In an article in WSJ.com, Natasha Vargas-Cooper admonishes SCDP to get with the times: “If the men of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce want to keep themselves attractive to clients looking for innovative strategies they may want to make more room on their masthead for Joey and Peggy — or at least give them a door to their office.” (27 July 2010).

Kyra notes in her Antenna posting that Mad Men has a relatively small viewership yet is intensely interesting in some quarters. WSJ.com will follow Man Men this season (blog/wsj.com/speakeasy). In their first posting (27 July 2010), the WSJ.com panel commented on the show’s historical verisimilitude about gender and agency practices and also its inevitable resonance with gendered work relations today.

Toril Moi observes,

“In its representations of gender ‘Mad Men’ appeals rather powerfully to our need or wish to feel superior to the 1960s. It encourages us to think that at least we have sorted out gender relations by now. But of course we haven’t. In the 1960s women suffered from the conflict between work and marriage (Joan’s leaving the agency when she got married is a good example), today the conflict is between work and small children. Women are still caught out in this bind far more often than men. The glass ceiling still exists. So ‘Mad Men,’ much as I admire the series, may be contributing to a far too upbeat assessment of gender relations in our own era. On the other hand I actually think it is true that women have a better deal in work life today than in the 1960s, and I don’t want to blame ‘Mad Men’ for bringing this out.”

For all my annoyance with Don’s humiliation of Peggy, Mad Men remains on the cusp of the past and the present, inviting us to explore continuities and changes in women’s condition.