Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the 1960s and Beyond

A wickedly frank, funny and fascinating account of life in the New York advertising world in the 1960s portrayed in the hit TV show Mad Men by a real-life Peggy Olsen.
Mad Men is one of the hottest shows on television, and its fans 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 those of her peers, gives the full stories behind the scenes, 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. Maas’s crisp and funny prose shows what made her an award-winning copywriter. Absolutely unputdownable. ‘In the Mad Men tV show, the males are depicted as shtupping their secretaries as they drink and smoke themselves to death, with nary a female copywriter in sight. In this damn funny book, the talented Jane Maas, who lived through those days of struggle and sometimes humiliation, tells it like it really was.’ George Lois, legendary NY ad man