I listened to the audiobook and it was really good. The reader had a very silky voice that could put you to sleep. It was interesting to hear the woman's perspective of the Mad Men Show and how it was in advertising in the 60's. We've really come a long way over the last 50 years. ( )

This book caught my eye because 1)my husband and I are huge Mad Men fans and 2)my husband is a creative partner at an advertising agency and I like learning more about the industry in which he works. I constantly pause Mad Men while we’re watching and ask him incredulously, “Did stuff like that really happen back then??” Ninety-nine percent of the time, his answer is yes. I was really interested to read a book from a woman’s point of view of the era and industry.

Jane Maas has some great stories. She writes in a very conversational style, almost stream of consciousness at times. One memory will remind her of another memory. At times, this works well and at times it makes the transitions and flow awkward. She is not afraid to drop names which is awesome – I don’t necessarily respect discretion in a memoir – I want specifics and dirt!

Jane was a high ranking advertising executive with a fairly progressive husband and a full-time live-in housekeeper/nanny to help her raise her two daughters. Therefore, her life was quite different from a secretary’s life during this era. Naturally this book is focused on what life was like for her and the handful of female executives like her. There is a little information on what it was like for the girls in the typing pool but not much.

Jane mentions the TV show Mad Men a few times, usually to point out an inaccuracy, which I appreciated. This book was published after the fourth season so only examples from the first four seasons are used.

This was a very quick read as it’s only a little over 200 pages long with fairly large font. Reading it was an enjoyable way to spend a Sunday afternoon and I liked learning more about the world of 1960s advertising. ( )

really interesting. good narrator ( )

For fans of the AMC television series, “Mad Men,” (It is said elsewhere of the show that it is about: “the conflicting desires of men and those who suffer because of them” —a paraphrase) Jane Maas’s memoir of working in the advertising biz in NYC during that time is more than a little interesting. She deliberately gives us the woman’s point of view of the 1960s advertising culture as presented by the show. Generally, I think she confirms that the show gets most things right, but cautions that not every agency behaved the same. She writes with wit and honesty (she notes that most memoirs of advertising done in the past have been efforts on the authors’ parts to advertise themselves and their companies), and begins her story with her college years at Smith and then Bucknell (she is great pals with Philip Roth – they did drama together and have been lifelong friends), explaining the culture that someone like the show’s Betty Draper came out of. She began in advertising as a copywriter in 1964 and rose to become the creative director and agency officer (Don Draper’s position). Eventually she would become president of another agency.

Maas, through her own experiences and those of others women she has talked with, discusses sex in the office, the three-martini lunch and other vices, the creative revolution, money, and being a working mother during those years…etc One of my favorite chapters—“Get the Money Before They Screw You”—discusses the treatment of women in the workplace, the lack of respect, the disparate salaries (women were considered a ‘bargain’ to hire, even into the feminist era), and the fact that women weren’t even taken seriously as consumers.

“Ask any woman who worked at an advertising agency in the Mad Men era. Of course we didn’t make the same salary as a man with the same title, even if we knew we were doing a better job. We didn’t even have equal space—the guys got offices with windows; we got cubicles. The problem was we simply submitted to the situation. Women’s lib had not yet flowered, and our consciousness had definitely not be raised.”

Mad Women is a quick, enjoyable read, written for perhaps the generations younger than I am, those who have no experience with the 60s. Readers from other countries may find the discussions of various American ads from the era a bit difficult to slog through, but I’m sure most of these ads can be found on the internet or YouTube these days. (I admit to reminding myself of an old Maxim coffee commercial starring actress Patricia Neal by watching one on YouTube, after Maas told how difficult her husband, children’s author Roald Dahl was to work with (to put that politely). According to Maas’s recollections, I think we fans of the show should expect all the creative departments to be regularly smoking dope by the 1970s (which doesn’t surprise some of us at all…) and, if the show continues long enough, there's going to be a revolution, hey, hey....(I'm singing this part...) ( )