Maureen comes down on both sides, and is not finished before she delivers one of her signature phrases or words that send me to the OED: droit du seigneur.
Maureen was obviously given a dictionary at a very early age. Do they ask you foreign phrases in spelling bees?
Maureen, use droit du seigneur in a sentence. Gladly. "So I could have not been more thrilled when #MeToo ripped away the curtain on the murky transgressions and diminishments that women endured in the droit du seigneur era."
Maureen recounts her 'Mad Men' experience of applying for a job at a Midtown Manhattan magazine and being asked by the future boss to come up to his hotel room.
She tells us the interviewee became the boss, so she got the job. Does that mean that after worrying that the job was gone unless x happened that Maureen did x? It's left unsaid, but maybe implied. Or, the possible future boss reconsidered his leering offer and gave her the job anyway after a sharp retort from Maureen? Perhaps.
So what does droit du seigneur mean anyway? The OED tells us: an alleged custom by which a medieval lord might have sexual intercourse with a vassal's bride on the wedding night.
Does the vassal at least get to consummate the marriage before the lord comes a calling? Probably not. Nasty custom, but not inconceivable.
I know I'm nearly ten years older than Maureen, male, and have my own Mad Men stories to tell of the office pecking order at work in the '60s.
My start was in 1967 at an insurance company, and not very high up the food chain either. Above mail room, but pretty much entry level. There were enough females who seemed to get promotions that seemed to depend on how they crossed their legs. Or maybe uncrossed them. Looking back, I can remember several promotions that went to candidates that seemed to go the Leah Martins who didn't say much, but did look good.
The test I took to get into the EAM/EDP department saw a few candidates get accepted, but all I remember is that Leah did too. By the way, the computer department was called EAM and stood for electronic adding machine. It got a little more refined when it was later referred as EDP, electronic data processing. Several bosses where known as "whoremasters." Did these women, young women, "put-out" as the saying would go amongst the guys?
I can distinctly remember in the company magazine a picture of the men assembled to judge who would be Miss Blue Shield, and who would be Miss Blue Cross, to be crowned at the annual dinner dance at the Commodore Hotel on 42nd Street. My collection of company magazines went down with the Trade Center, but the memory is not erased.
You don't need Mad Men episodes to get a flavor of sexual politics. Just listen to the lyrics from the musical "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying."
The clever Frank Loesser lyrics try and tell the guys that they need to be cool about things. "A secretary is not a toy, no my boy. Her pad is to write in, not spend the night in."
There is a great Kim Kovak, Fredric March movie, 1959, 'Middle of the Night' that viewed with today's eyes would be revealing about what the secretary/receptionist at a Garment District company had to put up with. Okay, the boss is widowed, but he always has to endure his uncle's behavior, who never stops talking about the "tootsies."
I often think about my uncle George who commanded destroyers in the Pacific during WW II. His active duty ended in 1959, having retired as a Rear Admiral. I imagine my uncle being whisked through a time machine and plopped down on the bridge of a naval ship in the late 20th century and being asked to handle a crew of male and female sailors. And female officers, no doubt. There wouldn't be enough expletives in the English and Greek languages to describe what he'd have to say about that.
My uncle was born in 1909 and passed away in 1968, but if he were whisked to that distant time without being exposed to the gradations of change that have come along the way, ever since he was ducking kamikazes, he would, I'm strongly convinced, agree that death is not so bad.
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