Author of the week: Jane Maas

last updated 8 January 2015

Jane Maas has a few complaints to lodge with Mad Men, said Emma Mustich in Salon.com. Maas, who started her advertising career as a copywriter and rose to become Ogilvy & Mather’s creative director, knows 1960s Madison Avenue. As the hit show about the era begins a new season, Maas’s memoir, Mad Women, is offering a counter perspective. Though she finds the show’s look accurate, Maas says it gets the work atmosphere “totally” wrong. “Everybody is eager to throw somebody else under the bus,” she says of the show’s fictional agency. “We were a band of brothers, as most agencies were.” Still, she never dreamed that TV viewers would one day consider their work life glamorous or sexy.

That’s not to say that there were no workplace affairs, said Debra Ollivier in HuffingtonPost.com. Most women at Ogilvy were single, and the men worked long hours. “They weren’t spending any time with their families,” Maas says. “Here were all these young women working as secretaries but wanting very much to get professional jobs, and they’d be happy to sit down and talk about the brands that these guys were working on. And they were sexually available.” Male attitudes about appropriate office behavior have changed for the better, she says. “Men think twice or three times before they consider making a pass.” Yet Maas’s former industry has in one sense disappointed her. “Less than 5 percent of creative directors are women,” she says. “I don’t think we really have come such a long way.”