Mad Men: THE SUMMER MAN – How A Woman Navigates Power
Often, watching Mad Men, I’m startled by how 1960s New York sounds like Mumbai in 2013. Because it’s a workplace drama, that contrast throws up how a woman is treated as an outsider. The Summer Man made me think of how different women navigate power equations at work.
The episode’s most dramatic scene is when Joey, a young freelancer harasses Joan Holloway Harris, the senior office manager. He tacks up a pornographic cartoon of her to her office window. He describes her to her face as “dressing like you want to be raped”.
There is so much going on here. Harassment is by the more powerful to the less powerful. It’s easy to assume that it’s only workplace harassment when a senior employee misbehaves towards a junior. But Joey’s gender offers a supreme kind of protection while Joan’s leaves her vulnerable, regardless of their designated workplace roles. The gender hierarchy supersedes official authority.
In a show like Mad Men, behavior like this gets attributed to the time frame and/or western culture. After calling the particular propagator a few names, it gets pegged as abnormal behavior. The trouble is, this is not abnormal behavior. It’s not specific to that time frame or that geography. It is only a slight exaggeration of how women get treated in the world of authority & power. This is the reality, here and now.
Joey’s words drip with ugly resentment as he informs the others in the room that,
“My mother was a Joan.”
The men who hated me, the professional
Rather memorably, on my first day at b-school, the professor (an M.Tech. from I.I.T.) strode up to me seated in the first row and said,
“Why are you here? Why aren’t you at home learning to make chapatis?”
The predominantly male class laughed and the professor made some loyal fans that day. For the rest of the term, the professor sidelined and mocked my questions, never answering them. He didn’t think he was required to do his job and teach me.
I got my back when I landed a special project. According to the professor “it involves a lot of maths so only engineers can handle it”. I was the only non-engineer and the only woman in the group. I spent two weeks being laboring on it, being ordered around by the rest of the team.
On the day before the presentation, I threw up my hands and declared that I was resigning. I had done the bulk of the work, including the mathematical analysis, charting and the PowerPoint. The team came down on its knees and begged me to return. I delivered the entire presentation the next day and got a good grade (for the entire group, of course).
This sadly, has not been a stray incident but the first of my many experience of gendered harassment at work. It started here where as a student, I was at the very lowest rung of power. The man at the top was so threatened by me that he sent a misogyny offensive in motion. Through the two years, my male peers picked up those scraps from him and hit me with their microaggressions.
One classmate blamed the proposed 35% reservations for women in parliament for men not getting jobs. The irony of a ‘management quota’ student like himself saying this to me, a merit student was lost on him. All that mattered to him was that a woman was in a place he believed was only for men. He would also angrily remark later that,
“When I get married, I will not allow my wife to work.”
Allow, I asked him, what makes you think that is your place to say? His reply was,
“I know what it feels like. My mother used to work and I don’t want my children going through that.”
I wondered what his father was doing in all of this but it wasn’t safe for me to speak up. But it’s pretty clear, isn’t it? Misogyny (including the first one in a man’s life) comes from the first man in his life.
It wasn’t any better when I actually went out into the working world. A candidate I interviewed kept his eyes firmly on my breasts through the interview. A junior flat out refused to take orders because he didn’t see any point listening to a woman. I’m surrounded by Joeys.
Shaming Joan for surviving
The generation of women just before mine were far & few in the workplace. The ones that were there fought hard to keep their territory as prime girl. Joan Harris/Holloway sometimes gets called a bully or a mean girl but I think that’s a really shallow reading. True, she is positioned a bit like that in the pilot. But the show was actually approved and released over a year later by which time the characterization had changed.
We only learn about Joan’s background in bits & pieces. Joan’s ways to navigate a brutally misogynist workplace have had to be adapted from her upbringing and situations she faced. The audience often echoes the men of the show in despising her for ‘using her sexuality’. I say, when men weaponize their gender so blatantly, why shouldn’t a woman? If a man is fool enough to be manipulated by a woman’s body, that speaks about his unprofessionalism, not hers.
Peggy Olsen, the new woman at work
Peggy Olsen is the quintessential path-breaker, the new woman. But she’s one specific kind of new woman. We see her story arc from the very beginning since the pilot opens on her first day at work. I see my own professional journey charted in hers.
What interested me about The Summer Man was what Peggy Olsen does. Peggy is new to power and this episode indeed is one of the many milestones in relationship with authority. It occurs to me that Peggy learns the techniques of her job from men (mostly Don Draper). But she learns her most important lessons in doing that job as a woman from other women.
In the early episodes, Joan gives her many tools from her own arsenal (who says she doesn’t help other women?). They seem dated and Peggy doesn’t use them because they don’t work for her. Peggy takes time to figure out other things that do. This includes a prized skill and an open-minded mentor – both matters of luck that not all women enjoy.
Bobbie Barrett offers the nugget of treating men as her equal so they will treat her as their equal. I wonder if Peggy realizes at this point, what a supreme gift Bobbie has given her. Bobbie does not seem the kind to throw around valuable things, especially wisdom and to other women.
Peggy vs Joan in the office girl stakes
In The Summer Man, Peggy is enjoying her newly achieved status as the top writer on Don’s team. This brings her camaraderie and acceptance from Joey & his cronies, which she enjoys. But she also resents Joey’s harassment of Joan. She tries warning him and when he doesn’t listen, she takes it up to Don Draper. Don advised her to not get him involved as it will make her look like a tattle-tale. He tells her to fire Joey, if she wants.
Peggy fires Joey and reports this to Joan, feeling proud and vindicated. Joan’s reply, as always, is surprising (if not cutting) but insightful. And I learnt a lesson that perhaps Peggy learns at the end of this episode too. In the war of the sexes, do you accept the advice of the enemy (even if that particular one is an ally)? Or should you follow the counsel of one of your own sex, who leads and proves their mettle?
In a problem created by a man for a woman, should the solution be a man’s or a woman’s? Joan like others of her generation, uses her gender attributes to navigate the power equations at work. These include sexuality, attention, polite contempt instead of outright aggression. Is that the best way or the right way?
With time, I’ve come to wonder whether Peggy’s way is quite the right way either. As the seasons of Mad Men progress, we also become aware of Peggy’s own privileges. She is abrasive and a workaholic. She gets to be so because of her race. The black women who join later do not have the freedom to do that, even if they feel those emotions. Peggy is extremely talented which opens even the most misogynist of doors for the value she brings to the table. Do unspecial women not deserve the same respect that mediocre men get?
When a woman is pulled up for being unprofessional, why does another woman who gets called a bitch for it? When a woman does her job and pulls up someone, there’s payback in ways a man would not face. If she’s pulling up a man, the system resists her (like my classmates did). If she pulls up another woman are told that ‘women are women’s worst enemy’. Pick-me girls rely on this because it’s “I don’t want another seat at the table; I want your seat.”. Unfortunately, who we are as women is not just defined by men but by other women too (often internalised misogynistic ones).
Workplace womanhood
Society is governed by rules created to pander to men. Our ideas of structure, security, authority and power come from men. So our behavior as leaders, as power wielders are learnt from those who wielded them before us – men. Ultimately it boils down to this: To be a powerful woman, you have to be a woman, not a man. And you can only learn to be a powerful woman, from a powerful woman, not a powerful man.
I would love to have a Joan Holloway in my life. Someone a little older, wiser who has fought the battles I fight, with more dignity and grace than I do. Sadly, I don’t have any real female role models. And it’s a doubly nerve-wracking realization that I may be just such a role model to younger women. I may have to relinquish dignity & grace – the choice Peggy makes.
This last snippet from Mad Men to show the richness of the Joan-Peggy relationship.
(This post was originally published on 31 May 2013. It has been edited and added to here.)
If you’re a fan, you might like to read my other Mad Men posts too.
