10 most feminist moments in Mad Men’s 1960s sea of misogyny

“Farewell to Mad Men” still, image via AMC

Peggy finds her love and work balance

At the end of the series, we get a huge payoff with Peggy. Even though she’s had to bounce from agency to agency and work her way back up ladders all the while, she ends up at McCann Erickson with Stan Rizzo, an illustrator that she first worked with at SCDP. Throughout the series they maintained a bizarre friendship, and every once in a while finding each other in the midst of their own personal chaos. Ironically they both end up at the same agency, and they both end up in love with each other.

There’s a lot of charm to this union. They’ve both worked on creating ad campaigns together and, even though others have found them individually difficult to work with (Peggy becomes more shrewd as the series progresses), they always maintained a weird sense of harmony in work and on a personal level. At the beginning of their work partnership, Don had them locked in a hotel room to work out a campaign for Vicks. He writes Peggy off, saying she has body shame, to which she challenges him to strip down to nothing and bear all. She does it effortlessly, and her chutzpah clearly blows away Stan.

This is such a nice way for the story to end with Peggy because, even though all the women of the show experience a significant amount of strife throughout, Peggy seems to have the most raw deal. She manages to work her way up the ranks, but the sacrifice is a personal one, as people begin to regard her as cold and shrill. To me, she’s a lot like a certain female presidential candidate from last year (cough cough), who was unable to garner certain voters’ affections because she doesn’t appear vulnerable, like women “should” by societal standards. To see Peggy find love is very satisfying, not because she needed it, but because we wanted it for her.

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There you have it, the 10 most feminist moments of Mad Men. Could you believe there were any at all? Even though those moments were sometimes few and far-between, they were immensely profound when they did happen, and lent to a greater conversation about the evolution of feminism in America. And if you miss Mad Men a bunch after reading this, all seven seasons are available to stream on Netflix.