| Book Review | Law and History Review, 27.1

Book Review

Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. 496. $35.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-674-01909-6); $22.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-674-02749-7).

In her compelling and important new book, Nancy MacLean describes a fundamental transformation of postwar American society from a "culture of exclusion" to one that values race, sex, and ethnic diversity, especially in the workplace (13). According to MacLean, the contours of modern American society—with its cultural commitment to diversity accompanied by some continuing economic stratification—are the joint handiwork of the heroic efforts of civil rights activists and the conservative response to those efforts. In describing the always complicated and double-sided dynamic of creating a more inclusive workplace, MacLean has produced a historiographic powerhouse. She makes substantial contributions to American social, cultural, and political history too numerous to mention here.

At the heart of the book is MacLean's unearthing of the hard work of women and minority activists who took advantage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, engaged the administrative machinery of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and revolutionized the American workplace. MacLean's depiction of litigation as a social process of grassroots activism and administrative response offers an invaluable look into how law on the books translates into law on the ground. Because MacLean takes employment—rather than the flashier and better excavated ground of education, voting rights, or public accommodations—as her focus, she also importantly reorients the history of civil rights. MacLean views employment as central to notions of citizenship, and she emphasizes the preeminence of workplace change in the larger civil rights struggle and in the broader transformation of American society.

MacLean also breaks new ground in joining a growing but still small group of scholars engaging the history of contemporary American conservatism. She describes how initial opposition to workplace change took the form of outright condemnation of equality most closely associated with southern white conservatives. When the locus of controversy moved from ending formal legal discrimination to achieving equality through quotas and other forms of affirmative action, however, both the arguments and their purveyors changed. Once some Jewish organizations—which had long supported black civil rights—opposed quotas, a new brand of legal and social conservatives saw an opening for a more refined but equally staunch opposition to continued racial change. In the past, conservatives had opposed the very idea of equality. Now they embraced a version of "colorblind" equality that enabled them to capture support from mainstream whites while still cabining possibilities for real progress.

By telling these usually segregated stories of progressive change and conservative backlash in tandem, MacLean vividly illustrates the deep relationship between resistance, change, and resistance to change. MacLean highlights the important role of political realignments in determining how much—and what kind—of civil rights progress would ultimately take place. She also highlights the complex dynamics of cultural change: on the one hand, the discourse of equality has become virtually hegemonic; on the other hand, it has been drained of much of its transformative power. The conservative movement both stymied affirmative action in the political arena and largely succeeded in appropriating the discourse of equality in service of that goal. MacLean's reconstruction of the ways in which even progressive historians and journalists have unwittingly propagated the conservative narrative provides precisely the kind of corrective that recent calls for a "long" civil rights history have demanded.

MacLean is too sophisticated a historian to fall prey to the temptation to lay the blame for all unrealized progress at the feet of conservatives, however. Rather, she points to an increasingly unfavorable economic climate as well. As Title VII was passed, promising nondiscrimination in industry, industrial jobs were disappearing. As women began gaining access to the building trades in the late 1970s, the construction industry entered a tailspin. Thus, while MacLean is upbeat about the degree of inclusion in the twenty-first-century American workplace, she is also reflective about the ways in which cultural change has outstripped real economic gains for women and minority workers.

MacLean's nuanced causal story successfully interweaves political, cultural, and economic forces. But it fails to account adequately for the law itself. MacLean is a social and cultural, not a strictly legal, historian of American race relations and civil rights. To the extent that MacLean has an implicit theory of law, it is an instrumentalist one. Law—for her, in the form of Title VII—can create social change. Indeed, MacLean quite convincingly demonstrates the extent to which grassroots activists succeeded in promoting legal reform, which in turn transformed the terms of inclusion in contemporary American society.

But MacLean largely overlooks the potential failures of the law itself. Her explanations for the limited efficacy of Title VII are external to law—deindustrialization, stagflation, political backlash. Yet Title VII itself was a fairly modest law. Unlike earlier efforts to secure nondiscrimination in employment, Title VII did not guarantee full employment or present any sort of significant challenge to the basic structure of the labor market. It simply protected against discrimination. Thus, although the conservative movement certainly hijacked the language of nondiscrimination to purposes quite at odds with those of black activists, colorblindness was nonetheless embedded in the tools the civil rights movement used from the beginning. MacLean overlooks the possibility that Title VII's failures were intrinsic to the law and understates the consequences of choosing particular legal strategies rather than others. While her movement activists were busy implementing the explicitly nondiscriminatory and nonstructural Title VII, they were perhaps bypassing opportunities to pursue structural economic change through other mechanisms. The very successes of Title VII might thus have cabined the possibilities for other kinds of economic success.

These disciplinary questions aside, Freedom Is Not Enough is a tremendous achievement. It is analytically sophisticated and beautifully written, meticulously researched and deeply aspirational. It is essential reading for anyone interested in postwar America, even remotely, and highly recommended for everyone else.

Risa L. Goluboff

University of Virginia

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.