The Best of Everything has been reissued by Penguin with a cover sticker reading ‘As seen on Mad Men.’ Don Draper, the series’ main character, and the only Mad Man not driven by the belief that women are (a) intellectually inferior and (b) of physical interest only, is seen sitting up in bed reading Jaffe’s novel, to understand young women, to tailor his marketing accordingly.

The story centres around 20-year-old Caroline Bender, who works in a New York publishing house — moving from secretary to reader to editor, all the while pursued by male bosses. While Jaffe’s novel is of its time — the women’s primary goal, rather than optional extra, is to bag a decent husband — the story highlights what women were up against in the post-war, pre-feminist era.

Rather like Peggy Olsen in Mad Men. So like Peggy Olsen in Mad Men that it would not be unrealistic to assume the script writers had read Jaffe’s book, which has themes of sex, adultery, abortion, divorce and single parenthood, against a backdrop of patriarchy.

There are similarities between Jaffe’s characters and Peggy Olsen in the tricky climb up the career ladder, as men craned their necks to look up their skirts rather than listen to what they said.

Jaffe based the novel on her own experiences as a young woman living independently in New York City, but rather than assuming they were the same as every other young woman’s — back then people didn’t talk about private stuff the way they do in, say, Sex & The City — she conducted informal research among her extended mid-1950s peer group.

“I didn’t know if the things that happened to my friends and me was just an anomaly,” she wrote just before her death, aged 74, in 2005. “So I interviewed 50 women to see if they’d had the same experiences, with the men and the jobs and all the things nobody spoke about in polite company. Back then, people didn’t talk about not being a virgin. They didn’t talk about going out with married men. They didn’t talk about abortion. They didn’t talk about sexual harassment, which had no name in those days.”

These days, it has a name and it also has legislation protecting us from it. Thanks to decades of legal equality, we are light years away from the outrages of Mad Man-era casual sexism and the ingrained belief that women exist for decorative and sexual purposes. Aren’t we?

Well, maybe. Actually, hang on a sec. Wasn’t it just last year — that is, 2010, more than half a century after the publication of Jaffe’s novel — that male employees of two giant accountancy firms, KPMG and PwC, were revealed to have been sending in-house emails rating their female colleagues — not on their job skills, but on their looks? The men at KMPG had a ‘k-score,’ and discussed ‘luck with the ladies.’ PwC’s male employees had a ‘top ten’ of female colleagues based on their appearance, which was apparently an ‘annual ritual.’

To make matters worse, many of the publications which reported the story, both in print and online, splashed the photographs and names of the women being ‘rated’ and not photos of the offending men, tacitly inviting everybody else to have a good gawp.

Such attitudes and behaviours — while forced, these days, to be more covert — are equally rife in the macho work culture of financial markets, where women routinely complain of the old boys’ network, of using traditionally male arenas of golf courses and strip clubs to informally clinch deals.

Women routinely speak of being excluded from their share of the power and being ridiculed if they are gutsy enough to complain, and ostracised or sacked if they dare to complain formally.

If female workers do object to being objectified in the workplace, or disregarded, or harassed, there is always the lingering notion that we are being too po-faced, that we are having a sense of humour by-pass, that we cannot take a joke.

Silvio Berlusconi and his Benny Hill media empire, for example, was never too bothered about the dignified representation of women, yet he only got into trouble when his behaviour became so outrageous that it could no longer be ignored.

Suddenly, the floodgates opened, and Italian women — still living in their very own version of Mad Men, in a culture that prizes female looks and culinary skills above all else — took to the streets in an outpouring of anger at how they are perceived.

And lately, although on a smaller scale, women have been reacting in France to the behaviour of the former head of the IMF, whose sexual incontinence recently took an allegedly criminal turn.

“It’s very interesting to look at the protests in France at the moment,” says Susan McKay, CEO of the National Women’s Council of Ireland. “Women are coming out in anger at the Dominique Strauss Kahn affair. It’s not whether he is innocent or guilty, but a comment on the attitudes expressed — there is an almost 18th century attitude among some journalists around what men are entitled to do.”

McKay says such casual attitudes around the dignity and safety of women are ingrained in Ireland, despite years of slowly forward-moving attitudes backed by legislation. “There is a lot of sexism built into Irish culture, yet a great unwillingness to discuss it,” she says. “There are, for instance, shockingly high levels of domestic and sexual violence against women in Ireland, yet it’s very difficult to start a public discussion about it. The attitude seems to be that it is about individual men rather than the overall culture.

“When those guards were caught joking about raping the young women they had just arrested, the feminist reaction was shock, yet many men thought it was just a bit of a laugh. With the Dominique Strauss Kahn affair, there was the infamous tweet from [Green party Senator] Dan Boyle quipping that the real shock was the price of the hotel,” she says.

McKay says until there is genuine equality, and not just the on-paper variety, women will continue to be up against the same attitudes that were the norm 50 years ago.

“There is a false divide created between stay-at-home women and working women, with an implication that feminism supports working women but not women who work at home,” she says.

“In reality, there is no such divide. Irish women do 86% of caring work. Ireland has the lowest public funding for childcare in the developed world. And there’s still an almost 20% pay gap. Women’s lives are still made more difficult in a lot of different ways, and there’s a failure to recognise this. And underneath all of this, there is the deep dark river of violence against women.”

BOOKS THAT BROKE DOWN THE BARRIERS

Two Serious Ladies (1943) by Jane Bowles Too avant garde to be a mainstream contender, it dealt with topics not normally written about during that era, ie lesbianism, financial and independence.

The Best Of Everything (1958) by Rona Jaffe Young women trying to make it on their own, with the end goal of husband catching.

Covered generally taboo subjects like sex, extra marital affairs, etc.

The Women’s Room (1977) by Marilyn French The Women’s Room Feminist novel set in the 1950s which follows the life of a traditional young woman as she becomes conscious and empowered.

Sex & The City (1999) by Candace Bushnell

Again, groundbreaking in its explicit discussion of sex from a female perspective.

Ruined by awful film franchise.