Actresses Elisabeth Moss, left to right, January Jones and Christina Hendricks, stand in a conference room on the set of the AMC television series, Mad Men, in Los Angeles.

TPN / GENARO MOLINA

HOLLYWOOD

In its first season, Mad Men, AMC’s series about a group of guys on Madison Avenue, received critical raves for its finely drawn portraits of the employees of Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency. Set in 1960, it focused on Don Draper, a glamorous up-and-comer with a double life and a secret past, and the smart, politically incorrect men around him.

But watching from a different perspective, there’s a whole different story going on. And it’s all about the women: Peggy, Betty and Joan.

In their pointy bras and flouncy petticoats, the leading women — a secretary, a housewife and a sexy office den mother — might look like stars of television shows in bygone years. They exist in a nonchalantly sexist world where men slap fannies or ask the new girl to shorten her skirt. Agency partner Roger Sterling (John Slattery), for instance, advises Draper: “Remember, Don: When God closes a door, he opens a dress.” In pondering the question of what women want, Sterling sneers over a cigarette and a drink, “Who cares?” (And he’s the classy one.)

But while they are marginalized, the women of Mad Men are no mere archetypes. They are complicated, glamorous, ambitious and stifled in a way that women in 1960s television never were. With 48 years of hindsight behind their creation, they are marginalized in a particularly subtle way, so that viewers might not even realize they are riveted by their struggles.

One reason, according to the actresses who play them and their creator, Matt Weiner, is that they are really about women now. Even in 1960, viewers couldn’t relate to Ozzie and Harriet, Weiner said. “The truth is: A lot of people were laughing at those shows then, at how unrealistic they were.” Perhaps it takes a show like Mad Men to allow viewers to appreciate the subtle conflicts of women’s roles in the workplace and the family. “You have to do it retroactively,” said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.

In Mad Men, the women as well as the men have public, private and secret lives. Most dream of a fairy-tale life, married to a strong man and living in a country house. To that end, the women always look lovely, in neatly coiffed hairdos, makeup and form-fitting dresses requiring military-strength — and, as the actresses said, sometimes painful — undergarments. As January Jones, who plays Draper’s wife, Betty, noted, “When you take the girdle off at the end of the day, everything sort of falls.” Veteran television writer Weiner said his main interest in writing the show was Draper (Jon Hamm). He read authors of the period such as J.D. Salinger and Norman Mailer to inform Draper’s world. But he also read Helen Gurley Brown and Betty Friedan. And as his mother, sister and wife are professional women, he said he quickly realized how dynamic the conflict in the female professional experience would be. “I said, ‘This is the rest of the show.’

“Don has a lot in common with all these women,” he said. “He’s unable to express himself; he wants to be a different kind of person than he is. His image of himself is not really who he is. All these women are like that: If you buy into something, you have to live by the consequences.”

So far, the show has been one of those cult favorites with fewer viewers (1 million average per episode) than its rave notices would suggest. But none of the actresses is complaining. “Even if it gets canceled, we’ll still be doing it,” Jones said, half-jokingly.

Elisabeth Moss, who plays Peggy, Jones and Christina Hendricks, who plays Joan, said what makes their characters so interesting is that they have so many sides to them. At the same time, each operates at some level of denial.

Peggy, for instance, is bright, talented, ambitious and initially naive when she comes to work. With Claudette Colbert-inspired “bumper bangs” she can’t trade on her looks the way Joan and Betty do, and to be taken seriously she has to learn to play the game as the men do. “Every step she takes, every meeting, every idea, every account is a new step for her,” Moss said. “Not only her, but the men around her. She takes her hard knocks, but she’s definitely not one to make the same mistake twice.”

It’s important for her to play Peggy as she is, not what she represents, said Moss, who played the president’s daughter on The West Wing and has appeared in several independent films, including Virgin. “One of the great things about the show and the characters, why people love them and identify with them, is that they’re just people, like you and me, in specific situations and in this time period.”

Peggy, written to be 20 in 1960, was “in an extreme state of denial for seven or eight episodes last season,” Moss said. After Peggy had sex with Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), a manipulative young exec, she ignored her subsequent pregnancy and gave birth unexpectedly.

Despite her talent and brains, it’s clear she’s as unaware as the others, “completely capable of compartmentalizing, especially when it could destroy you,” Weiner said.

Maintaining the facade of perfect wife and mother is important to Betty, but she’s “not a Stepford wife,” said Jones (We Are Marshall, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada). Betty, who is 28 in 1960, has a college education and a former career as a model. She knows she has the life the others envy, but strange behavior sends her to a psychiatrist.

“She has the ultimate realization of luxury,” Weiner said. “She was in that world, but she’s younger than (Draper) and she knows something now.” The question is, is she his child or his wife? And is that up to her?

It’s rare in television, even now, to find rounded characters for women, said Hendricks, who plays Joan, the head secretary with a voluptuous Marilyn Monroe body and persona. Wise in a Sex and the Single Girl way, Joan claims to want a husband but stays in a hopeless, long-term affair with the married Sterling.

“I think Joan’s a little bit scared the fairy tale’s not there,” said Hendricks, who has appeared in numerous television shows (ER, The Court). “When you never finish a project, you can’t be disappointed in it.” But at 31 in 1962, Joan knows she’s quickly passing her prime.

The actresses sat together outside the makeup trailers at the Los Angeles Center Studios in downtown where the Mad Men sets are meticulously furnished with period detail, from plaid wallpaper to Langendorf bread. Moss, who had changed from her vintage dress and heels into a robe, was able to lean forward and relax. But Hendricks and Jones, still in their form-fitting costumes, eyeliner and Breck Girl hair, sat with the perfect posture forced on them by the clothes.

“I just tip over in some dresses,” Hendricks said.

Hendricks, Moss and Jones said the cast always has a good laugh at the impolitic dialogue in their first reading of an episode. “Some of it just feels absurd,” Hendricks said. “You think, ‘My God, you would never say that in public.’ ”

But, they said, people still say shockingly sexist and politically incorrect things in public. Jones, for instance, recently found life imitating a Mad Men scene. She said she was in an elevator with some men exactly as some characters were in a Season 2 scene, and the men were making the same sort of sexist remarks about women, as if there was no woman in the elevator.