If you're following Mad Men but aren't up to date, spoiler alert.

The character of Grandpa Gene, Betty's father and Don's father-in law, had a short but interesting tenure on the show.

He arrived at their household in a swirl of accusations about his incompetence, bolstered by his fits of peeling spuds and hiding all the liquor. Irascible, confused, he seemed nothing but an albatross for the family to handle.

But he made conspiracy with Sally, Betty and Don's daughter.  He has her reading The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire at night instead of reading to her.  He wants to get her favorite fruit.  He says she reminds him of his late wife, who was a draftsman with the boys.  He lets her drive the car — her legs are too short for her feet to reach the pedals, but he works those for her.  He tells her she's smart and will amount to something.

Even in conflict, they bond. She steals money from him, and, while he knows it was her, he doesn't rat on her, waiting for her to come up with a pretext for "finding" it.

He focuses on her, and she responds well.  She doesn't get enough attention from her own father; he's too busy working or looking for strange.  Mom jokingly calls her a little lesbian for using tools.  There's an element of the downtrodden banding together — after all, Gene's no longer a man in charge of his destiny, and she's just a girl.

In contrast, he shows disappointment with his own daughter, Betty.  He feels she's too soft.  When he tries to discuss final arrangements with her, she complains that he doesn't care how she feels about it — she's still his little girl and doesn't want to face the fact that he's ill and may not last long.  The unspoken part here is, of course, how do you think he feels talking about his death?

And when Grandpa Gene dies, Sally is quite understandably devastated.  Her ally, her companion, the one who always has his eye on her, is gone. 

At the end of the show we hear the WWI song, "Over There."  The forces that allowed Gene's wife to ascend, need in a time of war (though it was WWII), were strongly countered at the end of the war with "go back home" messages to women.  The GI bill was actually partly used to quash women's ambition, since they wouldn't get the college degrees that made the returning men "more qualified" for jobs.  The Fifties were a time of unabashed constriction of women's roles.  Women who had worked hard in business and industry while the men were at war were unceremoniously shoved aside when the men came home. 

When it's over, over there, it's over for women, over here.  But only temporarily.