Mad Women of Advertising

The television show Mad Men focuses on the men of advertising during the Creative Revolution of the '60s, but women had been a part of the advertising scene from the late 1800s on.

In 1880, Mathilde C. Weil opened the M.C. Weil Agency. Helen Lansdowne was already an experienced copywriter when she took on the Woodbury Facial Soap account in 1910 for the J. Walter Thompson agency. By the 1960s, women were already experience copywriters and help positions in many agencies because they were natural copywriters; they had an innate knowledge of how to sell to other women.

At the same time that women were succeeding as copywriters, they were being denied other, more prestigious positions because women were not seen to be fit for positions of importance or power. Advertising maven Bernice Fitz-Gibbons summed it up best in The New York Times in 1956 when he said:

"Now, let's get this clear. Women have always worked. And the men have always approved. And the harder and grubbier and dirtier the work, and the longer the hours, and the lower the pay, and the grimier the environment - the more warmly and heartily have the men approved. It is only since some of the girls began to climb ... into the Chanel and Dior suits and onto the five-figure payroll and into the corner office with the broadloomed floor that the boys have gone in for headshakings and mutterings and hues and cries and anguished plaints ... about women's place being in the home."

Source: http://www.care2.com/causes/mad-women-a-history-of-women-in-advertising.html