Unsurprisingly, I gobbled up all the intense amounts of hype over the third season of “Mad Men”, and I was especially pleased to see feminists all over discussing the show. But I saw one thing that drew me up short at both Feministing and Bitch’s coverage—-the way they were unnerved by Betty’s use of the term “lesbian”, or more properly, “Lesbian”, since it was pretty much always capitalized in the early 60s.
I actually wondered about Betty’s comment, was it anachronistic? I got the impression from previous seasons that homosexuality is perceived as a perversion, not really as lifestyle/sexuality. (Remember when the Russian guy at Sterling Cooper guy who comes out is called a pervert by folks around the office?) And therefore it would be weird for Betty to reference it so casually. But maybe I’m wrong. I need some schooling from a gay-rights historian!—Ann….
But we got only Peggy nagging on about her secretary for a brief scene before it was back to the men, and a bit of anachronism from Betty (I highly doubt a woman of her background and education would have had much of any kind of idea about lesbians in 1963, girls’ college or no).
I was surprised that they were surprised. The comment was absolutely not an anachronism. As Peggy’s reaction to Kurt shows, by the early 60s, even sheltered Catholic girls (at least in New York) understood that homosexuality was an orientation. My sense from reading novels and other historical materials of the time was that straight people generally grasped the idea of homosexuality, but since it was more acceptable then to discriminate against large swaths of people, they didn’t stop to consider the social and legal abuse of gay people to be anything other than what you’d expect. If anything, the idea of “the closet” was less well-defined in the public mind than homosexuality itself. The common term for female homosexuals was “Lesbian”, which I remember used to startle me in books from the mid-century, until I got used to the capitalization.
In fact, Mary McCarthy’s best-selling book The Group, a1962 satire of women that are exactly like Betty Draper (except Betty went to Bryn Mawr, and the characters in the book went to Vassar) has this whole funny situation at the end where (SPOILER) the group reunites with the woman who was their unofficial leader in college, and they have to deal with the fact that she is—-always a step ahead, that one—-living as a lesbian, and she goes about with her female lover. Betty, who is 20 years younger than the generation McCarthy expertly sends up, would have only been more aware of the existence of lesbians, though of course, she’d be prejudiced against them. I have very little doubt that anyone who went to a girls’ college in the 50s, as Betty is supposed to have done, would have gone without a lot of exposure to cracks about lesbianism in said schools.
I think that the whole thing was surprising because there’s a persistent sense that the character of Betty Draper is kind of a bimbo. I’m not sure where this idea comes from. I think the actress does a great job of portraying Betty, but maybe her blank blondness allows certain stereotypes to seep in. But I’d say that Betty is a much more complicated character—-sophisticated and reasonably intelligent, but kind of going a bit soft because she’s bored and crippled with a naivete about people around her that doesn’t necessarily translate into naivete about the world at large. Her crack about lesbians fits right into the long-standing situation in the Draper marriage, where Betty tries to remind Don that she’s more than a wifebot, and he basically ignores her. It also fits into a great deal of characterization of Betty as someone who is crippled with the prejudices of her WASP-y upbringing, which gets touched on the most when you see how she just shoves her kids around, and she and Don battle on the subject of whipping.
But I do believe we’re supposed to assume that Betty is sophisticated. The character is a refutation of the “Leave It To Beaver” portrayal of housewives, and closer to Betty Friedan’s portrayal of women of her age and class as highly educated and bored. (I don’t think the similar names are a coincidence.) In fact, I would argue that the dark joke of the show is that Don keeps cheating on Betty with intelligent, sophisticated women, and he doesn’t realize that Betty would be the kind of woman he finds exciting if he didn’t oppress her and make her feel small all the time. Let’s look at the evidence: