I would be really interested to know from folks here who are around Sally Draper’s age if you would have received similar punishments/threats/admonishments as Sally does from Betty, for the same kind of behavior.
I know that’s a confusing sentence (sorry!) so some examples from recent episodes:
Sally gets slapped on the face by her mom for cutting her own hair. Typical/no?
Betty threatens to “cut [Sally’s] fingers off” when Sally is caught masturbating at a friend’s house. Typical/no?
Betty, in reference to Bobby’s lying about being asleep, says, “he’s a little liar.” Typical/no?
I would also be interested to know if Betty’s punishments or attitude would be considered harsh or distant, regardless of class, by 60s standards, for those of you with first-hand experience.
Typical, IMO. Sounds a lot like dear old mom to me. Hard to believe, but back then kids were not Special Little Snowflakes handled with care - because coddling didn’t prepare them to handle the tough things in life. (though of course there were much ‘worse’ parents and much ‘better’ parents, then as now. But Betty wasn’t treating her kids ‘badly’ at the time, her peers would have agreed with her attitude. Just about everything in the show is a bit bizarre according to our modern sensibilities.)
I think Betty’s parenting style has nothing to do with the 60s. That style is still as common as well as bare butt whippings.
I grew up in the 60s - graduated from high school in '72. My mother was more like June Cleaver than Betty Draper.
And Betty is not that bad. Well, OK she is. But it is because of her own childhood (from the way she talks about her past). I don’t think she hates the kids, but she is just very imature and probably went along with everything her parents asked of her. She can’t understand why her kids can’t just go along with everything she wants.
Also remember Sally and Bobby have Don/Dick as their father. No prince there. But I think he had it so very bad as a kid, he wants to make things better for his own kids. Like the time he refused to spank Bobby.
Betty just needs her own Dr. Edna. It is Edna isn’t it?
I think it’s supposed to be telling how the other characters see her. Don, her friends, the neighbors, Henry, Henry’s mom, the teachers at school all act kind of shocked whenever Betty bothers to do any “parenting.” They’re a similar class as she is so her parenting standards and their parenting standards would likely be similar. I think we’re supposed to see her as outside what’s considered normal.
My mom was easy-going, but some of my friends’ moms would have reacted much like Betty.
Something that’s been stuck in my head since 1957: At sleepovers at one friend’s house, the mom always insisted on a bath before bed.* Now to me, a bath is water up to chest-level and lots of bubbles. Mary’s mom would run maybe three inches of water in the tub, and no bubbles. I thought it was odd at the time but now I think Mary’s mom just wanted to be sure our nether regions were fresh, but she didn’t want to talk about washing “down there”.
*We’ve talked about this before: In the days before everyone had showers, daily bathing wasn’t common, especially in large families. Kids took a bath once a week, more often if they got dirty. Most houses only had one bathroom and you might run out of water after one bath.
Hey amarinth, do you have personal experience with type of situation, or are you assuming the show is realistic? Because whether or not the show accurately reflects the mores of the time period is what I’m trying to get at here. Thanks so much.
I went to a pop culture conference this spring and naturally went to the panel devoted to Mad Men. There were several women present who would have been Sally’s contemporaries and when the conversation turned to Betty, they all agreed that it was an accurate portrayal of women they knew, including their own mothers in a few cases. For whatever that’s worth to you.
Betty reminds me a lot of my grandmother. The scene where she shot the birds in S1 (S2?) reminded me so much of her that I thought I was going crazy for a second. My mom was born in 1962 so not exactly the same era, but close.
What you describe is similar to how my wife was raised. Coincidentally, her dad worked in Manhattan in advertising. (Although not at an agency … he sold ad time for one of the networks.) My wife attributes a lot of the ugliness she experienced to the booze and diet pills.
I don’t think it was common. (My mom wasn’t like that, for example.) But it certainly happened.
I think the show is accurate, based on the mother-daughter relationships of my friends and their moms (Iowa, mid-50’s/early 60’s).
Examples: None of our moms were our “friends”. We didn’t tell them our secrets or ask them for advice. We didn’t do each other’s hair. We didn’t go shopping (after the age of 12) or to movies with mom. If we spent time with mom, it was doing housework, or with the whole family at family gatherings. Mom might teach us how to cook or sew or garden or play the piano, but it was a student-teacher relationship, not sharing something you loved to do.
Moms were moms and kids were kids. Parents were authority figures, unknowable and a bit scary.
I have no idea if that was the norm, but it’s what I experienced. However, from what I’ve seen over the past 20 years or so, a lot of us became closer to our moms as we all got older, maybe due to the shared experience of child-raising. (?)
I agree that the question of whether it’s realistic doesn’t have an answer. There have always been parents like Betty, and there still are today. There always were parents who were very different from Betty, and there still are today.
There are fads in parenting and class makes a large difference. What really differs are individuals. Betty is not a representative of the 60s. Betty is just Betty, just as Don is just Don.
I’m a few years older than Sally, so I grew up in that era, FWIW.
I knew more mothers who weren’t like that than who were, but there were *plenty *like her. The kids with the meanest moms didn’t invite friends over as often as the others so as not to be embarrassed. And moms didn’t often do it in front of other adults.
I was older than Sally Draper; my mother was a widow with 3 kids. She did, rarely, use corporal punishment. It was always the last resort & done “in cold blood.” (I was not impressed with the results; if my life had included children, I’d have done without the board.)
She never, ever hauled off & slapped us because she was angry.
She never, ever shoved food into our mouths at the dinner table.
And I’m pretty sure she never slapped another mother in the grocery store.
One of the jarring moments for me was in season one when another father slapped the Draper’s son for spilling a drink and Draper didn’t bat an eye and threatened to slap the kid again.
I’d put Betty at around the 30th percentile in parenting quality. A lot more better mother’s than worse, but still close enough to the center of the bell curve that there were/are a lot of Betty’s around.
(You don’t want to know about parents in the bottom 10 percent. Dick Whitman knew one of those.)
Some era specific examples:
Kids crawling all over the seats in the car while she was driving: That was common.
Getting mad at Bobby when he had the dry cleaning bag over his head because he might’ve left the clothes on the floor (vs. suffocating): Not so common. Mom’s knew in the 50s about kids suffocating playing with those bags.
My parents were both schoolteachers in the 1950s and 1960s and told about kids coming to school with broken arms and obvious beating marks and how there was very little you could do about it. There were child welfare agencies that could investigate but at that time public sympathy was almost totally with the parents, social workers were nearly taking their lives in their hands by going to any home to begin with and if the kids were black (my parents taught in all black school for a time) it was given lowest of priority anyway, and they had to prove little short of the kid’s life being in danger for them to take them from the home and the foster homes were often little better. Reporting a suspected child abuse was more likely to make it worse than better.
My parents were in Alabama but the problem was nationwide; for an extreme but well documented case read Sybil, the bestseller about (the woman later revealed to be) Shirley Ardell Masonwho grew up in Minnesota and endured many years of constant and just absolutely evil abuse from her schizophrenic mother that left her not just psychologically damaged but with physical and sexual injuries that required medical attention and that even doctors later admitted it was clear was coming from abuse, yet they didn’t intervene. (Her mother also molested and abused other children yet never was arrested or charged with anything.) Then of course there were the Catholic priests and countless other authority figures who got away with decades and decades of physical and sexual abuse without it even being reported.
The point is that mothers of Betty Draper’s era- especially one who’s upper middle class and (other than divorce) of respectable standing- had damned near carte blanche to treat their child however they wished so long as they didn’t go way overboard. They’d probably at very least have had to send the kid to the hospital, and probably repeatedly, before welfare agencies would have so much as blinked about it. Even if Don himself had made a complaint the most they probably would have done is visit the home, report “no endangerment/nice house” and send Betty an apology for bothering her. When they did get involved it was usually going to be a poor family who didn’t have the resources to fight them in court (which led to abuse by child welfare agencies of course- one particularly notorious example).
While some left to their own devices would still be warm and wonderful mothers giving discipline as needed but then within reason, the Bettys had absolutely no fear of repercussion, probably had no remorse as to what they did, and there was little to tell them it was wrong to begin with. If Betty were real and she were still alive today (she’d be somewhere in her 70s I suspect) you can easily imagine her sitting around with her lady friends on an upscale seniors cruise lamenting how out of control kids are today but they weren’t like that when she had hers and seeing it as weakness that her daughter’s in therapy, and since the pendulum has shifted to where many will admit the standards for child abuse can be ridiculous and vague at times (spanking a two year old is NOT child abuse as most understand it yet people have gotten into serious trouble for it) even the younger ladies would probably give her an Amen.