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Jobs and Justice Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace. By Nancy MacLean. New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2006. 454 pages. $35.00 (cloth).
Over the past five decades, the U.S. labor force has undergone profound transformations. In 1950, white men dominated the professions and constituted the vast majority of skilled blue-collar and white-collar workers. Today, women and people of color work in fields ranging from medicine, technology, and business to media, management, and the law. Americans from across the political spectrum claim that they support equal rights in employment and value the new "diversity" in the labor force. Historian Nancy MacLean's important and highly anticipated new book, Freedom Is Not Enough, explores the origins and legacy of this transformation, placing the struggles of African Americans, Mexican Americans, and white women to secure employment at the center of our understanding of postwar social movements, public policy, and the rise of the New Right. Any one of the book's multiple strands would be a significant contribution to our understanding of postwar U.S. history; that Freedom Is Not Enough combines them all into a single, engagingly written narrative is tremendous accomplishment.
At the heart of Freedom Is Not Enough is Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination in employment and enabled social movements to achieve previously unimaginable results. Joining historians such as Timothy B. Tyson, MacLean emphasizes that civil rights legislation did not in and of itself produce social change: employers did not suddenly reform their hiring practices after Title VII became law.1 NAACP labor secretary Herbert Hill explained: "Title VII is not self-enforcing" (76). The push for enforcement began with African American civil rights groups, who were the "prime mover" in the "fight for jobs and justice," and the thousands of blacks who filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). It continued with the work of hundreds of committed attorneys and the staff members at the EEOC and the Labor Department. MacLean suggests that the campaign to end racial discrimination in employment has not occupied a prominent place in the historiography of the Black Freedom Movement because it was conducted primarily by mainstream organizations such as the NAACP and often lacked the drama...