Fish sticks (and hot dogs and canned soup) were a staple of kids’ lunches. They probably still are.
Don’s going to get meat, a starch, a salad, and dessert. The kids will probably eat before he gets home (if he ever gets home), and being kids, they might not eat the same meal.
I think it’s true to the time period, especially for a suburban wife who can afford it. Convenience foods were becoming popular, and a woman like Betty is going to take advantage of them. I doubt we’ll ever see her pop a TV dinner into the oven though.
That’s not a sign of Betty’s laziness though. Getting the cake from the bakery would be SOP – even now, if you’re having a big party. If the party was just kids, Betty would probably have baked the cake, but with that crowd, you need a sheet cake.
Also, she wants to impress friends and neighbors. In 1960, you didn’t impress by doing it yourself – you impressed by showing that you could afford to buy a bakery cake.
I’m not saying that any of this is explicative of Betty’s laziness or that any of it is somehow anachronistic for 1960. I am inferring that Mad Men is intentionally showing us something about 1960. And it’s not something that necessarily new either. I recall hearing from other sources that in the post-WWII period, processed foods were believed to be better than what we today would consider fresh foods.
I’m not saying I’m amused because I think Mad Men got something wrong. I’m saying I’m amused by this difference between 1960’s culture and today’s culture.
My take on why the pilot gave us no clue that Draper was a family man until the end is that it wanted to show us how detached he is emotionally from his wife and kids. His movement in his “day” world is indistinguishable from a bachelor’s – there’s no internal conflict regarding his philandering. He is who he is and he does what he wants. And maybe this is a characteristic that is shared to some extent by all (or most or many) of the men in the business world of 1960. What they say seems to imply that they regard their wives as jokes who have no impact on who they are as men.
Nobody thought that tv dinners were better “than what we today would consider fresh foods.” People thought that the then modern convenience foods were far better than the convenience foods in earlier decades, and that was certainly true. Some cookbooks of the day also featured recipes that included canned goods, such as cream of mushroom soup, as bases for sauces rather than making every aspect completely from scratch. Betty would probably do that. But that’s is not at all what you are saying.
I’m still not buying any of your interpretations. Betty is making most of her meals from fresh ingredients at home. She’s being a classic homemaker and she is specifically being held up as the opposite of Helen, the divorced mother. The meals she is serving are hugely better than Helen’s. Her “childishness,” as her shrink puts it is taken directly from the Betty Friedan casebook of how being a homemaker infantilized women of the day. (The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963.) She is trapped by needing to do too much housework, without any intellectual stimulation and with a husband who thinks of her only as a Stepford Wife for her beauty and the image she and his kids send to the neighbors. That’s the message the show is sending, not any suggestion of how frozen foods were considered to be wonderful at the time. I don’t see even a trace of that.
What was the story with the returned wedding gift? Pete said that his wife asked him to return it because they got two, but then she was unhappy because it came from her aunt. Was he supposed to return the other identical gift? And the scene of him waving the gun around in the office was creepy, and another example of how different things were. Today, if anyone brought a gun to work and swung it around like that, people would call corporate security or the police immediately. (Not to mention how unusual it seemed to everyone that the husband was returning the gift; that was seen as the wife’s job.)
Well, my memory is a bit loose on this, but I have a distinct impression that there was some cultural preference (maybe not a majority, but definitely mainstream) for canned and frozen foods, especially with regard to fruits and vegetables. I recall someone – I can’t remember where (probably on NPR or the SDMB) – saying that her father’s generation looked sideways at fresh vegetables from the garden, with an underlying notion perhaps that they aren’t as “clean” as something from a can.
I get that, but what I’m also getting is a cultural difference in what is considered “good food.” I don’t know what your discussion on Betty’s “childishness” is addressing, because I don’t think I’ve set forth any specific criticism of Betty.
I don’t think the two messages are mutually exclusive, but I get that you disagree with my interpretation.
She did want him to return it but she was upset because he exchanged a gift “for us” for a “toy” for himself. He devalued her aunt’s gift by trading for something she saw as frivolous and selfish. She expected him to have both their interests in mind and get something for a grownup household (or just take the store credit and let her spend it as she saw fit).
I was 15 in 1960, and I agree with what (I think) you’re saying about the switch to processed food. My mom and her sisters all kept gardens, and they canned and froze and pickled like crazy. They didn’t do it because it might have been tastier or healthier, but because they were on a budget.
I don’t know what they thought of convenience food – they might have wished they didn’t have to work so hard to put a meal on the table, or they might have been proud. I never asked them, darn it.
I do remember, as a child, thinking that eating home-preserved food meant you were too poor for store-bought.
Speaking of looking sideways at fresh, my son visited from Seattle this summer. A neighbor brought us some onions, with some dirt still on them, and the kid says “You can eat that from right out of the ground?” Like it needed to be processed before it was fit to eat. So I made him shuck some corn.
Tried to post this yesterday right before the board went offline…
The more I see of Pete the more uneasy he makes me. He’s a classic “little man” who’s being systematically emasculated on every front. His wife tells him where they’re going to live even though he objects that they can’t afford it. So he tries to assert himself with his parents to get a helping hand to buy the apartment and they turn him down cold, in a really insulting manner. So then he has to go to her parents for the money, putting him into their debt even more. He steals the work of others, tries end runs around his coworkers and only has his job on sufferance and the possible entree he gives the firm into the circles of the society people. The only place he has power is over Peggy, which he’s asserting in a really dominating, icky manner. He tries to “be a man” on other fronts and with other people and gets roundly squashed every time.
The rifle thing squicked me out big time, as did his endless repetition of “It’s a chip & dip–you put the chips here and the dip in the middle!” He sounded weirdly obsessed about the whole thing–and the situation was not made more easy by the sales girl blowing him off while fawning over the alpha male who engaged him in conversation while he was returning the gift. He strikes me as someone who’s going to blow in a spectacularly outre manner and take some people with him.
Holy crap, Pete really flipped out last night on the fellow who was making fun of Peggy, didn’t he? I could tell by the way he was starting to wriggle uncomfortably that he was going to blow up, and WHAMMO!
Don’s wife getting that Coke modelling job only because the ad company wanted Don was sad. The look on her face when she was told her job was finished was heartbreaking.
I was quite surprised at Don’s attitude towards her getting a job outside the home, because as I understand it, women weren’t encouraged to do so.
And the ending where she’s standing in the front yard shooting the neighbor’s pigeons because their dog chomped on one of the birds and he threatened the dog was hilarious. I was yelling, “Go! Go! Go!” the whole time. I also think shooting at the birds made her feel better as to her losing her job.
Annnddd…does anyone besides me think Peggy is in the family way? If so, whoo doggies, what a mess that’s going to be when it comes out.
I was raised by a widowed mother & widowed grandmother, who’d gardened & pickled & canned their way through the Depression. But, as working women, they didn’t have the time in the 50’s & 60’s. (Although mom didn’t go back to work until we were all in school.)
The meat course & “starch” were usually fresh. And we always had fresh salads. But the vegetables were usually canned or frozen. Let’s not forget the casseroles–mushroom soup forever! We had TV dinners occasionally, but knew they weren’t very good, even then; frozen chicken pot pies were OK. For something exotic, we’d have Chef Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti from a box. Or La Choy Chinese from a can.
Cakes sometimes came from a box–even we kids learned to cook fairly early. But Grandma’s cakes, pies & biscuits were wonderful.
I haven’t seen Mad Men yet, but will make an effort. Certainly, the well off suburbanites depicted became fans of Julia Child’s show–but it didn’t start until later in the 60’s. And I’ll bet the sophisticates loved 1961’s New York Times Cookbook. (I do!)
Edited to add: Yes, nearly everybody smoked back then.
I don’t think she’s preggers. She’s heavier, as evidenced by the ripped skirt, but she’s not acting pregnant. She’s full of confidence after the Belle Jolie success, and I don’t think an unmarried pregnant woman in 1960 would be so ebullient.
I’m with the guys – Peggy slimmed down some to get the job at Sterling Cooper, where appearance is important, and maybe to attract a man. But as soon as it looked like she might become something more than a secretary, she said to hell with the diet.
Bridget, it sounds like you were living in my house!
I hope you can catch the show, especially if AMC runs it again from the beginning. They had a marathon awhile back and they’ll probably do it again. I think you’ll appreciate it more if you can see it from the beginning.
Not encouraged, but not unheard of either, even in 1960-era TV. IIRC…
On the Dick Van Dyke Show Laura Petri filled in for a week as a dancer on The Allen Brady Show. They asked her to stay on, but she quit because she couldn’t stand the strain of working and keeping house.
On I Love Lucy Lucy and Ricky made a bet that she couldn’t last a week working outside the house, while he couldn’t last a week keeping house. They were both right.
On the Donna Reed Show there was at least one episode where Donna went back to being a nurse, to help out her husband, a physician. She enjoyed it, but didn’t want to do it permanently.
Those were played mostly for laughs. But on Father Knows Best Margaret Anderson really threw herself into a (volunteer) job of fund-raising. She was crushed, like Betty Draper, to find out she was just being used.
And the husbands’ reactions were – oddly enough – pretty much like Betty described Don’s. “I know you hate this, but I also know you’re just a little bit proud of me.”
In the latest episode – “Long Weekend” – what caught my notice was when Sterling’s wife wanted to bring their daughter into the hospital room and he said “I can’t let her see me like this.” My first thought was “Are you kidding, this is exactly what she needs to see. You as you are, a flawed human being, instead of some macho facade.”
I loved the season ender … Pete creeps out, Betty reveals she knows about Don’s infidelities … Harry living in the office in his underwear …
Why are so few Dopers watching this show?
By the way, I’ve been using a casual conversion factor of 20 for the dollar amounts. Pete makes $75 a week, so that’s $1,500. His apartment was $30,000 = $600,000. Don got a raise to $45,000, so $900,000. Francine’s phone bill $18 = $360.
Maybe because it’s on AMC. I never watch AMC. I don’t remember how I heard about Mad Men – it wasn’t advertised on the other networks.
So Harry confessed his adultery to his wife? I’m of two minds about this. It’s good that he felt some guilt, but assuming it was a one-time drunken party thing with Hildy, he should have kept it to himself.
These characters are so well done, all of them. As much as I like watching Don deal with his alienation, I’d like to see more of the other Mad Men next season, and more of the women too – not just Joan, Betty, and Peggy.
I read somewhere that one of the actresses was “difficult” and was written out of the show. We haven’t seen much of Helen (Glenn’s mom), and Don dumped Midge – if that’s true, it must have been one of them.
The season finale was really good, with the exception of Peggy’s pregnancy reveal. It’s veering into soap opera territory. I guess it’s possible she was in heavy denial the whole time, but I just don’t buy it.
But I loved Don’s Carousel pitch - amazing. And it was very clever of Betty to use the psychologist as a means of communicating her unhappiness to Don. I am looking forward to seeing how her character develops next season.
Nice touch using Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice” at the end.
