MovieChat Forums > Mad Men (2007) Discussion > Were men really like this towards women ...

Were men really like this towards women back in the day?

posted 8 years ago by JDoe18
36 replies | jump to latest

I'll admit I have had some sexist thoughts and enjoy the fact that she makes me food and cleans up for us but I try and help here and there and am grateful she does it. I dont expect it either but dont discourage the gender role either. Also how they treat them like property at times and how they command them what to do from time to time and how they believe they are unequal. Just a different time I suppose but is a lot of this fictionalized?

[–] Thomasina 8 years ago

how they treat them like property at times and how they command them what to do from time to time and how they believe they are unequal. Just a different time I suppose but is a lot of this fictionalized?

It's not fiction. And it wasn't just individual attitudes, it was also that legally, women were often required to be dependent on or subsidiary to men. A few examples:

*Banks could--and often did--refuse to issue credit cards to unmarried women, and they also had the right to refuse to issue a credit card to a married woman if she didn't have her husband's permission to get one.

*Until the late 1970s, It was completely legal to fire a woman because she was pregnant.

*Also until the 1970s, there was no legal recourse for a woman who was raped by her husband. Now, marital rape is illegal everywhere in the U.S, but then the law didn't even acknowledge that marital rape existed--and even now, some states have mitigated penalties for rapists who attack their spouses as opposed to rapists who attack people they aren't married to.

*Again, until the early 1970s, women were still barred from serving on juries in some states, and where they were allowed, in some cases married women had to get their husbands' permission to serve. Until about the same time, women could also be prevented from practicing law--even if they went to law school, passed the bar, and got a job as a lawyer--just because they were women.

[–] maggimae83 8 years ago

I will be 78 in July and so was pretty close to Peggy's age in the 60s. I worked in a tire store and was the only woman there. I could handle the sexual harassment, but the inequality of pay still burns me to this day.

maggimae83

[–] JDoe18 8 years ago

IT just saddens me it was like that, I am so thankful for the women I have in my life and am truly believe they can do anything a man can to a certain extent (mostly physical things) even then women are proving them selves physically as well. As for intellectually my relatives that are women are way smarter than I will ever be and will likely always make more than I will.

[–] njiuma 8 years ago

yes they were, i grew up in the Seventies and saw it then, although it was changing for the better albeit slowly.

"If you love Jesus Christ and are 100% proud of it copy this and make it your signature!"

[–] WhoisThePrisoner1 8 years ago

Yes, great times!!

[–] elce26 8 years ago

My mother worked at the Chicago board of trade in the early 80s(different time period, obviously), and hates the show because of her experiences there. It is what it is, can't change the past.

[–] JohnRayJr 8 years ago

Yes, Men were really like this toward women.

[–] 8 years ago

[deleted]

[–] CuddlesMacombs 8 years ago

It's really uncanny how incredibly the show captured the actual behaviors and attitudes of the times.

I grew up in New York City, born the same year as Sally Draper and I can say unequivocally that living in New York City during that era was exactly the way it was depicted, especially the way women were treated.

"I'm not foul, Mr. Carson. I'm not like you, but I'm not foul."

[–] Eva_Marrie 8 years ago

Umm, OP, it's been like this and worse towards women for almost all of recorded history. And it still is in most places around the world. There are around 60 million missing women in East Asia thanks to sex-selective abortion. Male violence trumps all natural causes of death for women around the world. One of the reasons ancient Athens lost its power is that they killed off most of their infant girls. The whole concept of traditional marriage is based on keeping women as property of individual men. Domestic violence towards women was not only permitted, but encouraged.

Frankly, I don't know how women refrained from just drowning their sons at birth to reciprocate this level of abuse from the male species.

As for maintaining gender roles, OP - what century ARE you living in, exactly? They need to disappear altogether. They are rooted in female slavery. No man's hands have ever fallen off while cooking, and no womans' - while changing the car oil.

[–] maggimae83 8 years ago

Hey, Eva Marie: When my mother finally kicked my father to the curb, she was around 60. And I think the moment I was proudest of her was when she noticed that she needed to put some oil in the car. However, she only knew about the hole where the dipstick went in, so she got a small paper cup and little by little she poured a quart of oil down that hole. My mother could do anything she set her mind to.

maggimae83

[–] Eva_Marrie 8 years ago

My mother could do anything she set her mind to.

Same with my mother. She rushed in to help in a bad car-wreck once, when all the men around her were frozen in fear. She recently installed a toilet after all the hired male workers kept screwing it up. She also kicked my father to the kerb while pregnant and very young because he did no housework. This was back in the 80s, in a backward Eastern European country, where women did all the housekeeping on top of full-time work unquestioningly! There is absolutely no way I could ever buy into gender roles while growing up with such a super-hero of a maternal figure.

That's why when I hear of those deluded Western chauvinists who dream of marrying an Eastern European woman, thinking that they'd find a nice dependent doormat (so unlike those EVIL  Western feminist women), I just wanna laugh manically. Little do they know that those women are leaving their countries PRECISELY to get away from this kind of male treatment.