Image of Betty Draper and credit here.
So I am terribly late to the party and I am only now getting completely hooked on Mad Men (please be careful with spoilers*). I love the show – everything from the retro wonderland that is the set to the study in urban malaise and social history that is the script.
Much of the show is about (white, middle-class) women’s lives then and now (some things haven’t changed), and motherhood is but one of the aspects examined. Betty Draper is the original yummy mummy – gorgeous, domestically accomplished, and married with two children to the show’s deeply flawed but incredibly dashing hero, Don Draper.
Apparently fans hate her. They find her to be a cold and selfish mother, and besides that, too miserable. Funny, cos I find her rather stoic for someone trapped in a shit of a marriage.
It is always very revealing to see how people define “a cold and selfish mother”, isn’t it?
Here is an interesting piece by Amanda Dunn on everyone’s dislike of Betty Draper and what that might all mean.
Says Dux: ”The one thing that the domestic goddess is meant to have is mother-love. Betty displays a coldness that freaks people out.”
Cunningham argues that ”cold” is still an effective term of abuse used against women today, particularly by other women who, even subconsciously, are harsh on anyone they perceive as letting the team down. ”I just think women love to get stuck into women,” Cunningham says. ”It’s one of the real problems of feminism.”
Quite thought-provoking..
* I am currently half way through season 2.
I’ve discovered the series recently too, and I have a lot of empathy for Betty. I see her as living this life which she was promised would be ‘Happily Ever After’ and the truth is it’s nothing like at all.
The moment I keep coming back to is a particular conversation with a very emotional Francine (trying not to be spoilery here) who exclaims that she is talking to Betty because “Don’t you KNOW?” how to keep it all together, carry on as if everything’s wonderful and easy when it’s really not. Because that’s what Betty *seems* to do (to people who don’t know about the details of what’s going on).
I also think it’s really interesting how Bobby seems to have almost no personality, compared to his sister. He’s like a blank, child-shaped symbol of… something.
I am also a big fan of the show, from the beginning and dying for the next season to start in NZ. While I have sympathy for Betty I am also unimpressed with her parenting, and I don’t see why I can’t take both positions. She is the adult and it’s up to her to try harder. Is that harsh? For what it’s worth, I am just as judgy about the male parents in the show.
I’m late to this cocktail party, too (though nearly to the end of Season 3).
I used the second episode of the first season in a class where we were discussing Betty Friedan and “the problem that has no name.” Betty Draper embodies it, I think.
She’s also a pretty negligent mother even by the standards of the day. In that same episode, her daughter Sally appears wearing a dry cleaning bag. Instead of yelling at Sally about putting a bag over her head (as my mother’s generation would have done), Betty yells at her for potentially getting her dry-cleaning dirty. So I’m a little bit with Tamara here. Betty is incredibly self-absorbed. But I do have sympathy for her. I think there’s a better Betty trapped in that bad marriage.
Aside from all that of course, the main point made in the story is that Betty gets the most criticism of all the characters. I think Dunn’s analysis of this is spot on. And that’s the point of the character as far as I can tell. Her role is to enable the show to explore various feminist issues (with others covered in the plots for Joan and Peggy) and it only gets more interesting blue milk! Oh, and I love my Mad Men self, in evening wear of course!
Personally, I noticed that it’s apparently feminism’s fault that women feel they are held to unrealistic and offensive standards of ‘femininity’, and then use these standards to assess other women. And there I was thinking the patriarchy/society/thewholedamnworld had something to do with it. I was wrong – it’s just feminism (presumably because it’s tapping in to the whole bitchy undercurrent of just, you know, being feminine).
Hrmm except re-reading it maybe Cunningham means it’s a _challenge_ that faces feminism. Hrmm. Maybe I overreacted just a bit.
Naomi Eve – I read it as the second but I can see why you read it otherwise initially, and difficult to tell exactly what she intended with that comment.
I really liked this article, and how it’s easy to empathise with the more proactive female characters, while denying the Betty in all of us, the passive, depressed, angry, frightened person who can be both privileged and victimised at the same time, hurting others because we don’t know what to do with ourselves. She’s a deeply uncomfortable character, I think, precisely because she *is* so privileged and yet so obviously caged.
Hmm, I really don’t see that Don is any less cold than Betty. Sure, he occasionally empathises with his children, throws them in the air, and probably flies a kite once a year. But most of the time, he just plains ignores them, and yells at them if they insist on catching his attentions. Warm parenting just doesn’t seem to be a feature of the show at all, or indeed, safe parenting – not just the plastic bag episode, but the smoking over cradles, etc. What seems to bother the adult characters more is the ‘moral’ safety of the kids, they want them to grow up to be wage earning men and marriageable women. Until they’re that, they simply don’t seem to matter very much.
I suspect that when people look at Betty Draper’s parenting style they imagine what it would be like to be her child, not what it would be like to be her.
I don’t really find it surprising that a generation of people who grew up with Depression and world war were disinclined to worry about smoking, plastic bags or a little DDT, or that they tended to a parenting style we now think of as cold.
I probably haven’t seen all the ‘cold and selfish mother’ moments yet but I had my own reading on those I have seen thus far..
Betty worrying about her daughter getting fat and thinking her daughter looks photogenic when she is crying: illustrating the ease with which everyone starts objectifying girls from a very young age; Betty being hard on her son and wanting Don Draper to ‘discipline’ him: desperation to engage in Don in family life and discipline, especially of sons, being seen in that era as a task reserved for fathers.. plus maybe she senses the way Don Draper kind of sees his son as his own ‘inner child’ and is lashing out at Don and provoking a response by punishing that ‘inner child’?
Also agree with Kate – not sure smoking over a cot could be considered all that bad given the era she is in and their ignorance about the dangers of smoking.
WRT to head in a drycleaning bag thing – I have had days where the kids have done something dangerous (out of my sight), but survived and I’ve been angry with them for what they could have damaged rather than the damage they could have done/do to themselves. It’s only afterwards that you dwell on what could have been. I can imagine that as a woman trapped at home (I haven’t watched Mad Men, but I did see the d/c bag thing on an ad) these moments would occur more often. Sometimes you’ve just had enough and the thought of having to take the garment back to the drycleaners is too much, especially given that the child is standing in front of you, perfectly okay. It doesn’t mean that you don’t care for your kids, it just means that you have had more than enough crap for the day and that’s how it gets expressed.
I have just finished watching season one of Mad Men and I love it. As regards toBetty – she is the Stepford Wife character and reminiscent of some of the mothers that I saw when I was growing up (I am now nearly 50). So her portrayal is very realistic to me and I sympathise – my mother said to me after my Dad left her for another woman ‘I did everything right – I was the perfect wife and mother, and he still left me’. She subsequently had a nervous breakdown – we were the first family on the street to have an absent father (quickly followed by several other family breakdowns) but my mother felt ashamed. So I can see that Betty is unfulfilled and trapped in her era. Regards the smoking – this was not seen as a problem – even 20 years ago when I had my son I was smoking around him, without a problem. Finally, the way the women are treated at work on the show – when I first stated work in 1987 a man came up behind me in the canteen and pretended to ‘hump’ me – I pushed him off immediately and everyone laughed. How far we have come since then. Absolutely love Mad Men.
I think you may change your opinion once you’ve watched up to the latest season. She’s a pretty a harsh and cold mother and it isn’t just the marriage to blame. I sort of liked Betty initially, but it’s Peggy that owns my heart.
Has anyone considered that Betty had a nervous breakdown, following her divorce from Don? She is so angry over the 10 years she had wasted with him that she was lashing out at everyone. Mind you, she has only herself to blame for marrying Don for shallow reasons in the first place. By the way, she had every right to fire Carla. The latter had went against her wishes regarding Glen.
Guess what? Sally was doing the same. Lashing out in anger over her parents’ divorce, with Betty and Bobby as her main targets. Yet, everyone was expressing sympathy for her.
As for Peggy, she has become a problem. She is still trying to win Don’s complete respect and I’m getting sick of it. It’s time for her to move on to greener pastures. And now, she want’s to be a mother . . . after giving up the kid she had sired with Pete. Peggy is good at achieving her ambitions, but apparently at the cost of running from the consequences of her actions (screwing Pete, when she knew that he was engaged).
Betty wants someone to look after her, never grew up and cannot make her way without the admiration of males. She does not have a nurturing bone in her body, but there was no other role for her. No doubt she does resent the children in a lot of ways for forcing her into adulthood and symbolizing the end of her modelling career and youth. She is depressed and on prescription medication that is only used for veterinary purposes now. She is fairly selfish (although not in the same league as Don, of course) and is getting none of the nurturing from him that she needs to be happy.
I think it an over simplification to simply look at her as a frustrated woman trapped in a limited 50’s housewife role (I say 50s because being Old School she was not going to have any part in the emerging gender role changes). She would probably not be overly happy today, either.
By implication her mother was similar. . Most of her motivation is shown through her interaction with her Dad (Season 3, Ep 4) He expresses his disappointment in her refusing to challenge herself or pursue an education “your mother had you convinced that you only need to look pretty “. She refuses to assist him as he was dying ” I am your little girl, daddy, I don’t want to think of this .. ”
The main theme of Madmen after all is the ghosts of the past and how we are all marked by our experience. Betty is her mother, and we see throughout series 3 particularly how she is passing her traits on to her own daughter. (Great scene in Ep. 8 of her putting on lipstick, then focus on Sally a ghost image in the mirror who immediately replicates the same facial expressions. The camera work making the point, as usual)
Betty Draper is in my view one of the most subtle and well developed TV characters ever. Analyzing her situation from a not so subtle “feminist” perspective is a waste of a damn good bit of script writing.
Dave, you accuse the feminist perspective of being unsubtle but this has to be one of the most unsubtle descriptions of Mad Men and Betty Draper:
“Betty wants someone to look after her, never grew up and cannot make her way without the admiration of males. She does not have a nurturing bone in her body, but there was no other role for her.”
I don’t see how you can identify the things that you do about Betty and NOT discuss it from a feminist perspective. She is has no other role available, she feels worthless when she can no longer be a model and is no longer young…
Dave, so comforting to know we have authorities like you around to set us straight. I hate to think how lost we all were, you know, women analysing a female character, WTF, without a man about to tell us how it really is…
So Dave, does that mean you don’t believe that Betty had a nervous breakdown on the heels of her divorce from Don? I never got the impression that Betty WANTS someone to take care of her. I think she feels that she has no choice, because she has never been encouraged to live life for herself. And even if she had been able to take that step for another kind of life . . . like Joan and Peggy . . . chances are she would have ended up disappointed anyway. It happened to Joan and Peggy. It happened to the male characters in the series.
We like to think we have the answers that would make a fictional character or a real person happy. But let’s face it. Happiness if a futile thing that occurs occasionally in our lives. It’s not consistent. But we human beings are an illusional lot. We can’t accept the idea that we can never be consistently happy. We’re not very good at accepting reality.