I hereby predict that the women on Mad Men will get completely screwed at Emmy time. This is an outrage, since they're at least half the reason this is the best new show on TV.

Mad Men is a study of what Tom Wolfe called "status anxiety" in the male maelstrom of Manhattan advertising, but it also pays meticulous attention to erotic combat on the eve of women's ambiguous liberation. (The first season is set in 1960; the second, which premieres July 27, is reportedly set in 1962.) While the guys' conniving competitiveness exemplifies what Paul McCartney said when told that John Lennon was dead ("He was a maneuvering swine, but so was I"), the girls represent the era's epochal sexual temblors.

Every single one of them should register on your seismograph, and each character maps a different strategy for dire times. January Jones, whose very name sounds like a Playmate, plays series hero Don Draper's arm-draping, ex-model wife Betty. Perhaps named after Betty Friedan, she's a twirly scoop of neurotic vanilla, the feminine mystique up a creek. At first, she seems just another prefeminist cartoon, an empty length of plastic tubing: "As long as men look at me that way, I'm earning my keep," she purrs. But season one tracks her rebellion against her adorable three-timing creep Don. She scents other women's perfume on him (and "worse"), and senses when he's using a bedroom move he's tried on them.

Betty's quirky independence erupts unpredictably: an erotic encounter with her washing machine, a BB-gun rampage on a neighbor's pigeons. (This could be an oblique nod to Tony Soprano's opposite reaction to ducks -- Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner patterns his show on his former capo David Chase's.) According to Maureen Ryan's addictive blog The Watcher, the pigeon scene was inspired by writers' assistant Robin Veith, who, like Don Draper's secretary on the show, got promoted from underling to writer by force of talent.

Said secretary Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) is the anti-Betty: a plain, penniless, badly clad career gal who's also the female equivalent of her boss Don. A born ad copywriter trapped in a secretary's chair, Peggy seizes power on a lipstick account, knowing just how to pitch the target market's cravings. Moss is also matched with Don's (and her) nemesis, junior adman Pete (Vincent Kartheiser): they're both despised outsiders who see the coming ad revolution the older guys are clueless to, and each is a savage under the skin. You root for Peggy, but if you don't fear her, you're not paying full attention to TV's subtlest show.

Peggy is also paired with her secretary mentor, Joan (Christina Hendricks). Stacked like the Venus of Willendorf, Joan knows the deck's stacked against women, and cannily maximizes her paradoxical power of whoopee. Like pre-fame Marilyn Monroe, she climbs by bending over, scheming behind batted lashes. Joan was supposed to be a wiseacre like Eve Arden, but Hendricks' charisma enlarged the role. Joan gives Peggy bad advice to play the sex card -- easy for her to say -- but she's whip-smart on office politics. Joan responds jauntily to her lover, agency top dog Roger (brilliant John Slattery): "Roger, if you had your way, I'd be stranded in some paperweight with my legs in the air." But the look on her face when he almost dies and she realizes she's just red meat to him will rip your heart out.

Don Draper's twin mistresses are as memorable as Tony Soprano's. Village-dwelling Beatnik Midge (Rosemarie DeWitt) has two rules: "I don't make plans, and I don't make breakfast." Plus one more: "Ravish me and leave me for dead!" Free-loving Midge represents an On the Road allure; Don's client Rachel (Maggie Siff) is the ultimate on-the-job dame, a big Jewish department-store heiress dragging Dad into a new era with Don's expert aid. Midge is a sharp study in adultery, but Rachel is a 19th-century novel. One look in her dark eyes and Don's a goner (so, movingly, is she).

A Mad Men woman's part needn't be big to be great. The perfectly-named Alison Brie breathes privilege as evil imp adman Pete's tenderly tyrannical plutocrat wife. As Betty's also-cheated-on best friend, Anne Dudek crucially helps Betty's character pop from 2-D to 3-D emotionally. When Don's boss drags him into an after-hours tryst with 20-year-old identical twins, most shows would make them a giggly gag or a flesh-crawling fantasy a la David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, but Alexis and Megan Stier make the characters seem real-and the situation all the more are chilling.

By all means, celebrate the Mad Men. But be smarter than they are: notice the women.

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