Any Mad Men fans out there? I’m not one of them. I watched the first episode once; and besides being bored out of my mind, I just couldn’t stomach the disgusting treatment the female characters received at the hands of the male ones. I’m sure part of the show’s premise is to demonstrate how women were degraded and objectified in 1960s corporate settings, but I just didn’t enjoy watching it.

I have a similar feeling toward this week’s BP, Gentleman’s Agreement. While the message of the film is that prejudice at any level is wrong and disgusting, what the film (probably unconsciously) does is discriminate against women. Setting the plot of the film aside for the moment, even the film’s characterization of its female roles portrays women as intellectually and morally inferior to their male counterparts. Protagonist Phil Green, for one, is quite taken aback that it is a woman, Kathy Lacy, who has suggested the newspaper do a series on anti-Semitism. His mother Mrs. Green replies sarcastically, “Why, women will be thinking next.” But Mrs. Green herself is consistently ga-ga eyed when Phil presents his ideas about how to approach his assignment, placing herself in an inferior rational role to his, relegating herself to cooking and cleaning and playing mother to Phil’s son Tommy. Likewise, though a member of the newspaper team, Anne Dettrey, the fashion editor, is just that. No controversial and/or mentally stimulating assignments for her. Most of the time she is on camera, Anne is either flitting around town or chilling in her office, apparently with nothing pressing to do, whereas the male characters only ever have important matters at hand. Elaine Wales, Phil’s Jewish secretary, while more than capable of performing her typing and other duties swiftly and accurately, has to have Phil spell out to her exactly how to lay out his article although she clearly has done the same work before. It’s as if because she is a woman, she needs a man to slowly enunciate her task for her again so she won’t fall into easy errors.

Anne and Phil

As far as the film’s portrayal of the morality of women, Phil’s mother is probably the only woman for whom nothing negative is implied. Then again, there honestly is a smidge of a hint of incestuous overtones between her and her son. But I think I don’t really want to get into that here. Gross. For Elaine, the secretary, she appears at first as a sympathetic character, relating how she had to change her name to something “less Jewish” in order to get her job at the newspaper. Then she proceeds to disparage her own religious community by stating that she hopes the newspaper’s revised hiring policy won’t lead to the newspaper being overrun by the “wrong Jews.” Anne, the fashion editor, although refreshingly not anti-Semitic, also fails in the morality category, giving the impression of being kind of a loose woman, often going out on the town at night with Phil’s married friend Dave Goldman. When Anne finally has a serious conversation with Phil after he has broken up with Kathy, it would seem that perhaps Anne is the best romantic match for Phil; but Phil only has feelings for Kathy, and Anne is left alone and rejected.

And now we come to Kathy Lacy, Phil Green’s love interest. Her ethics are most on display in the film. But let’s start with this interesting fact about the two lovers first: Phil is widowed and open to the possibility of love; Kathy is divorced but maintains an oddly close relationship with her former husband, practically leaping into a romantic relationship with Phil within minutes of meeting him. Hmmm…not really the typical “good woman” characterization we’re used to seeing in films of this time period. Next, Kathy is a flaming bigot—though she denies it and doesn’t realize this fact herself until late into the film. You see, Kathy’s prejudice seems to be something almost inherent—at least among the upper-class, wealthy, white people with whom Kathy likes to associate—and quite subtle. Kathy verbally supports Phil’s plan to pretend to be Jewish for his newspaper series, but in reality she is resistant to anything that will make others judge Phil to be miserly, traitorous, or any other of the negative characteristics that biased people apply to Jews in this film. Even when Kathy performs a very heartfelt act in comforting Tommy after he is bullied, her compassion is quickly reprimanded by Phil because her reassurance of Tommy is based on the bullies’ mislabeling him as Jewish, not on the fact that prejudice is wrong whether its degrading comments are accurately applied or not.

Kathy and Phil

For Me Then…

For most of the film, I was hoping that Phil would break up with Kathy and end up with Anne. It was so clear to me as a viewer that Kathy’s morals were inferior to those of Phil. Yet after pondering the film for a couple of days, I began to feel sorry for Kathy. She was set up by the time in which she lived. It’s not that I’m excusing her bigotry–far from it. I’ve just come to feel that she also is a victim of prejudice; and as a woman myself, that angers me.

Even the film’s title, Gentleman’s Agreement, is exclusive of women. Though Kathy shares the narrowmindedness of the upper-class snobs portrayed in the film, she does not hold responsibility for making the decision to exclude Jews from such society. That choice was made by the men, by the “gentlemen” who are afraid of change and of interacting and mixing with people who are different. Words of wisdom from one of my favorite films, Cool Runnings (yeah, mon, the one about the Jamaican bobsled team): “People are always afraid of what’s different.” I believe this is true to some extent for all of us, and I think I would have appreciated this film more had its premise of acceptance extended to women as well as to marginalized groups of people. Take that, Mad Men.