I don't understand why people hate on Betty so much. I actually like her as a character. Betty married Don because she loved him. What so many viewers overlook is that Betty is a beautiful, blonde trophy, who is educated, refined, from a wealthy family and worldly. She could have had any man she wanted. She chose Don despite the fact that the Don she met and married didn't have ANY of those things. She admits in confronting him that she knew he was poor. He worked at a furrier as a copyrighter when they met. Let's be honest, he probably didn't have much money then. Betty didn't marry him as a meal ticket. She could have married a much better one if that's what she was looking for. Even if they got divorced today, Betty could STILL trade up. The thing about Betty is that she is as adventurous a young woman as a lady in her circumstances could be given her background and the times. She modeled in New York despite her mother's rebuffs. She lived in Italy; she got her complete education. She's doing the best she can with her '50s upbringing. She wanted adventure and an interesting life. Yet, despite all her efforts (which includes marrying a below her family's standards - we know how fond Gene was of Don) she's still a bored housewife. That's got to be terribly disappointing. I think everybody's selling her short. She's not just some whiny character, she is VERY multidimensional and conflicted. The thing about Betty is that she doesn't know what to do. I think she has feelings of disappointment that she never expected, and wasn't warned about. True, she's FAR from perfect, but she IS trying. She's developed quite a bit in the last 3 seasons. I'm still rooting for her. :)

but it's only her predicment that's interesting - she's as much of a bore as Carla is.

I didn't think she was boring when she was sitting in the cafe in Rome. Her Italian was certainly passable, she's educated and a knockout. It's amazing what being a housewife can do to a person...dulls all the senses after awhile...

I don't think Don found her boring at that time, either.

I don't see Betty taking any responsibility for her own experience. She keeps looking at men to complete her. Having said that, I acknowledge that women in 1963 looked for men to complete them, esp. women with college degrees and some money. I don't think Betty's family (Gene, her mom, her brother) are high society: I think Grandpa Gene was a non-college educated Marine Corps veteran who made money. That is hardly high society. Money is not the same thing as class. Gene, prodded, I suspect by Betty's mom, did his best to deliver Betty up a notch or two on the social ladder . .

I don't really think Gene was all that wealthy, either, because William, who now runs Gene's business, does not seem to make lots of money. William says, in the scene with the estate lawyer, that Gene might as well have given the house to Betts because Gene knew that William couldn't afford to pay fair market value for Betty's half of the house. He doesn't say it with these words, but that is the gist of his whiny rant about the house.

I agreed with much of wht you writer, dhster, that Betty is the product of her era. . . and I also know that plenty of women in 2009 still define their life expectations around what the men in their life want them to want. . . and I know that I am judging Betty with a 2009 mindset, having been a feminist myself since the late sixties, when I was in high school. (I am one year older than Sally Draper).

All women, all humans, need to take self responsibility for their lives. We all need to own that we create our reality and take responsibility for it. I dislike Betty Draper becase she epitomizes a passive-aggressive stance taken by many (most?) women, first they submit (this is the passive part) to the world's tendency to dominate women and give unearned rank and privilege to men, making the men's lives easier and then they (this is the aggressive part) blame people outside themselves when they accept the domination.

What I dislike in Betty Draper is something I dislike in many women, women in 1963, women in 2009, whatever. Women have not come so far. In 1963, I think women earned about six cents for every dollar a male earned and today, in 2009, I think women earn 73 cents, which is a huge bump up . . . but it pathetically tells the story that women are a long, long way from parity with males. I dislike Betty because by seizing the role her mother and society foisted upon her, being beautiful as her career, she perpetuates the subjugation of women.

Betty has a fine education. Bryn Mawr is a prestigious, excellent college. There were women who graduated from schools like that in the fifties who chose a different path.

I have a sister who is extremely beautiful, in Betty's league. My sister has a graduate degree from an Ivy, which she got on a full fellowship. She had straight A's in undergrad and high school. She is a bona fide genius. And gorgeous. When she was getting her fancy grad degree in communications, many people urged her to go into television journalism so she could exploit her beauty AND her writing ability. And lots of people urged her to be a model.

I remember her talking to me, when she was a teenager (she is fifteen years younger than me, we have the same parents but she was born when I was just about out the door to college so we didn't really grow up together) about people telling her to be a model. She said "I mean, what do models do, don't they just, like, look good? How could that be satisfying? I need a life of the mind."

Betty is plenty smart. She could have analyzed her choice of careers and found plenty of ways to use her beauty to advance in life: gorgeous copywriters, for example, get more attention and gorgeous fashion designers attract financing from male investors or she could have become like the Devil Who Wears Prada, using her education to run a Vogue-like magazine if she was fascinated by fashion.

I am aware, mostly from personal, painful experience, that options for females were sharply limited in the popular mindset of Betty's young adulthood. Gosh, when I graduated from a prestigious college in 1975, I had basically received the message that I could be a nurse, a teacher, and/or a mom. Employers did not recruit women on my campus for management training programs. I had countless employers, when I tried to become a management trainee, tell me to apply as a secretary. At the end of the seventies, I earned a law doctorate and passed the bar and I had countless legal employers tell me to apply to be a secretary. I think, in fact, that Sandra Day O'Connor, the first women on the U.S. Supreme Court, after graduating from Stanford Law was also told by many law firms that they would only consider her for legal secretarial positions. Her family position opened up connections to lawyer jobs and she did well for herself . . but in the nineteen fifties, law firms told women with Stanford law degrees to apply for secretary jobs because they would not consider jobs for lawyers.

In consideration of such considerations. I know it would have been extremely difficult for a pampered, narcissist like Betty to see beyond the cultural stereotypes for careers for women. I have empathy for Betty and accept that she could not see beyond limits.

But I don't have to like her. She represents a submission to the male domination of society. I want her to score much personal happiness and fulfillment. If I could watch a story of her finding real happiness, it would be a powerful metaphor for real change for real women in 2009. I hope the writers show Betty maturing, taking some responsibility fr her life.

Alas, I think Betty thinks she is 'taking charge' of her life by shopping for a new, 'better' man. Sadly that seems to be the only way she can see her way out of the narrowly constricted life she has created for herself.

Betty is progressing in steps. I think it is natural that she would think that self-definition might occur through another marriage--and, in the right marriage, that might happen. But I think she may progress farther still.

Thank you for your post, dhster. You have said many things about Betty that I've tried time and time to express, and said it better.

I'm also dismayed by all the Betty hatin'. I don't think she's a bore. She's not as accessible as Joan, for example, but that doesn't make her less interesting. I think she has more integrity than Joan, too.

She must be in her early 30s so she's young and still tied down with a preschooler. People seem to forget that she did try to give Don the boot during season two. She was doing fine without him and seemed pleased with herself when she told Helen Bishop that Don was gone.That was before there was another man on her horizon. It was the pregnancy, which she couldn't bring herself to terminate, that compelled her to take him back.

I think there are plenty of signs that she's growing as she matures. I don't know what people expect in the way of changes. She seemed genuinely interested in the Junior League project. She took charge of her father's estate. She took charge when she discovered the depth of Don's deception, too. She may be fantasizing about Henry Francis, but she's a lot more cautious than he is.

One of the most significant lines of the episode, for me, came from him when he asked her if she'd ever thought there might be a different way to live (and I'm paraphrasing - I don't recall exactly what he said). That, more than anything else, might be part of the allure for Betty. He's certainly not as glamorous as Don and he may not be as wealthy as Don, either.

Two little points: Betty "couldn't bring herself to terminate her pregnancy". Abortion was illegal, she had no CHOICE. She was rich growing up. She had a full time nanny. Nuff said.

There were places you could go to find abortions. Illegal ones.

Yes, and they were very dangerous. And tawdry.

Betty wanted an abortion. She dropped hints to her doctor and he discouraged her. Francine had information that could have been helpful. Betty had options, probably because she had money, and chose not to pursue an abortion.

Two scenes that I think suggest an interesting dimension to her character are 1) when she started shooting the neighbor's pigeons. I flashed back to Tony Soprano for a second. And 2) after she was coming home from the make-up dinner with the comedian, his wife Bobbie and the potato chip magnate and wife, all of a sudden Betty started crying to Don's (and our surprise). She said she was filled with joy at being part of Don's worklife.

I think about those scenes when I think about Betty's character too, marycarey. And I also flashed on the Sopranos when she was shooting at the pigeons - I thought about Tony and his ducks and also a scene when Carmella opened up the secret arsenal in the house and grabbed a gun to go after something (the bear maybe? - I don't remember).

With regard to abortions.... women with money had access to safe abortions. I knew girls from well to do families who had abortions in doctors' offices. Poor women were the ones who had to go to back alley butchers.

A rich woman like Betty, in 1963, could have gotten a safe abortion. Francine said something about going to, I think, Puerto Rico. . . or some place in the Caribbean but it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis and Francince also remarked that Betty might not want to go to that part of the world at that time. . . the women in the beauty parlor, where this exchange occurred, had just been talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Betty doesn't really have any friends beside Francine. Unless we count the horse-riding friend that Betty punked. Even a rich woman needs some support to find an abortion-provider. Betty asked her doctor, he said "if we are having the conversation I think we're having, I can't help you". . . for Betty, that was probably all the options exploring that was at her disposal. What else might she have done. . . . called around to the wives of men Don works with? Ask her brother or father for help?

I think she wanted an abortion and if her doctor had said 'I think I can help you if you don't want this baby" she would have had an abortion.

It's easy for us to say she had options . . . but as a practical matter, how was she going to find an abortion provider?

I appreciate comments, here, that point out we have seen Betty growing and acting like an adult. She joined the Junior League, she was interested in the water project. She didn't just call up Henry. . . she called all the JL members, one tedious phone call at a time. And I like that we keep seeing her reading: this shows a woman engaged with her culture.