and editor of nearly 30 books including the award-winning Coming Out of Cancer: Writings from the Lesbian Cancer Epidemic and Restricted Access: Lesbians on Disability. Her collection, From Where We Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth won the 2012 Moonbeam Award for Cultural/Historical Fiction. Her Y/A novel, Cutting will be published in fall 2014. @VABVOX