Introduction: Representing the Jewish American Woman in Popular Culture

Abstract

Sophisticated, powerful, forthright—and Jewish—Rachel Menken walks on the set in the first season of Mad Men (2007), a television show that Rolling Stone magazine will come to name the fourth best program of all time, and leaves an indelible mark. Portraying the lives of advertising executives in the 1960s, Mad Men will draw expansive praise for, among other things, its verisimilitude in set design and costume, as well as its illustration of the sweeping societal changes between 1960 and 1970. Characters weep over Marilyn Monroe’s overdose, go to Mississippi to register black voters, and panic during those thirteen days in May. None of these historical realities is more relentlessly or graphically portrayed, however, than the oppression of women during this time period. Stiletto heels, pointy bras, and garter belts connote confinement; yet the imprisonment goes well beyond costume. The hero’s wife, Betty, a graduate of Bryn Mawr, majored in anthropology but is now stuck at home raising three children. Chain-smoking, bored, and angry, Betty could well have been one of Friedan’s subjects in The Feminine Mystique. The stultified housewife that producer, director, and writer Matthew Weiner presents does not surprise the twenty-first-century viewer—we know this story. What still can shock, however, is his portrayal of the daily interactions between men and women. Weiner portrays a male culture committed to rendering H LEN E S. FLAN ZAUM BTLER UNERSITY