What is the attraction of Mad Men? There's the clothes, of course: every single woman wears spotless dresses with waists in the natural place, swishing or very tight - one could enjoy that in the same way as one fancies the high-waisted Jane Austen frocks or the long skirts of Cranford.

But there's a ghastly fascination, too, in the way the women were treated, the extraordinary taken-for-granted chauvinism of every single man. All the women were either wives - to be kept firmly in their place at home - or secretaries to be laid and/or ignored. And when a bright secretary actually did a bit of excellent copywriting, the response of her bosses was: "It's like watching a dog play the piano."

The women seem to accept this, though with their own subversive strategies for coping. They accept, too, that they all had to be perfect at all times; they all without exception have large cone-shaped breasts and shining hair, even in bed - surely we didn't wear bras in bed in those days? If the series did nothing else, it made you realise exactly why bra-burning became a symbol of the women's movement - indeed why it shouldn't have surprised anybody that Betty Friedan's 1963 book The Feminine Mystique lit such a forest fire.

Not that anyone on this side of the Atlantic ever did actually burn their bra - but things were different for us. A major part of the Mad Men plot concerned a really bright secretary who finally morphed into a junior copywriter (though not without paying the immemorial female price of being left holding - or in her case refusing to hold - the baby). Even in 1950 a friend of mine went straight from Cambridge to a copywriting job in J Walter Thompson; Fay Weldon was achieving fame with "Go To Work on an Egg" long before she wrote novels; most British graduates, even then, thought of something well beyond shorthand and typing.

Of course different bits of a society move at different rates. But the assumption that getting your man was the only goal that mattered - and I suppose that having got him you did what he said - was a far stronger conviction in America. Even in the 50s, when I was at Cornell, there were perfectly intelligent girls who said openly: "I'm here to get my Mrs degree." Whether it was because the second world war hadn't been fought at home, as the European one was, so the changes on the home front had been less marked, or for some other reason, it is odd that American women were shoved so much more firmly back into the kitchen and the nursery than we were. I remember once having an argument about this with Marilyn French, who wrote the classic feminist novel The Women's Room; I was quite unable to convince her that educated European women often had a far better shake than the Americans she was writing about, that we were not necessarily so downtrodden; and that this was perhaps why the whole women's movement took a milder form here than it did in the States. It is odd, though, that American women should - at least in theory - have been so dedicated to domesticity, when you think of the toughness that they must have had as pioneers, coping with twisters and locusts and being left on their own for months on end if their men were herding cattle.

Yet this picture of a totally male-dominated workplace rings true enough. In 1978 I happened to be in the offices of the Chicago Herald Tribune: there was one white-haired woman who dated from the Depression, and a cheerful horde of young post-women's-movement ones: nothing in between. As late as the mid 70s a friend of mine was told, admittedly in Alabama: "We don't hire women reporters." Nobody had told them, I suppose, that there were women reporters in America even in the 19th century - or perhaps someone had, and they were terrified.

We can sit back, gin in hand, comfortably watching this 60s scene and thinking how awful it was in the olden days. But is it really that different now? The 80s surge of women into boardrooms has, if anything, reversed; there are women in all sorts of top jobs and the working mother, rare enough when I was young, is now standard. There are even one or two newspaper editors who are women; but Murdoch's empire has an overwhelmingly male boardroom; and among the handwringing about our financial crisis is an admission that raging testosterone, unchecked by female influence, has been half the trouble. An apparently immovable assumption that really the important jobs are done by men is pretty deeply ingrained.

Why should this be so? I don't know, but I'm greatly attracted to the theory of Janet Radcliffe Richards, she of The Sceptical Feminist, who said that if women really couldn't do the jobs men kept them out of, there would be no need for discrimination. It was because they could (and Margaret Mead said she knew of no job that hadn't been an all-male job in one community and an all-female job in another) that men were so keen to corral their women in separate jobs. Why? The answer, she thought, lay in the realm of genetics: men did not want their women to be exposed to other men; they did not want to risk bringing up the product of another man's genes. It was segregation they were really after.

But weren't these advertising Mad Men surrounded by secretaries, tea ladies, servants, waitresses? Ah yes, but those weren't the ones you married. The ones you actually bred from were stuck out in Westchester County looking after "those little people - a job you do better than anyone else in the world". So how will it all work out in the Mad Men series? There were signs at the end of the first series that Peggy, the bright, friendly secretary, was becoming a stereotypical harsh career woman; will she turn out to be an aggressive single mother? Will the plot soften and give her a nice clean husband? And what about Don Draper, abandoned by his family at the end of the first series? We shall have to wait and see.