Let’s do another give away!

This time we’re offering a selection from the Personal Library of Betty Draper. Send in the receipt for your Mad Men Unbuttoned order and you’ll get a complimentary copy of Mary McCarthy’s The Group.

It’s all about the restlessness and dissatisfaction in the post-college lives of young bright women in the starting in the 1930’s. It’s the proper blend of insight and satire about ladies trying to find hapiness outside of the roles of wife/mother. There’s also a lesbian! 

A big best seller in 1963, required reading.

Favorite passage # 1

Things had never stood still long enough for her to decide. It sometimes struck her that Harold would not let her be sure of him for fear of losing his attraction: it was a lesson he had learned in some handbook, the way he had learned about those multiplication tables. But Kay could have told him that he would have been far more attractive to her if she could have trusted him.

Favorite passage # 2

But so far nursing, like most of sex, was an ordeal she had to steel herself for each time it happened by using all her will-power and thinking about love and self-sacrifice. The nurse was watching her now, to make sure that the baby was drawing at the nipple properly. ‘Relax, Mrs. Crockett,’ she said kindly. ‘Baby can sense it if you’re tense.’ Priss sighed and tried to let go. But naturally the more she concentrated on relaxing, the more tense she got. ‘Bless braces, damn relaxes,’ she joked feebly. ‘You’re tired this evening,’ said the nurse. Priss nodded, feeling grateful that someone knew and disloyal, at the same time, to Sloan, who did not know that it wore her out to have company, especially mixed company that sat there discussing her milk.

*Image above done by the magnificent Dyna Moe