Betty, Joan, Peggy.

The women of Mad Men still haunt us, intrigue us, infuriate us—and mirror us. Even now, a decade later.

While The Sopranos gave us gangsters and Game of Thrones gave us dragons, Mad Men gave us something far more dangerous: Women who dared to want more. They worked in offices, not war zones—but their battles were just as brutal.

They were complex—flawed, rebellious, submissive. Real. They reminded us of our mothers, many of whom came of age in the decade the show covered, from 1960-1970. More importantly, they reminded us of ourselves.

While women have made strides in the workplace—and society—since then, as they say in advertising, “Some things never change.”

Why the Women of Mad Men Still Hit a Nerve

We all know these women. At times, we’ve been them ourselves.

Betty (January Jones), the first wife of the show’s anti-hero, Don Draper, was a gorgeous blonde ice princess with Grace Kelly poise. Her husband was her whole world, and when she could no longer deny his chronic infidelities, it was like a grenade had been tossed into her picture-perfect home.

When Betty reached her breaking point and lashed out at Don over his cheating—“I’m just telling you I know”—it was a rare moment of total honesty for a woman whose life was built around appearances.

Viewers often saw a shallow woman whose only currency was her looks. And a cold mom—few could forget that touchstone moment when her young daughter put a dry cleaning bag over her head and Betty yelled at her, not for doing something dangerous, but for leaving her dress on the floor.

But while it’s easy to criticize Betty for her vanity, anyone who has ever known the pain of a cheating spouse could relate on a deeply emotional level. When she lost her dream marriage, she lost the essence of who she was. Watching Betty struggling, paralyzed, unable even to change out of her party dress after she confronts Don—feels eerily familiar. It’s every woman after her first big heartbreak. We’ve comforted friends who have gone through this, and we’ve been comforted ourselves.

Joan Holloway: When Beauty Costs You Power

We’ve all known a Joan (Christina Hendricks)—the super-sexy, smart office manager at Don’s ad agency—and envied her. Her smoldering bombshell looks ensure she’ll never lack for male attention—“My mother raised me to be admired,” she says in one episode—but it also means she’ll never be taken seriously, as a potential wife or as a real asset to the firm.

After her marriage to a vain, incompetent doctor falls apart, she finds herself alone and relying on the very mother who drives her crazy to help raise her son. When she tries a go-for-broke gambit to secure a partnership stake at the ad agency—sleeping with a vile client—it’s a pyrrhic victory. She played the game, gave in, and still lost.

Like Joan, many of us still have to choose between being admired and being respected. We’ve been blamed for our sexuality while simultaneously still expected to trade our bodies for access, and this discomfort plays out on the screen as beauty and brains collide in a world that’s all too familiar.

Peggy Olson and the Loneliness of Success

Young, eager, and more independent than either Betty or Joan, Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) isn’t afraid to compete professionally with the men, at times at the price of her personal life. Her ambition and her ideas often propelled Don and the agency forward.

The rule-follower who tried to have it all, one pitch at a time, led to her meteoric rise through the ranks, sure. But was the solitude worth the seat at the table? Single throughout the series, Peggy portrays every woman who trades cocktails for conference rooms, who looks for validation from coworkers in a way that’s lacking in their personal life, and who is still quietly doing the heavy lift for men—for less credit.

The Modern Woman’s Dilemma: You Can Do It All—But Should You?

Watching these women, you realize that today, we’re only supposed to yearn for workplace success. These days, we’re told success is simple. Ditch the man, do it all. But the tradeoffs? We’re not supposed to talk about those. If the guy gives you trouble, dump him; have kids on your own, raise them on your own—it’s all supposed to be simple. But it’s not—as I found out with my own mom.

A single mother, she was a secretary and a legendarily fast typist in the early ‘60s in Manhattan, who became a successful editor by the end of the decade. But all she ever said to me about work was to brush up on my typing speed. If I felt slighted by not being invited to a meeting with an important visitor to the office or if I expressed frustration at having to rush home to take care of my child, she shrugged it off.

But when we watched Mad Men together, after she was long retired, she began talking to me in a different way than she ever had before.

She was expected to be a Betty. She had her Joan moments too, juggling me and her job. And like Peggy, her closest bonds came from work. It was these relationships that were the most nurturing for her. She cared intensely about her work, often bringing it home with her.

What Mad Men Opened Up Between Me and My Mother

What really changed between us as we watched the show’s finale was that she told me about her struggles. About keeping away from a boss who sexually harassed her friends, about women disappearing to give birth or having dangerous, illegal abortions. About feeling pain when she wasn’t invited to meet important people. And about her pride at being good at her job, which was especially hard for her to own.

I’ve since learned I’m not alone. Mad Men sparked conversations between mothers and daughters that had long been off limits. The show didn’t just reflect our mothers’ generation—it helped us see our own lives in sharper focus. It gave language to struggles we hadn’t always been able to name. That’s why we still talk about them. We love them. We love to hate them. Because they weren’t just characters on a screen. They were us, in pencil skirts and pearls. They still are.

A Show About the Past That Still Reflects Our Present

Mad Men never hit harder than when it reflected something we’d felt but never said out loud. In one of its most unforgettable scenes, Don gives a pitch for the Kodak carousel, a device that lets users project one slide after another. “This device isn’t a spaceship,” he says. “It’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards … it takes us to a place where we ache to go again.”

We don’t long for the sexism—but we deserve the honesty.