Mad Men and the Movement
Mad Men succeeded in showing how social change seeps into otherwise unremarkable lives.
The end of Mad Men calls to mind an advertisement — not an advertisement for Topax or Secours Laxative or any of the other products the show’s writers have pitched, but for the show itself. As the series comes to a close, Netflix’s ad for the old episodes keeps appearing online with the line, “Before feminism, there was Peggy.”
For a show so deeply invested in the seductive powers of advertising, it’s funny to see it given such a banal tagline. But it’s also unsettling to see such historical amnesia given the show’s famously painstaking attention to period detail.
Such amnesia is not exceptional, of course, especially when it comes to the history of social movements in the United States. As Shulamith Firestone wrote in The Dialectic of Sex, which came out in 1970, the year Mad Men ends:
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