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Mad Men, Competitive Women, and Invisible Hispanics

Miguel A. De La Torre
Peggy Olson is a copywriter at the fictitious Madison Avenue advertising
firm Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce in the Emmy Awardwinning television
program Mad Men, set in the 1960s. In one scene, she sits at a bar being wooed
by a potential suitor. When Peggy mentions one of her clients, an auto supply
firm, her drinking partner informs her of a boycott being waged against that
particular company for refusing to hire Negros in their stores down South.
Soon the conversation drifts toward the civil rights movement, and the young
man questions how Peggy can provide services to the company rather than hold
them accountable for their racist policies. Apparently feeling criticized, Peggy
responds: Most of the things Negroes cant do, I cant do either. And nobody
seems to care. . . . Half of the meetings take place over golf, tennis, and a bunch
of clubs where Im not allowed to be a member. Or even enter. The University
Club said the only way I could eat dinner there was if I arrive in a cake. Im
sure they can fight their way in [to a job as a copywriter] like I did. Believe me,
nobody wanted me there.
The encounter between the fictional character Peggy Olson and her suitor
reflects the turmoil occurring under the surface of the early 1960s. Peggy symbolizes the millions of women of that era competing for a seat at the table in a
male-dominated world. But simultaneously, African Americans were also striving for their own rights. Peggys response reveals the tension existing between
white women and black men over issues of equality, a historical tension that
can be traced back to the friction between Frederick Douglass and SusanB.
Anthony and is still present today, as demonstrated during the 2008 Demo  The Beautiful Girls, Mad Men, Episode 9, AMC, September 19, 2010.

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cratic presidential primaries between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But
in a black-white and a male-female dualism, this Latino man must ask: Where
do my people fit in the equation? Within dichotomies that envision structural
injustices as either sexist or racist, Latinas/os become the new white woman,
relegated to the passive position most white women during the 1960s felt that
they occupied. Valerie Saiving may have asked, Where Is the Woman?; but
today, I must instead ask: Where Is the Hispanic?
Emma lived two floors above us in our tenement building in Queens, New
York, during the 1960s, and was one of many Latinas who left for the office
buildings in Manhattan at 6:00 p.m. each evening to empty trash cans, dust
furniture, sweep floors, and mop hallways. If there would have actually been
a Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce on Madison Avenue, Emma would have been
cleaning up after Peggy Olson. Not surprisingly, there is no character on the
show that lifts up Emmas story for the viewers to consider. She, along with most
Latinos/as, remains invisible. True, blacks in the era of Mad Men, when Reinhold Niebuhr and Valerie Saiving were writing, lived, and still do, in a society
where structural racism exists. And yes, women are forced to operate, then and
now, in a society where structural sexism is ever-present. Still, by creating neat
dichotomies, not only are Hispanics, along with communities of color, excluded
from the discourse, but the goals of liberation are dwarfed to the benefit of
those still grasping for their power and privilege.
Niebuhr, like Peggy Olsons young liberal suitor, was in favor of black civil
rights. However, for him, racism was reduced to a manifestation of the sin of
pride; an outwork and/or application of his Augustinian anthropology: All
human groups are essentially proud and find that pride very convenient because it seems to justify their special privileges and to explain the sad state of the
 A close friend of Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass advocated for the rights of women,
even participating at the first Womens Rights Convention, held in Seneca Falls in 1848, and signing
the Declaration of Sentiments. Nonetheless, the relationship between the two leaders was strained
after the Civil War over the issue of passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Anthony
refused to support the Fifteenth Amendment because it excluded women, while Douglass believed
it was important to first secure the rights of African American males before working to achieve the
rights of women. As Douglass said, When women, because they are women, are dragged from their
homes and hung upon lamp-posts . . . then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot (David B.
Chesebrough, Frederick Douglass: Oratory from Slavery [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998],
67). After the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870, Douglass resumed his work for womens
rights.
Although Hillary Clinton presently serves as President Barack Obamas Secretary of State,
their differences during the primaries manifested themselves in disturbing ways. For example, Clinton made the claim that it took Lyndon Johnson to make Martin Luther Kings dream a reality. The
message was clear. King and Obama can give great speeches, but it takes white presidents to bring
about effective change.
 Valerie Saiving, Where Is the Woman? Theology Today 19, no. 1 (April 1962): 11114,
quotation on 111.

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underprivileged. It is this combination of selfishness and pride which makes the

problems of group relationships so difficult. For Niebuhr, humanity was beset
by the selfishness of hubriswill to power dependent upon womans negation
of self. But as Saiving reminded us, the sin for woman is better described as the
failure to be a self. Women are particularly tempted to submerge their individuality, their self, to the needs and desires of othersa temptation facilitated
by the Niebuhrian private/public dichotomy. She accused men like Niebuhr of
identify[ing] his own limited perspective with universal truth.
I would add that sin for Hispanics failure to be selfis similar. Nevertheless, Niebuhr insisted that minorities have developed a pride of their own to
compensate for their unconscious inferiority complex. From this perspective,
he could paternalistically advise African Americans in their struggle for civil
rights. But such advice, as offered by Niebuhr, was couched within an understanding of the blacks placement within a lower evolutionary stage. In calling
for boycotts against stores and banks that discriminate against African Americans, Niebuhr advised that he [the African American] would need only to fuse
the aggressiveness of the new and young Negro with the patience and forbearance of the old Negro, to rob the former of its vindictiveness and the latter of its
lethargy10 For Niebuhr, the Negros patience and forbearance were not due to
religious virtue, but rather racial weakness.11
Niebuhr seemed to focus more on the disruptive impact that civil rights
could have on Southern culture than the injustices faced by blacks. He advised
African Americans not to make too many demands too quickly. Obtaining civil
rights for blacks was good and fine, as long as it did not disrupt order (read
as white male privilege). Ethicist Traci West reminds us that unfortunately
Niebuhr did not similarly propose that whites like himself should engage in
these tactics in order to challenge racial discrimination at stores and banks
that they used.12 It should not be surprising, as West points out, that during
 Reinhold Niebuhr, Confessions of a Tired Radical, Christian Century 45, no. 35 (August
30, 1928): 1046.
 Valerie Saiving, The Human Situation: A Feminine View, Journal of Religion 40 (1960):
100112, esp. 10911.
 Ibid.
 Ibid., 100.
 It should be noted that many Latinas, in unison with other women of color, have spoken on
and written about the need for them to respond to the sexism existing within their own communities
of color and to the racial, ethnic, and class prejudice existing within the Anglo feminist communities
which ignores the fundamental ways white women benefit from the oppression of women of color.
 Niebuhr, Confessions of a Tired Radical, 1046.
10 Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New
York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1932), 254.
11 Ibid., 268.
12 Traci West, Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Womens Lives Matter (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 13.

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Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 28.1

the 1950s move toward desegregation, Niebuhr expressed sympathy for those
anxious parents who opposed school desegregation due to the cultural differences of the two races. Niebuhr hoped that someday the Negro people will
have the same advantages as our children,13 but not at the price of social order.
Order was to be pursued, even at the price of certain inequalitiesa proposition incongruent with any marginalized community committed to justice. When
writing during his more progressive younger years, Niebuhr made room for
these inequalities, a necessity if we wish society to function properly.14 This
position would eventually lead him during the global disarray that followed the
Second World War to argue for the need of a stable world order in a nuclear
age. Hence Niebuhr made a preferential option for order and U.S. supremacy,
even at the cost of certain inequalities.
Saiving well highlighted the significant differences between masculine and
feminine experiences, but contended that there are significant differences between masculine and feminine experience and that feminine experience reveals
in a more emphatic fashion certain aspects of the human situation which are
present but less obvious in the experience of men.15 While this may be true,
both Saiving and Niebuhr still shared white privilege, a concern that Saiving
herself recognized during a 1987 interview. A lot of things I say here may not
be true . . . of poor whites, or black peoples or Chicanos. What I say comes
out of not only the middle class, but the white middle class.16 And here lies
my concern in any equality conversation among white men and white women
where people of color (beyond just African Americans) are not involved in the
discourse. Is equality for women, and by extension people of color, achieved by
ontologically becoming white males? Saiving admitted that many women were
brought up to believe in the fundamental equality of the sexes and who were
given the same kind of education and the same encouragement to self-realization as their male contemporaries17; nevertheless, it is crucial to realize that
this is a privilege denied Latinos/as throughout the 1960s, as well as in subsequent decades.
While Saiving argued for the two tendencies in the human situation, one
associated with competitiveness and the other with passiveness, I argue that
Hispanics, female and male, are relegated to the role of passiveness.18 Todays
undocumented Latinas/os must invisibly live in the shadows, offering themselves up as living sacrifices for the continuous well-being of documented white
men and women. They perform those merely trivial... thousand-and-one
13 Ibid., 15.
14 Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 128.
15 Saiving, The Human Situation, 101.
16 A Conversation with Valerie Saiving, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 4 (Fall 1988):
99115, quotation on 111.
17 Saiving, The Human Situation, 108.
18 Ibid., 1045.

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routine tasks that Saiving said women do, which lack creative drive but performed cheerfully must be done by someone if life is to go on.19 Emma,
cleaning on Madison Avenue, and my Latino father, mopping floor after floor as
a superintendent in the building where Emma lived, both occupy the feminine
space Saiving described. The need to survive led them to an anxiety to please:
Si Seor, I am honored to clean up after you or pick your produce.
If this is true, then people of color, male and female, have now become
the new white woman, to be domesticated and subdued. For those who historically have been at the pinnacle of hierarchical structures, to be a white male, or
to claim equality with white males, implies both domination and protection of
those relegated to their underside. Because sexism reflects only one aspect of
oppression, it is appropriate to include in our discourse all forms of oppression
imposed on those who fail to live up to the manly standards of being at the pinnacle of hierarchical social structures. To incorporate Saivings concepts today
must be as much about race and class as it is about gender. As a Hispanic male,
I have been taught that history is forged by white male testicles,20 a view that
is reinforced by Niebuhr, especially in his book The Structure of Nations and
Empires, an apology for U.S. imperialism. This leads me to wonder how the
semiotics of testicles affects a Latino/a reading of both Niebuhr and Saiving.
Women, nonwhites, and the poor are marginalized because they lack the
testicles to influence history. When white men look into Jacques Lacans mirror, they recognize themselves as men through the distancing process of negative self-definition: I am what I am not. The formation of the subjects ego
constructs an illusory self-representation through the negation of testicles,
now projected upon others, identified as nonmales. Ascribing femininity to the
other, regardless of gender, forces the construction of female identity to originate with the white man. In fact, the feminine object, in and of itself, is seen as
nothing apart from a masculine subject, which provides unifying purpose.21 The
resulting gaze of the white, elite male inscribes effeminacy upon others who are
not man enough to make history, provide for their family, or resist their
subjugation. The other, if male, may have a penis, but lacks the testicles to use
it. Power and authority exhibit testicles, which are in fact derived from social
structures, traditions, norms, laws, and customs created by men who usually are
white and wealthy.
19 Ibid., 109.
20 My usage of the term testicles is more than simply an idiomatic or vernacular expression
used for rhetorical effectiveness; rather, it is an attempt to encapsulate the vulgarity where those
outside of the white male self-definition find themselves. In an earlier work, written concerning Hispanic machista social structures, I used the more appropriate Spanish word cojones. See MiguelA.
De La Torre, Beyond Machismo: A Cuban Case Study, The Annual of the Society of Christian
Ethics 19 (1999): 21333.
21 Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Interpretation (London: Routledge, 1990),
11445.

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From one perspective, no one really has testicles. The white man lives,
always threatened by the possible loss of his testicles, while the white non-man
is forcefully deprived. The potent symbolic power invested in the testicles both
signals and veils white, elite male socioeconomic power. Constructing those oppressed as feminine allows white men with testicles to assert their privilege by
constructing oppressed others as inhabitants of the castrated realm of the exotic
and primitive. Lacking testicles, the other does not exist, except as designated
by the desire of the one with testicles. The castrated male (read race and class
other) occupies a feminine space where his body is symbolically sodomized as
prelude to the sodomizing of his mind. While white non-men are forced to flee
from their individuality, the white man must constantly attempt to live up to
a false construction. The white non-men become enslaved by the inferiority
engraved upon their flesh by the U.S. ethos, and as such must move beyond the
sin of failing to be self. Likewise, the white man (in other words, Niebuhr and
company) is also enslaved to his own so-called superiority, which flows from his
testicles, and for them, they must move beyond what Niebuhr recognized as
their sin of pride. Saiving was careful not to fall into the trap of linking liberation
to equality with white males; other feminists, unfortunately, have not been so
nuanced in their analysis.
Those from the dominant culture (Niebuhr and Saiving included) and those
communities of color relegated to their underside are alienatedboth suffer
from an obsessive neurotic orientation and both require liberation from their
condition. The need for this liberation is best illustrated by the continuing status quo of mad white men, competing white women, and invisible Hispanics.

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