Mad (wo)Men

Is font a decent enough distinguishing factor between us? If not, this is Chloe writing.

I've just started watching 'Mad Men'. I knew from the opening title sequence that I would love this show. The Hitchcock-reminiscent imagery and the music perked me up on the edge of my seat. I am my father's daughter.

Throughout the first few episodes, I reflected on how lucky I am to be a woman of this generation. I cringed watching the men of this series treat the women as inferior beings, just there to look pretty and pick up after men. Then, in one episode, a character that I truly despise (because he is successful not of his own accord but because of his mother's last name - Pete Campbell) said something that made me reconsider my thoughts. While it cannot be denied that women's rights have come a long way since the 60's, is there something we can learn from that era?

"I am going to have dinner waiting for me when I get home", he said proudly.

What are women dissatisfied with today? I gather, through talking with women of various ages, that women tend to feel a lack of appreciation for their work, be it in the home or out. The quote above refers to a situation in which Pete Campbell gets a phone call from his wife asking what he would like for dinner. Granted, this quote is taken out of context, and I do not claim that he, nor any other man in this series, has a great deal of appreciation or respect for women, but in this particular moment, he is proud to say that his wife is making him dinner. He considers her work in the home valuable in some way.

A lot has changed for women in the past 50 years. Women have been given greater opportunity to achieve: to achieve higher education, to gain access to politics and business, to change the choice between family or career to family and/or career. However, with an increase in opportunity and thus an increase in responsibility, there should also be an increase in value and appreciation. But is there?

In terms of education, women have not only taken the opportunity, but have gone a step further by outnumbering men in higher education. In most U.S. colleges and universities, the ratio is close to 60% women to 40% men, a number that has these institutions turning away qualified women. Despite the fact that women were given access to higher education after men, and that for years this access was limited by a social belief that women were not worthy of education, qualified women are being turned away. In an article for the New York Times, At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust, author Tamar Lewin recognizes this gender divide. In an interview with Robert Massa, Vice President for Enrollment at Dickinson College, the truth about affirmative action for males surfaced:

"The secret of getting some gender balance is that once men apply, you've got to admit them," Mr. Massa said. "So did we bend a little bit? Yeah, at the margin, we did, but not to the point that we would admit guys who couldn't do the work."

This promotes an inequality between men and women in which women's education is still not valued as highly as men's. What about outside of college? Are women valued in the workplace and at home?

Women are going to college and getting into the workforce; however, the role of housekeeper and family caretaker has not shifted much. In an article titled Forty years of feminism – but women still do most of the housework from The Observer, author Tracy McVeigh mentions a study on the gender imbalance shown in dual-income homes:

"Analysis by the Institute for Public Policy Research thinktank shows that eight out of 10 married women do more household chores, while just one in 10 married men does an equal amount of cleaning and washing as his wife".

In a household where both men and women work full-time, why are women still expected to maintain the house? Why is the responsibility not shared equally? (Yes, I am speaking in generalities. I understand that this is not the case in every home, as it is not the case in mine). The assumption that a woman should come home from work to cook and clean devalues the work she does outside of the home, as well as in it, if a man does not have the same expectations held over him.

Women are taking on twice the responsibility and receiving half the value. How far have we come since the 60's? If equality and symmetry are synonymous, then the illusion of gender equality is just that: a construction of equality, with the title of 'equal' rights, that makes invisible the truth that women are still being treated as submissive to men, as they were in the 1960's. 'Submissive but Equal'? Sounds familiar.

I do not propose that we go back to the ways of the past, but rather, that we learn something from them. To value a woman's worth is to appreciate the work she does. This means recognizing that a day at work is just as long for a woman as it is for a man, that the task of keeping house does not fall on a woman by default, and that a woman should not be turned away from higher education so that a less-qualified man can fill her spot.