(WP) Mad Women

Here's a thoughtful reflection on the current nostalgia in popular culture for the bad old days of gender relations: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/magazine/watching-mad-men-with-my-mother.html?ref=magazine
An excerpt:

     "Mad Men" made my mother remember life in her 20s -- too clearly. When the show focused on Don Draper's wife, Betty, a repressed housewife in suburbia, my mom visibly cringed. "During Betty's scenes," she told me, "I felt this pain, right in my gut." She took a breath and explained that she loved her life and her marriage now, but when she watched Betty say she just wants to serve Don, it took her back to when she and my father were first married. "That's the way I thought. I lived to serve. I wanted to make him happy."
     It was odd to hear my mom compare her relationship to the Drapers'. My parents split the household duties, held jobs in teaching and systems administration and pursued their interests in meditation and aikido. What I was coming to understand, thought, was that my mother did not come into the world fully formed in 1981, when I was born, that there was a complicated and somehow painful life that predated me.