Betty Hofstadt was born in Cape May, New Jersey, where her family summered, and raised in the enclave of Lower Merion, a suburb on the Philadelphia Main Line , which was a very prestigious place to live near Philadelphia.
Betty mentioned having a German grandmother and that she came from Nordic people. Her first kiss was with a Jewish boy named David Rosenberg. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in with an Anthropology degree, and briefly modeled in Italy before moving to Manhattan. It was during this time that she met Don Draper , when he was a copywriter for a fur company and she was a model posing for a print ad as told by Joan in " Lady Lazarus ".
In the spring of , Betty started to see a psychiatrist because of repeated spells of numbness in her hands, which began after her mother's death.
In combination with psychosocial stressors and the exclusion of a neurological cause, it seemed likely that Betty was experiencing Conversion Disorder. Having discovered that her psychiatrist was giving reports of her sessions to Don, she decided to take revenge by telling her doctor things she wanted her husband to hear, but not to tell him directly.
So she told the doctor about her husband's infidelities and how much they upset her. Sometime before February , the consultations were stopped. After a dinner party where Betty was embarrassed to have been tricked by Don into behaving like a "demographic" in order to impress a client, she confronted her husband about his adultery, specifically with Bobbie Barrett. Don, however, denied having an affair.
