Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the '60s and Beyond

Summary

Mad Women is a tell-all account of life in the New York advertising world of the 1960s and '70s from Jane Maas, a female copywriter who succeeded in the primarily male environment portrayed by the hit TV show Mad Men.

Fans of the show are dying to know how accurate it is: did people really have that much sex in the office? Were there really three-martini lunches? Were women really second-class citizens? Jane Maas says the answer to all three questions is unequivocally yes. And her book, based on her own experiences and countless interviews with her peers, gives the full stories, from the junior account man whose wife nearly left him when she found the copy of Screw magazine he'd used to find "entertainment" for a client, to the Ogilvy & Mather agency's legendary annual sex-and-booze-filled Boat Ride, from which it was said no virgin ever returned intact. Wickedly funny and full of juicy inside information, Mad Women also tackles the tougher issues of the era, such as equal pay, rampant jaw-dropping sexism, and the difficult choice many women faced between motherhood and their careers.