Mindless Ones

When Betty first brought up her doctor’s recommendation that she should seek psychiatric help, Don was angry. Which is another way of saying he was scared. He couldn’t cope with the idea that the life they’d built together wasn’t enough. But for Betty and Don that life was a prison, and if Betty didn’t find an outlet for her pain, then the next accident to befall her might have had far more serious consequences than the low motion car “crash” which prompted her to seek professional help in the first place. In the end Don saw this too, and acquiesced. It was Betty’s first, even if small and tentative, act of resistance.

At the time though, she was still being buffeted around by forces out of her control, most of them male. By her doctors; by her husband; by her psychiatrist, a textbook sexist freudian who treated her as little more than a hysterical child and who, against all psychiatric ethics, provided Don with detailed notes on every one of her sessions; and by her own emotions, which at that point she was a long way from understanding. She didn’t want to think about any of that stuff.

Until she did.

Betty’s story has really been about her encroaching agency, and now that she’s in a healthy relationship with a man who’s happy for her to have her own life, a career is the obvious final step. In the end the answer to Don’s question, the title of this piece, is the whole of Betty’s life without him. It was Betty speaking up to her psychiatrist about Don’s infidelities, even if she didn’t acknowledge this for years afterwards, that really set her on the road to where she is now. And it was Dr Edna, her daughter’s official and Betty’s not so official psychiatrist, who showed her what a woman could do – a woman who wouldn’t be satisfied working as a travel agent that is! Personally, wherever this story goes, I love that Betty’s considering this move. Why psychology? Because it maps her journey completely, from pawn to player – owned to owner. It’s almost too perfect.

*Don Draper, Ladies Room