A number of things struck me watching "Meditations" on Sunday night.
First — especially since the murder of Dr. George Tiller on Sunday — the attitudes toward Betty's pregnancy.
Her doctor brushing off Betty's qualms by patronizingly assuming Betty was worried about her "figure."
Then, his assumption that ending the pregnancy would only an option for an unmarried young woman with no other options (although I wonder if most doctors in the early sixties would even have referred to abortion as an option for unmarried girls even that easily, considering the laws and practice of the period.)
But then again, Betty lives in a leafy, green upperclass suburb, where gossipy abortion information is available at the local hair salon, even if the actual abortions are only available hundreds of miles away illegally upstate, and flying to the Caribbean is proscribed that week by the threat of nuclear war.
Betty has already tried the old horseback riding option.
Last, the expression on Betty's face after she's told Don she's pregnant. He suddenly looks hopeful, optimistic — she's neither.
Watched nine times because 10 would feel excessive …
Does everyone else try to watch these promos and try to think what someone who's never seen the show would think? Is it compelling if you don't know the context of all those clips? If you don't know everything about those characters but just saw the commercial in a vacuum?
Not to be picky (alright, with every intention of being picky), but everything in the commercial is fantastic except the "I had your baby" line. It kinda makes everything seem soapy, more like "Desperate Housewives" or something. It sticks out because of the quality we know the show gives. Anyone agree?
I had a family member who was an ob/gyn during the baby boom (pre Roe v. Wade). He would direct anyone who asked him about abortions to his nurses. They had a little black book of safe places to get abortions.
Ah yes, and yet another anecdoate from the '60s about abortion, or the lack of same: my adult stepsister had a friend, and as the story went, that woman had a baby that died in the womb, but she was forced to carry the dead baby to term, and give birth to it.
Which was said to have affected her fertility adversely — lord knows, that couple was considered an anomaly, as childless in that time and place.
So a shout out to Dr. George Tiller, who was murdered for rescuing other women from just such a horror.
Here's a better quote for why Betty might be reluctant to end her pregnancy in the early '60s with a rumored "doctor in Albany":
Since abortionists provided an illegal service, anyone could enter the trade. The crackdown on abortion coupled with the growing demand inevitably attracted more people to this lucrative business that required no specific training. Some women found respectful and skilled abortionists, including both physicians and nonphysicians. Others went to untrained practitioners, including motorcycle mechanics, bartenders, and real-estate agents, who knew little more than that women needed abortions and that inducing them was profitable." http://www.escholarship.org/editions/view?docId=f…
WEE! John Slattery and Matt Weiner are having a Live Chat tomorrow at 4pm. Here's your chance to ask them LOTS of questions about the upcoming season. http://goldderby.latimes.com/awards_goldderby/200…
Funny that this came up again as I've just moved across county to a Hudson River town, so Ossining is only a few train stops away.
I'd think that back in those pre-sprawl days Ossining would have been considered really far north as well as not being upscale. As I'd mentioned, my grandparents moved to the White Plains area in 1951 and there were all of four houses on their block (both sides of the street) at the time, so that perfectly manicured single-family house suburbia where The Drapers live just doesn't say "1950s/early 60s Ossining" to me.
The river towns are known for Gilded Age country estates, and there are plenty of old multi-family or Victorian-style buildings from Route 9 to the river.
That's some interesting info, thanks guys. They might've been better off using Greenwich, CT…it seems like that still remains a place where the new york power people choose for their suburban homes
Believe me, it intrigues, no doubt. Not throwing it all overboard.
But if each line is a subtle signal about what to expect if you tune in, that one line (for me and maybe Deb) crosses over into the maudlin stuff you get in the “other” nighttime dramas.
Like I said, in trying to look at it through the eyes of a newcomer, that’s how it feels to me.
I dunno, Greenwich might have been too upscale for Don. Or at least too close-knit and old money. I don't think he could just waltz into that town with no family background or formal education and be socially accepted. Don needs some semblance of privacy to maintain his ruse.
Did anyone watch that show The Riches on FX? Don in Greenwich would be like the Eddie Izzard character having to fake his Ivy league education.
That doctor was taking his chances: there were actually more therapeudic abortions performed in the 1930s and ’40s than in the 1950s and ’60s (that is, abortions considered legal, for which doctors and hospitals were not prosecuted.)
For a variety of reasons, there had been a backlash and crackdown on hospitals and doctors doing approved abortions that began in the late 1940s, as well as stepped up arrests and prosecution of physicians who performed abortions after hours, or even those that acted as a conduit to an abortionist.
“There is . . . more difficulty in locating abortionists today than there used to be,” reported Dr. Alfred Kinsey, director of the Institute for Sex Research in Indiana. “The laws have made it more difficult . . . to find a physician who will perform it, and that has raised the cost of abortions.”[1]
“Abortions became harder to obtain, more expensive, and more dangerous as a result of the new repression as hospitals cut access to legal therapeutic abortion and the state shut down established clinics. Accounts of illegal abortions in the 1950s and 1960s feature a new level of secrecy. Blindfolding and taking women alone to unknown places for their abortions became the norm. What had been a fairly open practice became more clandestine as abortionists devised ways to avoid police detection.”
“With the new repression of abortion, a discretionary and discriminatory system developed in which class and racial privilege came to the forefront. Those few who received safe, legal, therapeutic abortions in hospitals were almost all white women with private health insurance. Yet almost every woman who looked for an abortion had a difficult time obtaining one, and many endured frightening and dangerous procedures. ”
Not surprisingly this resulting in a corresponding and sickening spike in the 1950s-’60s of women being admitted to hospitals with complications from illegal abortions and women who died as a result from illegal abortion.
And a new generation of abortionists who might claim to be doctors, but could have little medical training, or none.
One of the reasons for Betty to take Don back and continue with the pregnancy, was the likely possibility that in the early ’60s the rumored “doctor in Albany” would not be a physician, nurse or even midwife.
“Recent narratives of illegal abortions in this period confirm the covert character of the abortion underground. These oral histories and written accounts have been produced as a result of efforts to excavate and preserve women’s experiences of the era of illegal abortion. Many informants have told their stories in the hope that their personal histories will generate understanding among politicians and the public about the necessity of legal abortion. The accounts are individual, but patterns stand out and have helped draw a portrait of abortion during the decades immediately preceding Roe v. Wade .[15] ”
“When one woman met her connection in Baltimore, he blindfolded her and walked her up the stairs, down the halls, and down the stairs to thoroughly confuse her before taking her into a hotel room where the abortionist introduced a catheter. A woman who went to Tampa for an abortion in 1963 recalled being examined by the doctor, then being put in a van with several other women, the entire group blindfolded, and then driven to an unknown location where the abortions were performed. A nineteen-year-old from Madison, Wisconsin, went to Chicago where she “waited on a street corner, was picked up, blindfolded, and driven to a motel in a Cadillac.” She commented later, “I know the person who did the abortion was not a doctor. I went through with it because I was desperate.”[16]
“…A Milwaukee woman had an abortion without anesthesia and reported that “the ‘doctor’ smoked a cigar during the entire time.” One Chicago abortionist worked “in a dirty T shirt,” treated his patients in twenty minutes, “then pushed them out” of the hotel where he worked into a waiting limousine. Another abortionist reeked of alcohol and performed the abortion in the kitchen.”
When I was about 9 (1959) my babysitter got pregnant and was married off at 16, an all too common phenomena then.
A situation which hadn’t changed even by the mid ’60s, when two girls in my high school circle got pregnant at 14 and 16. Both A students in the College Prep program, not from religious backgrounds — both were forced out of high school and into teen marriages. Not the only 16 year old marriage in my high school those years.
A 14 year old Jewish friend spent a year exiled in Arizona with an aunt for “asthma” — I now believe sent off to a home for unwed mothers.
A home for unwed mothers was also founded in my town around that time, and troops of pregnant teenage girls marched to the mall from there.
The Religious Right hadn’t yet gotten on the bandwagon that approved teenage pregnancies, and if relatively safe abortions had been as easy to obtain as a referral from local nurses, I doubt there would have been quite as many pregnant teenage girls littering the landscape of my lower middle class suburb.
I never heard so much as a hint that abortion was a possibility for ending a pregnancy until 1969, when I was in college. And then it was the rumor of a supposed “doctor in Philadelphia” in the next state, who would charge $200 (the equivalent of $1,000, or more, today.)
Although, as a student abroad in 1970, I ran into a girl from an upper middle class background who casually related the story of her abortion/vacation in the Bahamas, arranged for by her boyfriend.
Not to be persnickety, but I think Mad Men may have erred a bit on how easily abortion was discussed as an option in 1962.
“Just to be persnickety, Ossining to Albany is about 130 miles.”
Has anyone been to Ossining? I wonder why they chose that city…is it still mainly upper class families who commute into the city for work? Or has it changed…just curious…
Ossining is just a few miles from me, JS, and a little further for Roberta. Basketcase Jackie also lives nearby. It simply isn't upscale and never has been. Matt's gotten lots of letters from Westchester County fans to that effect. One or two towns away, say, Briarcliff Manor or Tarrytown, or Dobbs Ferry, would have been a much better choice. This event was local to Ossining and many of the audience members were people who kinda booed the idea that the Drapers lived in Ossining.
Apropos of absolutely nothing, my midwives were in Ossining.
I believe Weiner chose Ossining because it has a train and a prison. It worked logistically (train) and metaphorically (prison) but not economically. He got it wrong.
I thought I read or heard Matt Weiner say that he chose Ossining because of of some writer contemporary to when the series takes place set a lot of his stories there. I cannot remember the author(s).
Thank you judibrowni for the information on post-Rosie the Riveter pre Roe v. Wade abortions. I am really sorry about your friend. I had heard about how that type of event would damage a woman's fertility and it is tragic that some people decide that they hate abortions so much that she would be refused to have the child removed in timely manner. What are they thinking? I also read some story about anti choicer not supporting adopting a new born, or maybe it was arranging to adopt an unborn child. It shocked me a little, and then I remembered how much of their rhetoric goes into the "you're already a mother" slogan at women with unplanned pregnancies.
Which leads back to Peggy in this promo. I cannot say "I had your baby" is a more soapy line than "Damn it Don! I know you're having an affair!" Yes, the promo does look like it is trying to draw in people put off by what they heard of slow pace and retro vibe. But really my only complaint is that we have no shots of the cast in their S3 garb.
If I offended anyone with my politics I know this is not really the place to discuss this so click on my name and you can write me something directly.
Don't forget that Don's maintaining two households, plus his Liberty Capital Private "Discretionary" Account for when he needs to pay off some long lost relative or disappear completely. The man's got expenses, so he can't live too large, you know?
I just finished watching season 2 of Mad Men last week, and a friend turned me onto this blog. I gotta say, I am very impressed by the writers and commenters on here. And I can't wait for the third season!
Finally, a new promo! I love AMC's promos so far, but as a trailer editor I feel like AMC could be reaching much further with MAD MEN as their flagship show.
Right now, anyone uninitiated searching MAD MEN merely turns up episodic clips and these brief :30 second television promos – none of the high end trailers the audience seek out which plants bums in seats and sells DVDs. Of 10 billion videos watched online annually (AP), trailers rank third behind news and user-generated content, yet MAD MEN barely gets a look in!
The media savvy, young male demographic especially is crying out for carefully branded, high quality entertainment such as MAD MEN. Our show might not be THE SOPRANOS of advertising, but if AMC reached more viewers through highly stylized trailers and promos they could garner the much bigger viewership MAD MEN clearly deserves.
[...] dressed as Don Draper, wearing a well-tailored suit and provocatively smoking a cigarette? Today we came across an online promo for Season 3, set to premiere in August. Check it out after the jump, and read on for the top five [...]
Can't wait!
I just love this show.
So far away. *sigh*
Oh just some little clips! Arggh I am so excited. I hope it is still on 'On Demand' this time.
YAAAAAAAAAAY!
Oh, I can't wait!
How many times will I watch this promo until the S2 DVD comes out?
SQUEEEEEEE!!! Times about a billion.
A number of things struck me watching "Meditations" on Sunday night.
First — especially since the murder of Dr. George Tiller on Sunday — the attitudes toward Betty's pregnancy.
Her doctor brushing off Betty's qualms by patronizingly assuming Betty was worried about her "figure."
Then, his assumption that ending the pregnancy would only an option for an unmarried young woman with no other options (although I wonder if most doctors in the early sixties would even have referred to abortion as an option for unmarried girls even that easily, considering the laws and practice of the period.)
But then again, Betty lives in a leafy, green upperclass suburb, where gossipy abortion information is available at the local hair salon, even if the actual abortions are only available hundreds of miles away illegally upstate, and flying to the Caribbean is proscribed that week by the threat of nuclear war.
Betty has already tried the old horseback riding option.
Last, the expression on Betty's face after she's told Don she's pregnant. He suddenly looks hopeful, optimistic — she's neither.
Just to be persnickety, Ossining to Albany is about 130 miles.
Watched nine times because 10 would feel excessive …
Does everyone else try to watch these promos and try to think what someone who's never seen the show would think? Is it compelling if you don't know the context of all those clips? If you don't know everything about those characters but just saw the commercial in a vacuum?
Not to be picky (alright, with every intention of being picky), but everything in the commercial is fantastic except the "I had your baby" line. It kinda makes everything seem soapy, more like "Desperate Housewives" or something. It sticks out because of the quality we know the show gives. Anyone agree?
I noticed the same thing, Coop. It makes me think they want it to be soapy; they want to attract audience who have heard the show is boring or slow.
In response to judybrowni 's question:
I had a family member who was an ob/gyn during the baby boom (pre Roe v. Wade). He would direct anyone who asked him about abortions to his nurses. They had a little black book of safe places to get abortions.
Coop, I think this will be very intriguing for people who have never seen the show.
But both of you, no, the Peggy moment didn't feel weak to me; it just felt like a dynamic shift.
"Move forward."
That last line in promo (voiced by Don Draper) felt like heartlessness in two words.
Ah yes, and yet another anecdoate from the '60s about abortion, or the lack of same: my adult stepsister had a friend, and as the story went, that woman had a baby that died in the womb, but she was forced to carry the dead baby to term, and give birth to it.
Which was said to have affected her fertility adversely — lord knows, that couple was considered an anomaly, as childless in that time and place.
So a shout out to Dr. George Tiller, who was murdered for rescuing other women from just such a horror.
Here's a better quote for why Betty might be reluctant to end her pregnancy in the early '60s with a rumored "doctor in Albany":
Since abortionists provided an illegal service, anyone could enter the trade. The crackdown on abortion coupled with the growing demand inevitably attracted more people to this lucrative business that required no specific training. Some women found respectful and skilled abortionists, including both physicians and nonphysicians. Others went to untrained practitioners, including motorcycle mechanics, bartenders, and real-estate agents, who knew little more than that women needed abortions and that inducing them was profitable."
http://www.escholarship.org/editions/view?docId=f…
WEE! John Slattery and Matt Weiner are having a Live Chat tomorrow at 4pm. Here's your chance to ask them LOTS of questions about the upcoming season.
http://goldderby.latimes.com/awards_goldderby/200…
(good thing I get off early at 3pm tomorrow
)
*that's 4pm PT and 7pm ET, so I guess I'd be able to catch it even if I didn't get off early…
**Sorry, I've had a weird day all day… the Chat with John and Matt is Thursday at 4pm PT and 7pm ET…
I wish there was a way to edit your comments.
Funny that this came up again as I've just moved across county to a Hudson River town, so Ossining is only a few train stops away.
I'd think that back in those pre-sprawl days Ossining would have been considered really far north as well as not being upscale. As I'd mentioned, my grandparents moved to the White Plains area in 1951 and there were all of four houses on their block (both sides of the street) at the time, so that perfectly manicured single-family house suburbia where The Drapers live just doesn't say "1950s/early 60s Ossining" to me.
The river towns are known for Gilded Age country estates, and there are plenty of old multi-family or Victorian-style buildings from Route 9 to the river.
That's some interesting info, thanks guys. They might've been better off using Greenwich, CT…it seems like that still remains a place where the new york power people choose for their suburban homes
New Rochelle, home of the fictional Petrie family (the Dick Van Dyke show), would have been perfect.
Believe me, it intrigues, no doubt. Not throwing it all overboard.
But if each line is a subtle signal about what to expect if you tune in, that one line (for me and maybe Deb) crosses over into the maudlin stuff you get in the “other” nighttime dramas.
Like I said, in trying to look at it through the eyes of a newcomer, that’s how it feels to me.
I dunno, Greenwich might have been too upscale for Don. Or at least too close-knit and old money. I don't think he could just waltz into that town with no family background or formal education and be socially accepted. Don needs some semblance of privacy to maintain his ruse.
Did anyone watch that show The Riches on FX? Don in Greenwich would be like the Eddie Izzard character having to fake his Ivy league education.
I could see Roger in Greenwich.
That doctor was taking his chances: there were actually more therapeudic abortions performed in the 1930s and ’40s than in the 1950s and ’60s (that is, abortions considered legal, for which doctors and hospitals were not prosecuted.)
For a variety of reasons, there had been a backlash and crackdown on hospitals and doctors doing approved abortions that began in the late 1940s, as well as stepped up arrests and prosecution of physicians who performed abortions after hours, or even those that acted as a conduit to an abortionist.
“There is . . . more difficulty in locating abortionists today than there used to be,” reported Dr. Alfred Kinsey, director of the Institute for Sex Research in Indiana. “The laws have made it more difficult . . . to find a physician who will perform it, and that has raised the cost of abortions.”[1]
“Abortions became harder to obtain, more expensive, and more dangerous as a result of the new repression as hospitals cut access to legal therapeutic abortion and the state shut down established clinics. Accounts of illegal abortions in the 1950s and 1960s feature a new level of secrecy. Blindfolding and taking women alone to unknown places for their abortions became the norm. What had been a fairly open practice became more clandestine as abortionists devised ways to avoid police detection.”
“With the new repression of abortion, a discretionary and discriminatory system developed in which class and racial privilege came to the forefront. Those few who received safe, legal, therapeutic abortions in hospitals were almost all white women with private health insurance. Yet almost every woman who looked for an abortion had a difficult time obtaining one, and many endured frightening and dangerous procedures. ”
From the online version of the book “When Abortion Was a Crime”:
http://www.escholarship.org/editions/view?docId=ft967nb5z5&chunk.id=d0e4190&toc.depth=1&toc.id=&brand=eschol
Not surprisingly this resulting in a corresponding and sickening spike in the 1950s-’60s of women being admitted to hospitals with complications from illegal abortions and women who died as a result from illegal abortion.
And a new generation of abortionists who might claim to be doctors, but could have little medical training, or none.
One of the reasons for Betty to take Don back and continue with the pregnancy, was the likely possibility that in the early ’60s the rumored “doctor in Albany” would not be a physician, nurse or even midwife.
“Recent narratives of illegal abortions in this period confirm the covert character of the abortion underground. These oral histories and written accounts have been produced as a result of efforts to excavate and preserve women’s experiences of the era of illegal abortion. Many informants have told their stories in the hope that their personal histories will generate understanding among politicians and the public about the necessity of legal abortion. The accounts are individual, but patterns stand out and have helped draw a portrait of abortion during the decades immediately preceding Roe v. Wade .[15] ”
“When one woman met her connection in Baltimore, he blindfolded her and walked her up the stairs, down the halls, and down the stairs to thoroughly confuse her before taking her into a hotel room where the abortionist introduced a catheter. A woman who went to Tampa for an abortion in 1963 recalled being examined by the doctor, then being put in a van with several other women, the entire group blindfolded, and then driven to an unknown location where the abortions were performed. A nineteen-year-old from Madison, Wisconsin, went to Chicago where she “waited on a street corner, was picked up, blindfolded, and driven to a motel in a Cadillac.” She commented later, “I know the person who did the abortion was not a doctor. I went through with it because I was desperate.”[16]
“…A Milwaukee woman had an abortion without anesthesia and reported that “the ‘doctor’ smoked a cigar during the entire time.” One Chicago abortionist worked “in a dirty T shirt,” treated his patients in twenty minutes, “then pushed them out” of the hotel where he worked into a waiting limousine. Another abortionist reeked of alcohol and performed the abortion in the kitchen.”
When I was about 9 (1959) my babysitter got pregnant and was married off at 16, an all too common phenomena then.
A situation which hadn’t changed even by the mid ’60s, when two girls in my high school circle got pregnant at 14 and 16. Both A students in the College Prep program, not from religious backgrounds — both were forced out of high school and into teen marriages. Not the only 16 year old marriage in my high school those years.
A 14 year old Jewish friend spent a year exiled in Arizona with an aunt for “asthma” — I now believe sent off to a home for unwed mothers.
A home for unwed mothers was also founded in my town around that time, and troops of pregnant teenage girls marched to the mall from there.
The Religious Right hadn’t yet gotten on the bandwagon that approved teenage pregnancies, and if relatively safe abortions had been as easy to obtain as a referral from local nurses, I doubt there would have been quite as many pregnant teenage girls littering the landscape of my lower middle class suburb.
I never heard so much as a hint that abortion was a possibility for ending a pregnancy until 1969, when I was in college. And then it was the rumor of a supposed “doctor in Philadelphia” in the next state, who would charge $200 (the equivalent of $1,000, or more, today.)
Although, as a student abroad in 1970, I ran into a girl from an upper middle class background who casually related the story of her abortion/vacation in the Bahamas, arranged for by her boyfriend.
Not to be persnickety, but I think Mad Men may have erred a bit on how easily abortion was discussed as an option in 1962.
“Just to be persnickety, Ossining to Albany is about 130 miles.”
Has anyone been to Ossining? I wonder why they chose that city…is it still mainly upper class families who commute into the city for work? Or has it changed…just curious…
Ossining is just a few miles from me, JS, and a little further for Roberta. Basketcase Jackie also lives nearby. It simply isn't upscale and never has been. Matt's gotten lots of letters from Westchester County fans to that effect. One or two towns away, say, Briarcliff Manor or Tarrytown, or Dobbs Ferry, would have been a much better choice. This event was local to Ossining and many of the audience members were people who kinda booed the idea that the Drapers lived in Ossining.
Apropos of absolutely nothing, my midwives were in Ossining.
I believe Weiner chose Ossining because it has a train and a prison. It worked logistically (train) and metaphorically (prison) but not economically. He got it wrong.
I thought I read or heard Matt Weiner say that he chose Ossining because of of some writer contemporary to when the series takes place set a lot of his stories there. I cannot remember the author(s).
Thank you judibrowni for the information on post-Rosie the Riveter pre Roe v. Wade abortions. I am really sorry about your friend. I had heard about how that type of event would damage a woman's fertility and it is tragic that some people decide that they hate abortions so much that she would be refused to have the child removed in timely manner. What are they thinking? I also read some story about anti choicer not supporting adopting a new born, or maybe it was arranging to adopt an unborn child. It shocked me a little, and then I remembered how much of their rhetoric goes into the "you're already a mother" slogan at women with unplanned pregnancies.
Which leads back to Peggy in this promo. I cannot say "I had your baby" is a more soapy line than "Damn it Don! I know you're having an affair!" Yes, the promo does look like it is trying to draw in people put off by what they heard of slow pace and retro vibe. But really my only complaint is that we have no shots of the cast in their S3 garb.
If I offended anyone with my politics I know this is not really the place to discuss this so click on my name and you can write me something directly.
Don't forget that Don's maintaining two households, plus his Liberty Capital Private "Discretionary" Account for when he needs to pay off some long lost relative or disappear completely. The man's got expenses, so he can't live too large, you know?
I just finished watching season 2 of Mad Men last week, and a friend turned me onto this blog. I gotta say, I am very impressed by the writers and commenters on here. And I can't wait for the third season!
Welcome, Erica.
Finally, a new promo! I love AMC's promos so far, but as a trailer editor I feel like AMC could be reaching much further with MAD MEN as their flagship show.
Right now, anyone uninitiated searching MAD MEN merely turns up episodic clips and these brief :30 second television promos – none of the high end trailers the audience seek out which plants bums in seats and sells DVDs. Of 10 billion videos watched online annually (AP), trailers rank third behind news and user-generated content, yet MAD MEN barely gets a look in!
The media savvy, young male demographic especially is crying out for carefully branded, high quality entertainment such as MAD MEN. Our show might not be THE SOPRANOS of advertising, but if AMC reached more viewers through highly stylized trailers and promos they could garner the much bigger viewership MAD MEN clearly deserves.
Lyle, are you the same guy from the TWOP forums who made those nice high quality trailers for Mad Men?
S. Tarzan: Yes! I am lurking everywhere
[...] dressed as Don Draper, wearing a well-tailored suit and provocatively smoking a cigarette? Today we came across an online promo for Season 3, set to premiere in August. Check it out after the jump, and read on for the top five [...]