Mad Women - Softcover

"This is a fascinating book . . . All the elements are there - the drinking, the sex, the witty one-liners - but there is a serious side to it too, one that paints a detailed, nuanced portrait of a social and cultural landscape undergoing seismic change. Maas has a gimlet eye for detail - and she's funny, in a very dry martini sort of way." (Sarah Vine The Times)

"Funny and informative, with the kick of a dry martini" (Observer)

"You don't have to identify with Peggy Olson on Mad Men - or even know who she is - to appreciate Jane Maas's Mad Women... [a] breezy and salty memoir" (The New York Times)

"Hilarious! Honest, intimate, this book tells it as it was" (Mary Wells Lawrence, author of A Big Life (In Advertising) and founding president of Wells Rich Greene)

"I think of Jane Maas as a real-life Peggy Olson. When I started at Ogilvy & Mather in 1971, a lowly Account Executuve, she was already a creative director. She took me under her wing and taught me a lot about creative work that sells" (Shelly Lazarus, Chairman, Ogilvy & Mather)

What was it like to be an advertising woman on Madison Avenue in the sixties and seventies, that Mad Men era of casual sex and professional serfdom? Now, in her immensely entertaining and bittersweet memoir, Jane Maas reveals all...

·Was there really that much sex at 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!

Based on her experiences as a copywriter who succeeded in this primarily male jungle, and countless interviews with her peers, Mad Women gives us the full story. There is the junior account man whose wife almost left him when she found the copy of Screw magazine he’s used to find a ‘date’ for a client, and the Ogilvy & Mather’s annual Boat Ride, a sex-and-booze-filled orgy, from which it was said no virgin ever returned intact.

Wickedly funny and full of juicy inside information, Mad Women also tackles some of the tougher issues of the era, such as unequal pay, rampant, jaw-dropping sexism, and the difficult choice many women faced between motherhood and career.