(Image courtesy of these folks)
Sometimes a peek at the past can show you just how far you've come, baby.
Like many of my pals, I've waited (and waited) for Mad Men to resume, and not just because I need to spend more time holding a remote. It's because Mad Men is a type of archeology for me. Mad Men's first season was set in 1961, the year I was born. As I've watched the series unfold, I am astonished to see things I remember in my mother and father: eye-opening things that have informed so many attitudes that I saw back then but didn't understand at all.
My family emigrated to the US from England in 1965. My mother became one of those pretty secretaries that could type like a demon. My dad was a blue collar guy, working in a tool shop making the molds that punch out all manner of plastic widgets. We made our way to California in 1966, and settled into suburbia in 1967. Dad bought a station wagon to tow the motor cycles he had started racing. Mom still preferred her Corvair. Dad gave up smoking before I was born because of a bout of TB, but Mom always had one in her hand - held just the way the Joan does in the show.
What I remember of the 60's is tinted pink with that hopeful feeling that the progress of the decade gave birth to. From the outside, our family looked good. When my folks split in 1971 I was utterly blindsided. While I know now that they weren't happy, watching Don and Betty split has been a revelation. I can see that, like Don, Dad didn't understand that his wife wasn't fulfilled in her roles as mother and secretary. He brought home a decent wage and thought it was enough. Mom, I found out later, wanted a more creative life. She noodled with writing children's stories, but never took it anywhere because it was so far out of the nurse/teacher/secretary mold that the 1960's offered her. She couldn't be Peggy because I was already here. She was stuck being Joan. And while she made sure she was really good at it, stuck was still stuck. And I didn't get how stuck that was until I saw Joan's excitement at being given creative work to do, and her crushing disappointment when it was taken away. If my mom had had the choice, I think she would have been a childless career woman. It really makes me appreciate the choices my generation has.
(As an aside, such moments in the show are raising my consciousness for the older battles of feminism so that I am armed for the ones we obviously have still to fight... but that's for a different day).
After the divorce, I went with Dad back to England, and he quickly remarried. He made sure that wife #2 was decent mother material, because, let's face it, that was her job and where he needed the help. Over the years he and I have gotten closer, but back then he was still the guy that came home for dinner and only really got involved when I ventured into "wait until your father comes home" territory. My teen years were turbulent, as all teen years are, but I can see now that the cultural shifts added to the tornadoes. Step-mom wanted me to be a secretary, like her. Dad wanted me to do something intellectual (he didn't get the chance to go for higher education). He told me I could have any dream that I was willing to work for, a pretty modern attitude. When I chose art, embracing that modern attitude and my cultural right, dammit, it wasn't what he had in mind.
Over the years, Dad and I have clashed about his some of his more misogynist, bigoted and racist views - things I knew were a product of his times, but the show has really brought those times into sharp, gasp-inducing focus. Did they really just say THAT? Yikes! Lucky me to have become aware in an age where second wave feminism was blossoming, and the immigrant migrations of many cultures was becoming commonplace. While we've made many peaces, neither Dad nor I are shy about having an opinion, and these days I can see how fast our culture changed between his 20s and mine, between the Beatles and Disco (and even faster between Disco and Grunge). For both of us, it has seemed such cruel fate at times that he ended up with such a strong willed daughter (although he must realize that I get it from him). And while I don't like that he hasn't kept up on the tolerance front on occasion, I get that his generation, despite being the architects of the rocket age, is still having trouble with the speed of how things change. Heck, my son is light years beyond me already, and I like to think I run pretty hard to be hip, even though I often fall short.
