What an emotionally fraught and ambiguous place they hold in American life! Once the Victorian live-in maid was replaced by the once-a-week cleaning girl of the 1950’s things got even more complicated.

Consider Carla’s role in the Draper household.

Betty never refers to her as a nanny — but as a housekeeper. Not that Betty carries any maternal burden about it, after all, she was raised with a live-in nanny and turned out just fine. She’s just being historically accurate about the role of The Help. Betty, as was common, had no consternation about what bond or influnce Carla was building with the children. Even though Carla just came by in the afternoons, it was she who stepped in multiple times to serve surrogate mother to Sally and Bobby when Betty was striken with (rightly filled) parania and melancholy about Don.

It is Carla who enables Betty is able to 6 ‘divorcation’ in Reno. “To make an omelette you need not only broken eggs ” Joan Didion wrote in her essay on the Women’s Movement, “but someone ‘oppressed’ to break them.” Though she may be one of the unintentional forbearers of the Woman’s movement, it would have been impossible for a woman like Betty leap into emancipation if she didn’t have Carla’s back to do it off of.

The nanny-mommy relationship would grow increasingly tense as black women, after centuries of servitude, were leaving domestic work en masse during the late Sixties.

Luckily for Betty —and Henry Francis— that’s still years away.

October 24, 2009

“Still, [her friends] could tell that Kay was not as sure of him as she pretended she was; sometimes he did not write for weeks, while poor Kay went on whistling in the dark.”

• footnote - by Natasha Simons

October 20, 2009

Rome and Los Angeles, together at last:

The lobby of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center downtown stood in for the Rome Hilton.

Swoon.

9:48pm | 20 notes | Betty

“A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.” - Mary McCarthy, author of ‘The Group’. From her essay ‘Up the Ladder.”

Hmm.

So when is Betty going to read 1963’s The Bell Jar?

• footnote - by Natasha Simons

September 13, 2009

Wives matter! According to David Ogilvy:

“Never write an advertisement which you wouldn’t want your own family to read. You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife. Don’t tell them to mine.”

Betts does NOT like being lied to.

Additionally, says, Ogilvy:

“The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her.”

Not sure where Don falls on this belief. On the one hand, it’s obvious that he thinks of Betty as an ideal female consumer (like with the Heineken fiasco) but maybe, for Don, it’s more about ‘lies well disguised’? As in, “try not to lie to your wife but if do, at least do it well. Here, buy some diet cola.”

Thanks to Mark Malazarte for the quotes.

1:04pm | 14 notes | Advertising | David Ogilvy | Betty

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