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AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN AMERICAN CULTURE Nancy MacLean. Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace. New York: Russell Sage; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. xii + 454 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, and index. $35.00.
The civil rights movement was about much more than an abstract legal freedom, formal equality, or voting rights. It was, as Nancy MacLean shows in this sweeping national survey, also about access to good jobs. As many activists understood from the beginning, civil rights were hollow without economic justice, and it took the social movements of the 1950s through the 1970s to dismantle what MacLean calls a "culture of exclusion," which relegated men of subordinated ethnic groups and women of all groups to the worst paying and least esteemed jobs (p. 13). The black freedom movement led the way, providing the women's and Chicano movements new models of organizing and new legal tools for people determined to get jobs offering good wages and dignity. A conservative movement vigorously resisted these efforts, and one of the greatest strengths of Freedom Is Not Enough is MacLean's sustained analysis of conservative tactics alongside her analysis of progressive social movement dynamics. She shifts our attention from recent studies of working- class racism by showing that racism was also an intellectual position, elaborated and strenuously upheld by conservative elites. This book-based on primary research in well over a hundred manuscript collections across the country and synthesizing a vast amount of secondary literature-is a vital contribution to the emerging field of late-twentieth-century history. Readable and engaging, moving effortlessly between biographies of ordinary people and analyses of movement dynamics, it offers much to the student of politics, social movements, African American history, Chicano/a history, women's history, and conservatism.
MacLean's book operates on two levels. On one level are the efforts of African Americans, women of all ethnicities, and Chicanos/as to get better jobs and the efforts of conservatives to restrict their access to these jobs. These conflicts took place at workplaces, in unions, in the courts, in legislatures, and at demonstrations; they were propelled by social movements and given shape by legislation and judicial rulings. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, excluded groups managed to win many of these battles, but structural economic problems and...