Mad World

Like Karol, I'm a big fan of the show Mad Men. I love the dialogue, the sets, the characters, the smoking, and the sex. Besides being an incredibly well written and meticulously executed show, it holds the distinction of being a guilty pleasure for those who typical chastise others for smoking in public or applaud Bloomberg's ban of trans-fats in New York City's restaurants. Never mind that second hand smoke has never been conclusively proven to be harmful or that adults have the capacity to decide what they should or shouldn't eat without the government getting involved. I think one of the draws of the show is that we live in a society where we have a lot of guilt about our bad behaviors, we are keenly aware how our behaviors shorten our live spans and cause harm to others, heck some people would argue that food is the new sex when it comes our morals.

Mad Men lets us escape our modern world of talking heads on television telling us how to eat, drink, or breath. One of the things I love about the show is that although the period is researched to a fault, the characters are incredibly accessible and human, they are never caricatures of what they should be. Betty the quintessentially fifties housewife is incredibly powerful character in her own right, even if she does not work and "just" stays home with the kids.
So I was surprised to see a British author taking on the "challenge" of being a fifties housewife, and actually having something positive to say about the experience.

On Wednesday, while carrying out my chores, the man at the drycleaners commented on how nice I looked in a somewhat surprised tone of voice.

'Where are you off to?' he asked. I wasn't going anywhere. It was because I'd bothered to put some make-up on.

I work from home, and it's all too easy to adopt the woman-in-a-shellsuit look when I'm at home, but his comments gave me a boost.

One of the things this exercise showed me is that even if one doesn't want to spend all one's time cooking and cleaning, there are principles worth adhering to - like making sure you look well turned-out, eat healthily and are considerate to others.

Looking at the recipes in my mother's Fifties cookbooks, I was struck not only by the blandness of most of the recipes, but also by the modesty of the portions. It makes me realise that in addition to owning too much stuff, we also eat far too much.

One thing I think Ms.Lichenstein does wrong is that she takes her cues from rules found in "how to be a good wife", from a home economics high school textbook published in 1954. The rules enumerate highly idealistic conduct, that I don't think were actually strictly adhered to at the time. Maybe I am naive, but a generation that produced the Beat movement and who had just experienced WWII the quoted rules seem more like idealized goals than a description of how most women behaved at the time. I mean I don't look at magazines like Cosmopolitan as a real reflection of how I live my life.

I don't understand why the values of the fifties, seem to many, at odds with modern ideas of what is a good life. What the show has shown, in the very least, is the ideas we have of the fifties or at least pre-hippie America is not what the 1954 textbook described. I guess this is a long way of saying, watch the show you won't regret it and that maybe a more conservative way of life - is not so horrible after all.