(c) ShotDeadintheHead

Mad Men time (or related ephemera) again … an offer to buy one of these mugs has just popped into my in-box ( available as a t-shirt too – why, hello, Peggy).

You can also get Mr Sterling, Mr Campbell (why, though?), Mr Draper,  Little Miss Betty and Little Miss Peggy immortalised in earthenware and 100% cotton.

And I received a copy of this book – Women’s Roles in Twentieth Century America – through the actual post today – together with an invitation to go along to the launch of the new Sky TV channel,  Sky Atlantic and attend a cinema based screening of their 1920s set flagship series Boardwalk Empire.

I was very excited,  as I don’t usually get to hang out at such meeja events, but, due to the PR connectivity of the TV channel and the book,  I’m somehow on the guest list as a blogger.  Fame at last.  However,  upon closer examination of the invitation (“we’d love to take you for a drink first before Prohibition kicks in …”) – I see that the meeting point is at that oh-so-glamorous venue,  Yates Wine Bar.

British readers will sense my hesitation immediately;  American readers: it’s somewhat the equivalent of holding an event in a Denny’s,  ie,  dialled down a fair way on the Glam-o-Meter.

(Unless of course that’s the point and it’s been converted into a speakeasy,  where they’re serving gin in teacups and the like).

Still,  at least I won’t have to dress up … I hope. No mention made of fancy dress required.

Watch this space … will report back –  if I can get there in time from my interim job on the other side of London.

(Similarly, photos of Joan now inevitably accompany an article about “curvy figures”.)

Dr. Catherine Hakim’s recently published report – Feminist Myths and Magic Medicine: The Flawed Thinking Behind Calls for Further Equality – which concludes that mainstream feminist thinking is defective and that the UK government should stop trying to promote it (there’s an accurate, if somewhat right wing summary of her arguments here in this Daily Telegraph article) and that women tend to marry for money rather than love – has caused a rash of newspaper reports, published from London to Sydney and (probably) all points between – and the two highlighted here both feature lovely photos of the former Mrs Draper, as does a recent article along similar lines in Grazia.

Tanya Gold’s piece in the Guardian:  

“Inequality between the sexes is not a big deal any more, a new study tells us. That is only true if you are happy for women to have less than men …”

- does at least make some fleeting Mad Men reference to the assumptions in the report, commenting that perhaps Dr Hakim’s work is:

“ … based on a weird, Mad Men themed dream she had on Boxing Day …”

Female writers across the world have decided that actually, it’s OK to want to marry for money, to not have your own career or income and to stay at home, surrounded by items from Cath Kidston and Emma Bridgwater (ironically, two women who manage to be married and have their own eponymous businesses). And of course, yes, it is fine, I suppose. But this lifestyle framework is surely only OK if there’s someone to fund it – and what happens if that someone isn’t there anymore – either through death, divorce, a change in their own or their employer’s financial circumstances?

(This rather gloomy article from 2008 suggests a potential increase in divorce due to the credit crunch, with:

“… about 80 percent of those surveyed believe that the turmoil — and lower bonus payments — will prompt more women to seek a divorce before their husbands’ wealth evaporates further.” )

Obviously, nobody goes into marriage or life as a stay at home mum thinking “one day we’ll split up or he’ll lose all his money in some huge, unprecedented global melt down and then what will happen to me?”.

But as this cautionary tale, Regrets of a stay-at- home Mom, recently published on salon.com shows, it can happen:

“Fourteen years ago, I “opted out” to focus on my family. Now I’m broke.”

(For more on the wildly radical idea that “a man is not a financial plan”, check out The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up too Much?  by Leslie Bennets on the Recommended reading tab above).

* * * * *

In other news … the flyer I designed for Educators’ Trust India has now been printed up and is ready for use – if you’d like to see what they’re giving out to tourists in Goa in order to raise awareness of the issues of child poverty and of the need for literacy programmes, you can take a look and download a copy from my freelance writing site, Collaborative Lines.

(c) oldskoolhooligans.com

… which is also by way of a Public Service Announcement for UK readers,  reminding you that the new series (season 4) of Mad Men starts tonight on BBC 4 at 10pm.

Be there or be … well,  somewhere else with your martini and ashtray,  I suppose.

What I also didn’t know was that the “Dons” and “Petes” would follow you back!

_DonDraper (_DonDraper) is now following your tweets on Twitter.

A little information about _DonDraper:

15869 followers 290 tweets following 12110 people

If you want to follow them too,  the characters that I’ve randomly selected from amongst the many are: DonDraperSCDP,  bettydraper,  PeggyOlson, lanepryce,  SecretarySCDP, Sal_Romano and  (but of course) TheJoanHolloway.

Here’s a recent (and contemporary) “Don” Tweet:

“I saw a male stewardess lose his mind on the plane the other day. You should never hire a man to do a woman’s work.”

(More on the inherent sexism in MM in this piece in the Atlantic,  by the way).

In other Mad Men news,  and hard on the heels of the call from Lib Dem MP Lynne Featherstone for young girls to emulate Christina Hendricks’ figure rather than, say,  Paris Hilton’s,  here’s what the New Statesman has to say about Mattel’s new range of MM Barbie dolls:

“ … the Joan doll appears substantially underweight, her lollipop head wobbling on spindly plastic limbs, shrinking Hendricks’s curves into a body type that the toy company claims is more in keeping with “the aesthetic” of the show. Peggy Olson, a mousy-but-talented copywriter in Mad Men, has not been made into a doll, because frumpy, difficult and demanding women never get to be Barbie, whatever their accomplishments.”

Poor Peggy.

Anyway,  season 4 is apparently starting on BBC4 shortly.  Can’t wait …

Inadvertently, I’ve become familiar with words and phrases like IVF, surrogacy, Clomid, cervical mucus and the like.  Although two-thirds of British women in the 20-24 age group take the Pill, when you’re in your 40s (or even in your late 30s),  you tend not to do so, either by virtue of your age (and weight, or smoking status) or because you actively want to have children and so popping a daily pill from its little multi-coloured blister pack is an act from the past.

In series one of iconic TV show “Mad Men”,  there’s a scene where ambitious Peggy,  newly working in Manhattan and determined to be independent,  goes to see a doctor (who smokes throughout her examination – another example of how this visually stunning TV show uses props to invoke a sense of time, place and era) in order to obtain the Pill.

It’s the early 1960s and,  for the first time, there are doctors who will provide (unmarried) girls like Peggy with the tool to free them from their fertility.

I’m nearly as old as the Pill,  a fact of which I was reminded by this article in the weekend’s Observer,  which celebrates the Pill’s 50^th birthday and reminds us of how far we’ve come since Peggy’s day. How about this quote?

“Well into the 1970s, women in Britain and America were still pretending to be married in order to get a prescription; some used to pass around the same battered wedding ring in the doctor’s waiting room.”

And as novelist Margaret Drabble comments:

“I think I would have had a child a year if I hadn’t started taking it.”

So, happy golden birthday to the Pill, an iconic symbol of late 20^th century autonomy for women.

It was (and is) marked in a big way in countries like Russia and China,  where it’s a public holiday,  and quite a few western European countries also make it a social occasion,  with activities tied into fund raising for women’s charities,  but there was no sense at all of it being a global multi-media event.

Fast forward to this year,  and I’ve seen references all over the press,  even in the mass market tabloid papers – where it perhaps has most impact in terms of readership numbers.  From the official IWD website,  you can see that Reuters are on-board as a media partner and there are things happening all over the world,  including in many of the countries where just a few short years ago IWD was a relative non-event. I’ve been invited to celebrations in London, New York and Bangalore; of course,  I am actually going to the London one,  which is being hosted by Plan and the Africa All Party Parliamentary Group at the House of Commons and is a lunch thing to “Celebrate the Potential of Young African Women.”  Click here to read more about what Plan are doing to help girls in Africa and elsewhere complete their education.

I’m then legging it across town to join in the Fawcett Society’s photo shoot, which they’re organising to support their new pre-Election campaign, “What About Women?”. We all have to wear our FS “This is what a feminist looks like” t-shirt,  so I really hope the weather warms up a bit …

My favourite TV channel (it shows “Mad Men”!) is BBC4,  who are truly brilliant at creating themed programming strands: a week of shows from the BBC archive on any one of a number of concepts; prog rock, India, advertising, blues music and Islam, to name but a few recent memorable groupings.

Starting tomorrow,  and this surely has to be to commemorate IWD,  even though they’re not explicitly saying so,  is a week of programmes about women and feminism – most of which will be repeated if you miss them tomorrow night and/or are also showing on BBC2.  I’m setting Sky+  for the all-female audienced version of “Question Time” later in the week (still only ONE woman on the panel itself, though – why? Click here  to suggest more female panellists) and for Vanessa Engle’s three part documentary series on the impact of feminism called, simply, “Women”.

Part one is set in the 70s and is about what were then known (usually disparagingly) as “women’s libbers”.  Also from that era is Monday night’s repeat of a documentary on the 1976 Grunwick strike,  now regarded as a key moment in union history and one at which female and Asian workers first tested and protested their employment rights.

Check out the BBC4 listings (or iPlayer) if you’re in the UK,  there’s some great stuff in there from the amazing BBC archive.

Always good to know, for example, where a woman alleging that she was asked to leave an IKEA store in Brooklyn for breast-feeding sits on the moral compass, I think.

Because I am married to he who is officially the World’s Nicest Man, TLS, I am now a happy recipient of a massively overpriced but much loved by me subscription to “New York” magazine, which hits my London doormat at annoyingly sporadic intervals but which is always pounced upon and read immediately.

The most recent edition arrived yesterday, mid way through my as previously mentioned “Mad Men” marathon so I hit pause and opened it up … only to discover that the on-the-pulse editorial team had not let me down and were running a couple of “Mad Men” stories.

Here’s a link to a good interview with Christina Hendricks who plays Joan – and also a typically (but wittily, in classic NYM style) episode summary of the first two seasons.

I am so envious of all those based in the US who get to see the first episode of season three tonight. To quote from Monty Python: “you lucky, lucky bastards.”

a) So what?

and

b) the special features include “Birth of an Independent Woman” (parts one and two) and something called “An Era of Style” – both of which sound as if they have the potential to rock my world.

One of the things which I love most about the show is the depiction of three such different women in Peggy, Joan and Betty.

As the on-box cover endorsement from the “Independent” newspaper says:

“Yes, it does live up to the hype.”

I may be some time.

Brilliant.

OK, hands up – who wants to look like Joan?

And here I am: