When Mad Men concluded this past May, most viewers likely considered Peggy and Joan to be the most inspiring, strong-willed females of the AMC drama. But on Emmy eve at the Vanity Fair Social Club, Mad Men mastermind Matthew Weiner revealed that, in terms of television history, January Jones’s Betty—the blonde, Bryn Mawr–educated trophy wife of Don and then Henry—actually bucked the most in terms of TV tradition.

“We got to do something that is definitely a bit unknown on TV, which is actually admit the fact that this is a devastatingly beautiful woman [whose looks] affected her life, ” Weiner told Vanity Fair executive West Coast editor Krista Smith, who moderated the conversation sponsored by Brooks Brothers and Viktor&Rolf Flowerbomb. “In television, there is usually the ‘plain girl,’ who is a cover model. And then the good-looking girl, who is also a cover model. But on Mad Men, we see that Betty’s life has been different because of her looks, so [in the writers’ room we explored] what are the expectations from that, what has that shielded her from?

“It’s a conversation I had with January from the very beginning, because she had read The Feminine Mystique. She said, ‘I feel like Betty is constantly struggling with the fact that everything looks perfect but feels empty, and she was more than that and maybe wasted in a way.’”

Smith noted how interesting it was to see the final-season story arcs of these three women since Betty, who seemingly had everything in the first season, ended up enduring the drama’s most tragic third-act arc, when she was diagnosed with lung cancer. Meanwhile, Peggy and Joan, who came from lesser means, successfully navigated an oppressively chauvinistic office environment, ultimately cracking the glass ceiling. And Weiner revealed that this twist in female-character fates was always in the cards.

“Betty was a thing for me where I thought she was a tragedy from the beginning,” Weiner revealed. “I think at the end when she realized she was dying, she grew up in such a gigantic way. She is still Betty, though. She still gave her daughter a letter [before dying] instead of hugging her. It was horrible what happened to her but I didn’t want to not acknowledge the effects of smoking.”