Peggy Olson is depicted as the sole female copywriter to wander the halls of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce in Mad Men's depiction of advertising in the Sixties, but women had actually been working in the industry for decades.
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Early examples include Mathilde C. Weil, who opened the M.C. Weil Agency in 1880, and Helen Lansdowne Resor, who was hired by JWT in 1907 and created an all-female editorial board.
JWT (then J. Walter Thompson) published a booklet in 1963 titled "Advertising: A Career For Women," to lure college women to Madison Avenue—and not just for its secretarial pool.
While JWT's recruitment book was certainly progressive, it also reflected some of the stereotypes of the era—particularly when compared to JWT's other booklet, "Advertising: A Career For Exceptional Men."
JWT kindly agreed to let us excerpt both booklets, and gave us access to its photo archive. The images and the text form a stunning historic record of the real women of the Mad Men era.
Each slide in the following gallery features a female JWT employee from the era, with text from the booklets used to recruit them underneath the image.
(Tomorrow, read our interview with JWT's longest continuously employed female staffer—she started at the agency in 1951 and hasn't yet retired.)
The booklets begin with an explanation of what advertising is, with one notable difference ... (see below).
In the male-oriented booklet, the text reads: "There are probably as many forms of advertising—and as many facets to it—as there are leaves on a tree."
For women, there are as many different kinds of advertising "as there are soap flakes in a box."
Women often worked on soaps and other lady-friendly accounts.
The leaflets gave different reasons why advertising is an interesting career ...
For men, JWT explains that it works with "more than 100 corporations whose products range from toothbrushes to giant jet airplanes ... You might find yourself working on a problem related to the soap business at one time, cameras at another, and automobiles the week after that."
Women, however, were not promised that diversity in such detail but rather fed the blanket phrase that they would deal with "all kinds of people and an infinite variety of businesses."
It was far less likely that a woman would go on to pitch to auto and other "male-oriented" companies. Jane Maas, who worked at Ogilvy & Mather in the 1960's, told Business Insider, "working on the American Express account took longer than my becoming a Vice President [at Ogilvy] in 1970."
The women's recruitment guide had a special section dedicated to opportunities specifically for women ....
It begins with the pitch: "Advertising is a particularly promising field for women because so much advertising is directed to women and so many products are purchased by women. At J. Walter Thompson, women work in all departments and in all phases of advertising. Included among the many women holding highly responsible managerial and executive positions are two Assistant Treasurers, ten Vice Presidents and a member of the Board of Directors."
Pretty impressive for 1963.
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