The cost of that covenant to women — the suppression of worldly opportunity — has been thoroughly told. The cost to men — in terms of stress, time lost with the families they were trying so hard to support and lack of freedom to pursue personal interests — has not been nearly as well documented.

Men charged with total financial responsibility for their families obviously had even more reason to worry than men do today in tough times. Growing up in Michigan, I had friends whose fathers were laid off from jobs in a variety of businesses whenever auto sales faltered.

The worst economic downturn of my childhood, in 1957 and ’58, saw unemployment rise to 6.2 percent in the six months before recovery began. If the “Eisenhower recession” had lasted as long as the one that began in 2008, my father’s business — half of his clients were connected to the auto industry — would probably have collapsed. My mother, who hadn’t held a job since 1945, was unlikely to be hired for anything above the level of clerk-typist.

MANY decades would pass before middle-class men could hope that a wife’s earnings would help in lean years.

The difference between the 1960s and today is that middle-class working wives — not only those in the bottom fifth — account for a substantial share of family income. In 2010, 45.3 percent of wives in the middle fifth of two-earner married couples made as much as or more than their husbands. (Poorer women with children, then as now, married or unmarried, contributed a much higher portion of household income.)

While these figures do not support the fashionable, overblown image of women as ascendant rulers of the universe, they do represent a large number of households saved from economic destruction. How many more families would have lost their homes in recent years if working women contributed as little financially as they did in the era of “Mad Men”?

So it is difficult to understand why social commentators cannot muster up more empathy for the older generation of men, who had no backup if something went wrong at work.

I am as hooked as anyone else on the cocktails and clothes, the sexual drama and office politics of “Mad Men.” But I would like to see just one scene in which a man is gulping coffee at 4:30 on a February morning. Perhaps he is also scanning a book on the kitchen counter, because he knows he will be too tired to read by the time he gets home around 10 o’clock. This man warms up his car and heads for work, while his wife and children sleep soundly under the covers.