Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy. I'm Amy McPhee All the best. This past year, I watched the TV series Mad Men, which depicts life in the 1960s and 70s in America, especially focusing on gender dynamics. And I thought that one of the most striking bits of dialogue, and it wasn't really emphasized.

So at a different time in my life, it might have just gone right past me without me even noticing.

But it was this scene that was set in about 1965 in New York City when the civil rights movement was just starting to really pick up steam.

And a woman, a white woman, is talking about how

she is not allowed to join certain clubs or be served in certain restaurants or get a room at a

hotel or get a credit card. And many jobs aren't available to her. And even in the job she currently

has, she's paid far less than her male

counterparts, all because she's a woman. And she's saying this to a group of men, male co-workers.

And one of them says in response in a really jeering, mocking way, he says, what, you want a women's

march? And the show does such a great job of creating the world

that you can feel how to them that just sounded utterly preposterous, a women's march.

There hadn't been demonstrations for women's rights since the days of the suffragettes.

And as we learned in Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine mystique,

those feminists, the suffragettes, were looked down on in the 1950s and 60s. But so as a viewer,

you also have this sense of dramatic irony realizing, oh my gosh, the women's movement was about to

start, but they didn't even know it yet. So with that historical context in

mind that the women's movement was coming in the 60s, but they didn't know it. We're going to

start today's episode with a recording from 1970 when that idea of a women's march had become a

reality and thousands of women were taking to the streets

to demand equal rights.

I wouldn't have admitted the equality in inequality in my own life, even though I was continually

discriminated against in journalism. Journalism, which allows women to write about women

...