Fashion Friday :: here comes adolescent-inspired adorable again.

I started out thinking about sweaters and button-ups to do season five Sally (Kiernan Shipka) style.  Then I thought about maybe the adorable silver baby astronaut dress she wore to Don’s award dinner.  But finding a grown-up and still stylistically similar enough version of said astronaut dress proved difficult, so instead, here’s styling around the promotional photo of her.

I looked at several dresses for this.  Blue dresses with ruffles, blue dresses with polka dots.  But none of them seemed to suit the mood well enough, so I settled on this one.  Dance Lessons Dress, ModCloth.

I have no idea what shoes Sally was actually wearing in the promo.  I can pretty much guarantee that they weren’t actually silver Oxford-styled Mary Janes.  But this is interpretive, and I think that Mary Janes are a good way to do grown up little girl without being weird and costumey.  (And I just really like Mary Janes.)  Vintage Reserve Amy Heel, ModCloth.

Similarly, I am fully aware that there is no handbag in the picture.  But this one matches, and it just seems so completelyplaying dress up while trying to assert/discover my own identity.  Which is really the essence of Sally sometimes.  Day After Daisy Bag, ModCloth.

Since you absolutely cannot do little girl as big girl without a hairbow and also I really just love hairbows.  New ‘Do Bows, ModCloth.

And to finish it off, a little locket.  Even though I know Sally’s is just a charm.  Lots to Love Necklace, ModCloth.

–your fangirl heroine.

Television Tuesday :: 11 women in Don Draper’s romantic history.

Ranking them in two ways: how much I like the involved women as characters, independent of the relationship, and how well I think their relationship with Don worked.  Which is not a reflection on them, it’s not how good they are in a relationship, but it’s how well Don made the relationship with them work.  It’s a reflection on Don (Jon Hamm) and his failures as a romantic relationship-haver.  And I am convinced that Don, much like I’ve heard tumblr-ers say about Buffy and Echo and Sookie, should be alone forever.  Or not alone, entirely.  I want him to continue to be a cute dad with Sally (Kiernan Shipka), because he can be if he tries, and I want him to continue to be platonic soulmates with Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) and perfect secret-snark best friends with Joan (Christina Hendricks), but I just do not think that any of his romantic relationships have a chance of success.  Because he is the kind of person who just… doesn’t have healthy romances.  It’s, again, no reflection on the women.  A lot of them are lovely.  Most of them are nicer than he deserves.  He just doesn’t know how to maintain a relationship, because some people don’t.  And it’s a shame, and since he’s on television he will cheat on everyone always, but that’s just how it is.

I found a similar list (to round mine to a nice proper 11, I’m including a few more) but it seems to just be giving general rankings, not as a person and as a relationship.  Still, interesting.

SO.  Numerically rated, 10 being the one I am least affectionate towards; 1 being the one I am most affectionate towards.  And then a wild card.

10. Bobbie Barrett (Melinda McGraw)
Bobbie, the wife of one of Sterling Cooper’s d-baggy endorsement men, is just as much of a jerk as her husband.  She is a businesswoman, and I do not hate her for this.  I hate her for being a manipulative, downright mean human being.

9. Bethany Van Nuys (Anna Camp)
I think it’s hilarious that Bethany, one of Jane’s (Peyton List) friends, is basically a baby Betty, but that’s not a good thing.  She’s just vapid and boring.  Maybe if she’d been given more screen time, she could have been more interesting, but she just… wasn’t.

8. Joy (Laura Ramsey)
Joy, one of the idle rich that Don met in California, didn’t have much screen time either.  But she managed to irritate me the whole time.  I don’t mind characters that are the idle rich when they’re doing something with their time.  Pursuing intellectual hobbies, or any hobby that isn’t just floating around the world being idle.  It must be nice to be able to do that, but it doesn’t give you a right to be the kind of person she really is.

7. Betty Hofstadt Draper Francis (January Jones)
I don’t know how to write her name out, really; I mean, now she’s going by Betty Francis on the show, but I feel like that wouldn’t describe all of the past seasons of Betty Draper that I just… do not like.  It’s not that I started hating Betty when she started standing up to Don.  It’s that she is not a nice woman to anyone.  It’s that she is immature, manipulative, cold.  If nothing else, it’s that she is so not cool to Sally, and Sally is my favorite television ten-year-old (who’ll be like twelve in a few weeks when the season starts).  I’ve never liked her.  I felt bad for her, and I still think that Don wasn’t the best to her, but she isn’t the best to anyone around her.

6. Allison (Alexa Alemmani)
Middling out on this list because we didn’t actually get to know her that well.  She was wide-eyed, she sexed Don, she cried.  I’m sure she’s a decent person, but I don’t have a great sense of her.  So.

5. Midge Daniels (Rosemarie DeWitt)
Sure, I feel bad when Midge comes back in season four, all addicted to drugs and desperate and sad.  And I appreciate that Midge is artistic.  But she’s a little pretentious at the start, and I don’t love pretentiousness (hence my issue with Joy).

4. Megan Calvet (Jessica Paré)
I don’t have anything against Megan.  She’s competent with the kids, and she’s nice enough.  But she’s kind of like most of the 2012 Oscar movies.  She doesn’t make me feel anything at all.

3. Suzanne Farrell (Abigail Spencer)
She seemed like a perfectly decent lady.  Getting with Don was a mistake, and she knew it the whole time, but she did it anyway.  And hey, that’s something that people do.  It doesn’t make her a bad person.  But she seemed like a sweet, competent teacher, and I wish she could have stayed just that.  I would have rather had more of Ms. Farrell in a “befriending Sally” context.  I sincerely like friendly!her, and Don’s needing to sex her was unfortunate. 

2. Faye Miller (Cara Buono)
I like Faye, actually.  I really do.  She’s competent and intelligent.  I don’t so much like it when she’s using kind of icky and manipulative gender-biased techniques to get answers out of the secretaries in the focus group, but I acknowledge that that’s just how it had to be and was in those days, or something.  She’s a consumer-researcher intellectual badass, and sure, she’s not perfect with kids, but that’s okay.  Not everyone has to be.  (And her related awkward makes me feel better about life, a little.)

1. Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff)
And I absolutely love Rachel.  I think I explained why here.

WILD CARD: Candace (Erin Cummings).  A call girl that we literally only saw in the context of her sexual relations with Don.  So I have no sense of her personality at all.  For all we know, the personality she wears as a call girl is 100% manufactured.

Now, with slightly less tl;dr, ranking his relationships.  10 being the absolutely healthy, 1 being the one that’s the least unhealthy, and again, a wild card.

10. Bobbie
Still not good in any way.

9. Betty
The fact that they stayed married for so long, with him cheating and her being unhappy and him being unhappy, is possibly what makes this so damn unhealthy.

8. Joy
And again, there is nothing healthy about this lifestyle.  Even for a few days.

7. Allison
Sleeping with a secretary just to do it isn’t cool.  Period.

6. Suzanne
I don’t care if she’s not your kid’s teacher anymore.  You don’t go there, man.

5. Candace
Sad that this is in the middle of the healthy.  It’s a little weird, and it’s probably not healthy for Don’s mind, entirely (considering he uses her just to enact his own emotional masochism; sexual masochism is a different thing entirely, and if that’s what you do that’s what you do, but I’m pretty sure Don’s need to be slapped was a reflection of his self-loathing, since he’d never exhibited those tendencies before).  But at least she’s probably not going to have her heart broken by him?  Maybe?

4. Bethany
Was basically Betty 2.0, but he presumably didn’t let it get too far?  So that’s… something?

3. Midge
Was ridiculous and pretentious, but I guess it could have been worse?

2. Rachel
It wasn’t a good idea, and Rachel probably would be happier with someone who wasn’t a philanderer, and Don did exhibit the tendency to think that she’s perfect and a fix-all for everything that’s wrong in his life and that’s not healthy, but they were still connected in conversation and intellectual idea as well as sex.  So that’s something?

1. Faye
Seriously, man.  He was a jerk more than once, and she was awkward, but he could actually talk to her about serious things that it took him how many years to even say to Betty (and that under duress).  They were also emotionally/intellectually connected, and she was patient with him, and he tried to be good to her.  And then he had to go and ruin it.

With the WILD CARD: Megan.  I have no idea how well this works.  Aside from sex and a trip to Disneyland, we haven’t seen it in action, and I don’t trust it at all.

–your fangirl heroine.

Things in Print Thursday :: so, I sat down and read The Hunger Games today.

Just the first one, because even at the breakneck pace that I manage to devour books I can’t get through three of them in an afternoon, but I’m surprisingly less disappointed than I thought I would be.  When people build things up, I often find myself going “…okay, what?”  And everyone’s been telling me I need to read these.  Friends, Entertainment Weekly, all of it.

For what it was, though, it was a pretty solid book. The characters… weren’t all super-developed, but Katniss was, and being as she’s the narrator, it made sense.  She wasn’t too painful to read: she didn’t dither and moan over a lot of things.  She went occasionally confused about things, but the confusion wasn’t pages and pages of angst angst angst, it was a couple of lines in a paragraph that was otherwise about kicking society’s ass or something.  She wasn’t entirely cardboard, which is good.

The other characters were slightly less three-dimensional, but a lot of them didn’t have to be.  I think I’m just spoiled, because I’m one of those “attach myself to every minor character” types, and I like it when they’re attachable.  I didn’t feel attached to the other tributes, at all, but that was the point. They weren’t that interesting, but they served their function.  I remember Entertainment Weekly saying that Kiernan Shipka should play Prim at one point, and though some girl named Willow Shields was actually cast as her, I kept imagining Kiernan anyway, so I developed a fair amount of fondness for her.  I didn’t give a damn about either of the boys, the predictable love triangle boys, but they served their function, too.

I mean, I would have been into it if we could get a few more wacky details about the other tributes.  The who/what/why/when of their lives.  But again, that’s me being spoiled, and it didn’t detract.

It was fast-paced.  The lingery “we’re being cute in the arena” scenes later in the narrative were admittedly just sort of skimmed (because I am the most selectively romantic person ever, and I only care about romances when they involve people I’m emotionally attached to; though I was enjoying the book, really I was, I don’t know if I was particularly attached to anyone).  But it started with “okay, kids, have fun fighting to the death” and the vast majority of the book was “okay, kids, we’re fighting to the death.”  And the stuff before that, the getting ready and interviewing and social business, that was all necessary, I think.

(I mean, I’m pretty sure it was helped by the fact that in my head, the Capitol was like… Sailor Moon’s crystal Tokyo crossed with a steampunk Emerald City, and the denizens were similarly ridiculous, and Effie Trinket was a younger Dolores Umbridge on crack, and everything was sparkly… but that’s neither here nor there.)

It was exactly as long as it needed to be.  Each section lasted as long as necessary, the book itself was as long as necessary.  I intend to be done with the other two before winter break is over, because I have all this time to kill, and we’ll see how that goes (because, as I’ve avoided all synopses, I have no idea what happens next) but overall, I’m happy.  It wasn’t necessarily ohmygoshamazing, but it was good.  It was straightforward.  And that’s always nice.

–your fangirl heroine.

Television Tuesday :: death on television (there isn’t always enough)

I’m not saying death is good.  It’s not.  But death is a part of life, it’s just something that exists no matter what.  And when characters go entire seasons without anyone they even remotely know dying, it just starts to feel unrealistic to me.  I don’t know.  Maybe I’m just morbid.

I’m the kind of girl whose reaction to television death is usually one of three things:

1. Good!  That character deserved it, because they were bad and mean.
2. NO!  My baby, you can’t die, I love you too much.
3. I’m sad that you’ve died, yes, but I’m also applauding the writers having the courage to kill you off.

3 is my pretty constant refrain when watching, say, Buffy (I was originally going to make this a statistics problem, comparing how many people die in various television shows that represent various genres, but then I realized that it would take too long to count how many people die on Buffy, because seriously, SO many people die, random people and important people both; one of these days I will do Depressing Whedonverse Deaths, but that’s not today).  Lately, though, I’ve been attributing it to other things: True Blood, at least the last season (which we all know), and though Sons of Anarchy hasn’t killed off that many people, it’s putting a lot of people in near-death situations this season.

When characters are prone to dying on television, it’s more high-stakes, and that makes it more fun for me.  If I think that a character might actually die, I get tense, and I get more wrapped up in the story as a result.  If I think that a main character could die, I have to applaud the writers.  It’s not unheard of, but it’s rare.  (To say again how much I adored this last season of True Blood, I will just point out that they spent the first two seasons playing it pretty safe.  They killed off random waitresses that boinked people and random vampires and random hillbillies, they killed off their Big Bads.  Season three was a little more risky.  Season four, though… I mean, the season finale saw the deaths of how many characters in the opening credits?  Four?  And Marshall Allman, who played Tommy, had died previously, but was still in the credits, so that makes five. That’s a lot of death.)

Not every show has excuses for massacres, and that’s perfectly all right.  It makes more sense to have higher body counts on Buffy or True Blood or The Walking Dead or even Dollhouse, because of the nature of the programs.  There are monsters (or technology, or guns, or some combination thereof) that will kill you, period.  You don’t have to kill off everyone on, say, Mad Men, but I wouldn’t be opposed to someone not ancient (I’m looking at you, Ida Blankenship [Randee Heller]) getting killed off somehow.  (Not my girls, my Joanie [Christina Hendricks], Peggy [Elisabeth Moss], Sally [Kiernan Shipka], not Don [Jon Hamm], but someone… maybe a little bit less important but still important enough to have more than one episode’s worth of impact, like Greg [Sam Page].  He should die due to army things.)

Generally, the number of television deaths can be sorted out pretty easily:

1. Anything Joss Whedon touches
2. HBO
3. Showtime/Starz/etc.
4. Other programs about monsters or an apocalypse; sometimes war-related things too
5. FX/AMC/etc.
6. Miscellaneous medical/criminal dramas
7. Network dramas
8. Regular comedies, if you’re lucky
9. Sitcoms (seriously.  During the entire run of Friends, less than ten characters died.  That’s not even one per season.)

I know.  I’m morbid.  I don’t even care.

–your fangirl heroine.

Television Tuesday :: 10 television children I want to see grown up.

10. Isabelle Hodes (Allie Grant, Weeds)
Isabelle got more of a plot than a lot of the kids on this list have, with her whole child modeling career, but the last we see of her is her helping her mother Celia (Elizabeth Perkins) run the taken-over drug business.  I understand that the show was focusing more on Nancy (Mary Louise Parker) and family’s new lives, but I want to know what happened with Isabelle.  I always adored her, and you know she was totally the brains of her mom’s attempts at the drug operation.  Did that drug operation last?  Did Isabelle keep modeling?  Did she get a totally awesome lesbian girlfriend once she got into high school?  I vote all of the above.

9, 8. Every single child on Sons of Anarchy (Kenny [John Abendorth/Mason Charles] and Ellie [Lela Cortines/Kerris Dorsey] Winston, Abel and Thomas Teller [both babies or toddlers and anyway I'm not 100% caught up so I'm not Googling it lest I hit a spoiler], Lyla’s kid who I can’t find on the Sons wiki or anywhere else)
C’mon, I wanna see if they stay in the life or they rebel some wacky way or what.  And they get two numbers because there’s so many of them.  Ellie especially.  Will she marry a biker guy?  Will she run away and go live in England with an investment banker?  Will she become a pornstar like stepmommy Lyla (Winter Ave Zoli)?  (I hope not that.)  Any of these choices are possible.  Kenny, I couldn’t say.  I also vote that Thomas becomes a doctor like his mommy Tara (Maggie Siff), but in medical school, he decides he’s more interested in psychology than surgery, and Abel is going to be the Teller man who actually publishes a book (it won’t have anything to do with MC life, though; it’ll be something wild and crazy, like Harry Potter but not).  And I don’t even know for Lyla’s kid.

7. Aylesh Rohan (Emma Kenney, Boardwalk Empire)
Okay.  So Aylesh just appeared.  I don’t know if she’ll recur or what, but I love her already.  She’s Margaret’s (Kelly Macdonald) youngest sister, come from Ireland, but she’s the most American of them by far.  She’s a little bookworm, and she’s intuitive as all get-out: looking at Margaret’s hat, she spun a story about Margaret’s beau that was 100% accurate, just playing, but still.  She’s just super-cute, and I want her to finish school, get a college scholarship to some lady’s college, and become a novelist.  I want her to write stories about psychic equestrian girls or something.  And I want to see it all happen.

6. Teddy and Emily Schroeder and Tommy Darmody (Rory and Declan McTigue, Lucy and Josie Gallina, and Brady and Connor Noon, Boardwalk Empire)
Teddy should be a professor of economics.  Tommy should run away to Europe and marry a French woman and bake.  Emily should become a gutsy lady attorney and be able to work for the underground, like Robin Weigert does on Sons.  These are all things I’d like to see happen.

5. Cassandra “Wheels” Kowalski (a baby, United States of Tara)
You know that baby is going to grow up to be awesome.  If she’s only answering to Wheels and Chinese swear words as an infant?  Just imagine what an epic little geek girl she’s going to be.  I refuse to imagine her being anything but.  I just have this feeling she’ll grow up and be some cross between a scenester, a Mod kid, an anime character, and a cosplayer, and she’ll be adorable and nerdy and all the likeminded boys will fall all over her.  And Charmaine (Rosemarie Dewitt) will just be saying to Neil (Patton Oswalt), “This is all your fault, and I don’t mind.”  Because quirky though she’ll be, she won’t be a screwup.

4. T Tsetsang (Brandon Dieter, Dollhouse)
Now that the world’s not in hell, T can grow up with both of his parents in a stable fashion and help rebuild the entire world!  The children are the future, and since he’s one of the only ones, well.  Be the future, T.  There’ve got to be other thoughtpocalypse babies scattered around the world, and they’re all going to converge on LA, because LA is the center of everything, and together they’ll… I don’t know.  Something important.

3. unnamed baby Washburne (is not born yet, the Firefly postseries timeline)
Even if “Float Out” hadn’t confirmed it for us, I’d have chosen to believe that Zoe (Gina Torres) was pregnant at the end of Serenity.  (The line in “Heart of Gold” is as good as proof alone: “You and I would make one beautiful baby.  And I want to meet that child one day.”  I don’t know if that was at all planned, though I suspect it was, but it’s perfect.  It’s like, there will be a baby but you will not be around to meet said baby yourself.  Stab stab stab heart, literally.)  But the confirmation just sent me absolutely around the bend with wanting this to happen.  I don’t care if technically this is comic canon, it’s an extension of the show but in print.  Baby Washburne is a girl, Zoe said, and until I’m told otherwise, I’m christening her “Hannah,” because that’s alliterative with Wash’s given name, Hoban, but not derivative of its ridiculous, and also it means “favor” or “grace,” which… well, clearly Zoe was in someone’s favor and grace to be luckily pregnant, and I like names that mean something without being absurd or obvious, and also I’ve always liked that name.  And I want to know all about Hannah’s (and any fantastical Kaylee/Simon or Mal/Inara or River/some person we haven’t met yet but not Jayne/anyone babies that would occur) adventures in space.

2. Sofia Metz (Bree Seanna Wall, Deadwood)
Sofia and Alma (Molly Parker) leave the camp at series’ end, but then what?  I think little Sofia grows up a proper lady under Alma’s care and then decides that she’s going to be a teacher, because Martha Bullock (Anna Gunn) was a powerful figure in her life, and she wants to give back to the world and teach other immigrant children how to speak English and belong in America.   She’ll have suitors, but she’ll marry in her late twenties, late for those days, and when she has children, she’ll give the girls the names of her sisters as middle names, but her son will be named for Ellsworth (Jim Beaver).  I don’t know why it was so easy to invent her future, but it was.  It’s like a Dear America epilogue.

1. Sally Draper (Kiernan Shipka, Mad Men)
I want this so much.  Sally can turn out one of two ways: highly successful and awesome and badass, or just rebelling to rebel and sleeping with all the wrong guys and trying to “find” herself in ridiculous ways.  I hope the former.  I want her to be class valedictorian and do something really, really intellectual as a profession just to stick it to Betty’s (January Jones) notions of femininity.  I want Sally to be a freaking neuroscientist or something, and I want her to have tumultuous but safe love affairs, and I want her to go to wacky New York parties and write books, and I want her to be awesome. And she’ll somehow become friends with Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) and Pete’s (Vincent Kartheiser) baby, but she won’t know that, but we would, and it would be beautiful.

–your fangirl heroine.

Fashion Friday :: it’s a Mad Men week.

I was looking, earlier this week, at Banana Republic’s Mad Men collection.  It’s quite nice stuff, though in my opinion a slightly loose adaptation, but when I saw this skirt

styled as it is with the socks sticking out of pumps, I was struck with inspiration.  We’ve all learned that I adore Sally Draper (Kiernan Shipka)

and I enjoy seeing how much grown women can take fashion cues from little girls while still looking grown up, so here goes nothing.

Normally, I wouldn’t wear a top with chandeliers on it.  But the cut is just so cute, and the chandeliers are the same color as the skirt, and.  Well, when you’re doing little girl, you have to throw some whimsy in there.

Of course, you won’t see many chandeliers under this cute funky cardigan.  (Could I throw together this outfit without a cardigan?  I think not.)

Socks are also a definite must, as that was partially the inspiration for this here outfit.

And it just wouldn’t be me doing Mad Men (…or Dollhouse, for that matter) without tossing in rad black heels, would it?  So there’s that.

And of course, I had to throw a barrette in, too.

…this outfit could also be titled Emma Pillsbury Goes Almost 1960s, probably.

–your fangirl heroine.

Television Tuesday :: the Mad women and feminism

Specifically, this is elaborating on thoughts found in an essay in the book Mad Men and Philosophy, edited by Rob Carveth and James B. South.  The essay is “Mad Women: Aristotle, Second-Wave Feminism, and the Women of Mad Men,” by Ashley Jihee Barkman.  It’s a very well-written essay, and very correct in many places.  I couldn’t help but thinking, though, that the analysis offered in the essay might have altered slightly had the essay been written after season four and not after season three, and so I will expand upon thoughts, with all respect and admiration to Barkman.  I am but a pop culturally analytical college student, so I’m sure I don’t have the same credibility, but bear with me.

The essay begins with a description of the woes that the women face and their reactions: “sexual harassment in the workplace, adulterous husbands, and even nonconsensual sex,” and they’re “shown coping in an era fraught with what Aristotle, in a qualified sense, would deem ‘injustice’”(203).  Fair points.  Barkman disregards Aristotle’s view of women as being “incomplete men” early on, so that’s not an issue.

Her essay also has the three main female characters, Peggy Olson [Elisabeth Moss], Betty Draper [January Jones], and Joan Holloway Harris [Christina Hendricks] are the primary focuses, and this makes sense.  Peggy, she says, “is the lone individual who receives due justice — that is, she is treated as possessing a rational soul — but seeks it out as well”(205).  Betty is less fortunate; “Perhaps her beauty muffles her chance at self-actualization”(211) but at the end of her marriage to Don (Jon Hamm) “the threshold of injustice she can bear has been reached”(212).  Joan, somewhere in the middle of the two experiences, is “an invaluable part of the ad agency”(213) but Barkman describes her as “the least progressive of the three women”(212).

This is a notion I have a problem with.  “She neither initiates like Peggy, nor reacts like Betty, but patiently waits for her due.  Joan is a woman comfortable and content in the values and expectations of those in the pre-second wave world (of feminism),” Barkman writes, also on page 212 of the book.  In the first seasons, this is true.  Joan, despite being college-educated and clearly efficient in the workplace, has been raised to believe that a woman’s worth is in her looks, and she doesn’t see much reason to question that.  She knows that that’s how the world of the office is and there’s nothing she can do to change it, so she may as well accept it and make the most of it.

But by season four, there’s a bit of a shift.  She came onto the new agency, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, from the ground up, helping organize and initiate the move and facilitate the new organization, and she’s proved herself even more “invaluable” in the new workplace.  Despite having not been working after her marriage to Greg Harris (Sam Page), Roger Sterling (John Slattery) knew that they couldn’t make the transition without her.  And though it’s not really said explicitly, Joanie is happier when she’s working.  She seemed restless in the life of a housewife (the dinner party in 3xo3, “My Old Kentucky Home,” has forever won the award for Most Heartbreaking Accordion Performance in my heart) and having purpose is something that helps, especially as Greg transitions to the position of a military doctor and is there for her less.

But there’s this telling conversation between Peggy and Joan in the last episode of season four, “Tomorrowland,” and I will actually copy the entire thing out because I think it’s just that important.

Joan: Whatever could be on your mind?
Peggy: Can you believe it?
Joan: Happens all the time.  They’re all just between marriages, you know that.  He’ll probably make her a copywriter.  He’s not gonna wanna be married to his secretary.
Peggy: Really?  Is that what he meant?  “She admires you.”  Jesus.
Joan: That’s the way it works for some.
Peggy: You know, I just saved this company.  I signed the first new business since Lucky Strike left.  But it’s not as important as getting married.  Again.
Joan: Well, I was just made Director of Agency Operations.  A title, no money of course.  And if they poured champagne it must have been while I was pushing the mail cart.
Peggy: A pretty face comes along and everything goes out the window.
Joan: Well, I learned a long time ago to not get all my satisfaction from this job.
Peggy: That’s bullshit.
Both women laugh.

Don has just become engaged to his secretary, Megan Calvet (Jessica Paré), and the men in the office seem more focused on this event than either of the actually workplace-related advancements that Peggy and Joan have made.  The other women in the agency come and go with some regularity, but these two have stuck around, and they’re clearly doing important work.  And even Joan’s tired of sitting around just letting it go unnoticed, now.

More importantly, though, I think Barkman’s essay neglects the other women of Mad Men, the supporting supporting characters.  Women like Midge Daniels (Rosemarie Dewitt) and Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff), like Trudy Campbell (Alison Brie), like Helen Bishop (Darby Stanchfield), even like little Sally Draper (Kiernan Shipka).  Each of them have something interesting to say about the female condition, too.

Midge is the first woman-on-the-side of Don’s that we meet, a beatnik intellectual with artistic inclinations and a generally pretentious worldview.  The similarly inclined men she’s seen palling around with serve mainly to point out that even the alleged advanced thinkers of the time are stuck in these silly gender roles.  They criticize Don’s participation in the ad industry, but do nothing of substance themselves; the men still treat the women like objects, and the women allow it.

Rachel is another story.  Having grown up in her father’s department store, she’s determined to revitalize it.  She’s an independent woman, and she doesn’t see why her interest in business should counteract her femininity: “If I weren’t a woman I wouldn’t have to choose between putting on an apron and the thrill of making my father’s store what I always thought it should be.”  (1×01, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”)  She rebuffs Don’s advances repeatedly, observing that such a relationship would be unwise, and when she does finally act on her interest, she does so on her own terms.  When he begs her to go away with him, she refuses, still convinced it’s the wrong decision.  She’s going to do what she feels is right, and she’s not going to let anyone walk all over her.

Trudy is the picture of domestic bliss on the outside.  Pete’s (Vincent Kartheiser) wife, her family brings him business ties and she makes him respectable.  She keeps a neat house (well, apartment) and she’s always smiling and loving.  They argue, yes, and the dramatics that come from their struggle to have a baby are a point of contention for quite a while, but that’s about all there is to it.  Pete cheats a couple of times; not much comes of it.  Trudy loves him and supports him no matter what.  She’s happy just being his wife, but on Trudy it doesn’t seem like giving in.  It’s truly the life she’d wanted, and while she’s bright enough to have more, probably, she’s content.  And she’s far too good for Pete, too.  She negates the stereotype present in a lot of media that men with wandering eyes or who work late a lot always have harpies for wives (ergo, the cheating/avoiding home/whatever is their fault and not the man’s).

Helen is a neighbor of the Drapers, down the street: she’s important in Betty’s evolution as a character, being the first divorced woman in the neighborhood, and while Betty looks down on her for a while (all of the neighbor women do) she softens, becoming momentarily friendly.  Of course, that doesn’t end well, as Helen’s son Glen (Martin Holden Weiner) is a creeper and Betty gives into it, but Helen is the first picture of a completely independent (save child support and such) woman, the first openly liberal female character on the show; she paves the way, I think, for Betty’s eventual decision to divorce Don.  (I’m sure Betty decided that she’d be careful to remain proper even after divorcing, remarrying almost immediately; none of that going around for recreational walks wearing pants and volunteering and holding a job for her, oh no.)

Sally is honestly becoming one of my favorite characters on the show.  She started out just a little girl, window-dressing in Don’s suburban life, but as she’s growing up she’s rebelling a bit more against her mother.  Betty’s concerned over her beauty, her weight (which is ridiculous; she’s got a rounder face, like a lot of children do, but she’s not pudgy), her behavior.  Things like intellect hardly factor in.  Sally’s just trying to grow and to discover herself (sometimes literally and sometimes through actions like cutting her own hair, both seen in 4×05, “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword”).  She’s not interested in Betty’s ideals.  She wants to be her own person.

I’m interested to see how season five (oh, god, next year) contributes to these portraits.

–your fangirl heroine.