For example: Provance sounds incredibly brave! But he hasn’t been as successful as the Wilsons in gathering a support group around him. Wish there was something we could do for him?

Ditto Slater! The $48,000 fine was a joke.

To think how many people have been knocked off by associates of this administration or within the military. Terrifying. The more they can get their stories into the press….the more the protection they seem to have.

But the fact that it was a great show wasn’t why I called my daughter and DEMANDED that she watch it.

She is too young to have lived through the pervasive, overt sexism of ALL American workplaces that I had directly experienced and endured until, eventually, laws were passed that made men nervous about sexist remarks and also made women realize that they were not primarily sexual objects, even in the workplace.

She is too young to know how confined, stigmatized and stereotyped were women who didn’t work and were housewives and mothers.

“Mad Men” depicted all of that — the permissibility of overt sexism in the workplace and the social expectations and constraints on housewives/mothers.

My daughter fell in love with the series because of its drama and its great characters. She was also DUMBFOUNDED by the sexism of the time (1960 — and earlier).

We’d talk about each incidence of sexism, and I’d impress on her that that is how it was. I really needed her to know that that was the atmosphere in which I was raised and spent my young adult years in the workforce.

I had many examples to give her. In college, I showed one of my short stories to a male writer who complimented me, but said, “You write like a woman.”

I won’t get into all the examples I shared with her about comments made to me — Leslie’s experience says it best.

We have come a long way. But I know that, just like racism remains alive but is these days less overt, sexism also remains alive albeit less overt. It shows in polls for the current presidential race, with white adult men favoring the male candidates over the first female candidate to ever run for the presidency. And in the white middle-aged male commentators on television who bristle vociferously whenever there’s any accusation of sexism … they’re old enough to have been part of the culture of rampant sexism and also to have been forced, by the changing laws and culture, to change their habits and their language, and I sense that somewhere deep inside they resent the changes forced on them.

P.S. Because AMC enjoyed such success with “Mad Men,” they are producing several more original series, and I can’t wait. Curiously enough, one of the creators of “Mad Men” was on HBO’s “Sopranos” team, and gave the script to HBO, which turned it down — every TV critic is astonished that HBO, which has no great original series airing now, would turn down such a great drama. What’s great, though, is that more people can see it on AMC than would have ever seen it on HBO.