With that intro: no I never saw a single “New Look” get-up that I remember. Cliffies, and I’d be willing to bet Mawr-ites (or whatever their term of affection was), were anti-fashion unless they were in business school. It was a sign of stupidity to be worrying about that stuff.

(On the guys’ side that was echoed in a snooty attitude to football. It was only when I moved away from my Harvard neighborhood that I realized there really were people who not only admitted to being caught up in it, they gloried in it.)

I do remember a lot of beehive hairdos, and some shifts from the 1958-1962 era. Lots of narrow skirts on the secretaries and such that interfered with walking. (Materials science hadn’t invented some of the new elastic fabrics yet.) So it sounds to me like the TV writers got it wrong. Although if they’re trying to make it “believable” by fitting people’s preconceived notions, maybe they got it right.

Great story last night by TR about the Dunns!

Sorry to have been checked out of the discussion last night–but I was watching Desperate Housewives and Brothers and Sisters–two TV shows on a hopelessly uncool broadcast network, but they’re two shows in which women’s lives and stories are central. (Why am I tempted to apologize for watching such campy/soapy shows? Mad Men sure as heck feels like a soap opera to me, but that’s not the first term that comes to mind…) I don’t think there are too many more out there like DH and B&S–and isn’t it interesting that it’s Mad Men, Sopranos, The Wire, and Deadwood, etc., on cable or even premium cable networks that get all of the praise and critical attention?

Thanks for all of the historical info, TR–I never heard of fraternities at Bryn Mawr, and my guess is that they were 50 years ahead of even Betty Draper’s time, if they ever existed there, and were of the old-fashioned literary society kind, like the origins of male fraternities in the 19th C. (Helen Horowitz mentions their existence at Vassar, and says that Barnard had sororities and fraternities, but not Bryn Mawr.) My sense was that Betty’s clothes signaled that she was out-of-it, unlike her hip new divorced neighbor. Betty looks like one or both of the little Nixons, doesn’t she?

Thanks to all of you who have said that the show gets better, and gives up on Don. When is that guy going to go into rehab? The show so far reminds me of Goodfellas, towards the end when Henry Hill is trying to flush massive quantities of drugs down the toilet, destroy evidence of all of the bodies he’s helped bury, keep an eye on the Feds in helicopters above his house, and prepare a huge family dinner–”stir the sausage!” The lies and double-dealing are all about to fall in on him, right?

Still, although I’m very pleased that the wmoen get more focus these days, I’m often dissatisfied at the end of the current episodes (only 3 episodes left in this season!).

I’d argue that the show is *most* interesting when it focuses on the women (particularly Betty and Peggy). And yet, they’re still not as significant as they could be.

And these days, all the characters are locked in relentless cycles and I’m damn sick of the repetition with Don Draper. Although, maybe I should just be reassured that his character is so…steady.

Jackie had one miscarriage (prior to Caroline) and one premature birth, Patrick, who lived for a few days in the early spring of 1963 and then died.

Would Betty still have been sporting the new look in 1960? Perhaps: Pat Nixon certainly was. Remember that Betty is living in the old money Republican suburbs of New York, in Ossining. My mother — until she got pregnant again a matter of months after having delivered the Radical wore similar dresses quite regularly. I don’t remember this but I’ve seen the pictures. Once she had two children twenty months apart, however, it was all over in more ways than one. She also did not have Carla full time, as Betty Draper does.

Historiann, if you hang in there Peggy and Joan step up to the plate a little bit more. And you have to finish out season I for Peggy’s big turning point.

Betty Draper wouldn’t have been in a sorority at Bryn Mawr, but she might have been in a fraternity, a peculiarity of women’s colleges. What is stranger about the Bryn Mawr thing is that Betty met Don because she was a model. But I think what Weiner, the producer (a graduate of Zenith) is trying to tell us is that she is a smart woman who has been tamped down, first by Daddy and then by Don, and she is going to break loose in a big way. By season 3 we are beginning to see it, but it may. be. too. late.

In a final irrelevant connection, Mary Maples Dunn did receive her Ph.D. in 1959. More importantly, in 1958 she and Richard became the god parents of the newborn Tenured Radical, as Mary had lived with the Mother of the Radical (MOTheR)–also in graduate school at Bryn Mawr in English Lit. — between 1954 and 1957 in a house on Ardmore Avenue. In 1957 MOTheR left school to marry, and although she did not intend to be ABD, she became pregnant immediately, and it was left to the Radical to fulfill the family destiny.

Any other questions?