Content area
Full Text
Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace. By Nancy MacLean. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. xiv, 454 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-674-01909-1.)
In the mid-twentieth century, it would have been hard for the average American to conceive of a black man's serving as the chief executive officer of American Express or a white woman's anchoring the nightly news. Today, such things are not merely facts of life; almost everyone sees them as signs of societal progress. How did such a social and cultural transformation occur? That is the question that motivates Nancy MacLean's history of the battle for job equality, Freedom Is Not Enough.
The title of the book is a fitting phrase that comes from a 1965 speech by President Lyndon B. Johnson at Howard University. Freedom itself was not enough for the African Americans, feminists, Mexican Americans,...