What About Betty?

As Mad Men moves into its fourth season, is Betty left behind?     

by Mary McKeown      

From episode 1, AMC’s Mad Men has been as much about sexism as it is about advertising and the 1960s. After all, where would you draw the line if you tried to separate them?     

January Jones plays Betty Draper on AMC's Mad Men (MCT Campus).

Front and center has been Grace Kelly clone Betty Draper. She’s the big reveal after we first learn about the brilliant, cruel ad man Don Draper and his bohemian girlfriend at the beginning of the series. In a seeming afterthought, we learn that Don is married – to a Barbie.     

In season one, we loved Betty for her desire for Don, for her loneliness, for her ability and willingness to shoot her neighbor’s pet pigeon out of the sky with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth. Don left her abandoned her at a kid’s birthday party with no cake. He had an affair with a hipster artist and plotted to run away with Miss Menken. Betty didn’t even know his real name. And she had no one to talk to but that weird boy from down the street.     

In season two, when Betty got angry and started taking it out on the kids, the help, and her friends, we worried for her. When she kicked Don out, we cheered. When she got revenge sex from a stranger in a coat closet, we averted our eyes. But we still loved her.     

In season three, the producers virtually stabbed her in the back. Her pregnant encounters with Henry were painfully romantic, but beyond that and her brief honeymoon with Don in Rome – a fun episode – Betty became nothing more than a sulky B. Even when Don had the school teacher stashed  in his car outside the house, Betty’s behavior was so unpalatable that we had no one to root for.     

There’s realism in the idea that a woman as stifled as Betty would lose all her joy, become generally angry and unsympathetic toward her children, behave in petty ways toward her friends and family. She has no profession and no hobbies – it hasn’t been expected of her. This message seems clear until her father comes to live with her, and we learn that all wasn’t as we supposed. She had not been trained by an overbearing father to simply serve a man. He had wanted an expected more of her, and he gives his grandfather the feminist encouragement that should have come to her from Betty. It was Betty, we learn, who narrowed her own horizons, and it’s Betty who is dismissive of her dying father because Alzheimer’s is a nuisance.     

Where did that come from? Not only did it seem to fall outside the generally feminist messages we see in the show, but it seemed unnecessarily to cast shallowness onto Betty, who originally seemed so layered.     

At the end of last season, Betty flew off to Reno, and now she exists for us only the person who tortures Don’s children and her new husband.     

Dear Producers: Please save Betty! She started out as all our mother’s and now she’s now she’s just a mean old hag. Don’t do that to our moms.