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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2002).

IN UNEQUAL FREEDOM, Evelyn Nakano Glenn demonstrates, deftly and often quite brilliantly, that labor relations and citizenship have been mutually reinforcing and that ideologies of race and gender have fundamentally shaped both. In an account focused on the period 1870 to 1930, this book offers both theory and narrative, as well as a serious challenge to the East Coast, black/white bias in scholarship on US race relations. This is an important book that deserves widespread attention.

Unequal Freedom balances a sociologist's attention to structure and theory with an historian's interest in thick description. In her opening chapter, Glenn proposes an "integrated framework" for analyzing gender and race. One cannot be understood without the other, she argues. Moreover, categories of race and gender — including blackness and whiteness, maleness and femaleness, Mexicanness and Angloness — are interdependent. One half of each pair cannot be understood without reference to the other. Moreover, the meanings of such terms are constantly being remade. An accurate study of power relations and difference in United States history therefore requires an approach that looks at real relationships among people, as they happened in particular places and times.

Glenn next provides a useful synthesis of recent scholarship on citizenship and labour in two narrative chapters. Her overall argument is that "the concepts of liberal citizenship and free labor developed and evolved in tandem and in response to political, economic, and social transformations over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." (2) Her discussion of citizenship emphasizes the contradictory history of American universalism, implied in the idea that "all men are created equal," and exclusion, as manifested in the decidedly unequal treatment of women, poor people, and people of non-European origin. A linked chapter on labour traces the intertwined histories of "freedom and coercion" in US history, emphasizing that the ideology of "free labour" often masked a reliance on the labour of people whose choices were so severely circumscribed as to make them only nominally free.

Having laid this conceptual groundwork, Glenn offers detailed case studies of the dynamics of citizenship and labour from 1870 to 1930 in three primarily agricultural regions: the South, the Southwest, and Hawaii. The South, where whites subjected African Americans to increasingly systematic regimes of sharecropping and racial segregation, was the most rigidly structured of these three societies. Mexicans in the Southwest, like African Americans, were technically recognized as citizens by the federal government. But Mexicans' racial status was more ambiguous: in some contexts, some people of Mexican origin were understood to be "white" and therefore entitled to more rights and respect than were people of colour. Hawaii, with its minuscule middle class, was the most dramatically stratified of the three regions. In her analysis of Hawaii, Glenn focuses on relations between Japanese immigrants and white elites (haoles). She shows that the second generation of Japanese residents (Nisei) — born in the US and therefore citizens — were critical in claiming new rights that allowed many to escape an exploitative plantation labour system. The many differences among these regions notwithstanding, Glenn shows that in all three cases white elites used their power in political and economic life to build (often through coercion) large, non-white labour forces to do the grueling work of producing wealth.

To her credit, Glenn looks at racial ideologies as well as material circumstances. Across regions, she shows, elites mobilized ideas about racial difference to serve their own ends. They found ways of justifying the denial of basic rights by arguing that non-white men were — variously — uncivilized, lazy, dirty, or weak, while non-white women were exotic, loose, insensate, or incompetent. Such ideologies helped elites to reconcile the universalistic promises of American citizenship with the exclusionary practices of American capitalism.

Unequal Freedom is more than a story of raw exploitation, however. As Glenn demonstrates, Mexicans, African Americans, and the Japanese resisted oppression both directly and indirectly. They migrated away from repressive conditions, committed violence against employers or overseers, formed labour organizations, and went on strike. They also took steps to strengthen their own communities by, among other things, advocating for schooling, cultivating civic associations, and publishing community newspapers. Glenn shows that racialized communities were complex and often divided among themselves. Gender relations were contested and remade within these communities, for instance, and middle-class leaders argued over strategies for educating the population.

This work of synthesis makes important interventions in the existing literature. Glenn's analysis of gender provides a useful correction to studies that posit or imply that race is "genderless." Her insistence that labour relations shaped citizenship is a valuable antidote to a growing literature on citizenship that often disregards economic relations. And perhaps most important, Unequal Freedom demonstrates that racial formations in the US were far more than a drama in black and white. While Glenn is certainly not the first person to make this argument, her use of comparative analysis and the breadth of this work should prove beyond any doubt that, well before the policy changes that transformed immigration in the second half of the 20th century, people thought of Japanese and Mexicans, of haoles and Anglos — as well as of blacks and whites — when they thought about "race" in the US.

Glenn treats all three regions as distinct entities, but there are intriguing hints of an interconnected history here as well. For instance, Carey McWilliams described the recruitment of Mexicans in Texas to grow sugar beets in Colorado as an "underground railroad" in which growers' agents spirited away labourers at night. (158) Ray Stannard Baker, famous for his study of the Jim Crow South, compared the haole elite in Hawaii to the white planter class of the "Old South." (205) Were the South and black/white relations a template for racial formations elsewhere in the US? Unequal Freedom suggests that we need to know more about how people imported and exported racial ideas and practices among US regions.

It is worth mentioning that some of Glenn's analytical and organizational decisions lead to telling omissions. Her choice to analyze a dyad of race relations in each of three regions precludes, for example, an examination of the role of Native Americans (whose status as a racialized group was enormously important in this period) or of the complex, multiethnic nature of society in Hawaii. Perhaps more problematic, however, is the almost complete absence of poor white people from Glenn's discussion of "whites" and "Anglos" in the South and Southwest. Historians have long been preoccupied with the role of poor whites in shaping citizenship and labour relations in the South in this period. Steven Hahn and J. Morgan Kousser, among others, have shown that elite whites used white supremacist ideology not just to oppress African Americans, but also to draw reluctant poor whites into their camp. In this critical struggle to forge a cross-class white identity, elites were forced to make significant compromises in their own agenda. And as historian Neil Foley has demonstrated, white elites in Texas were far from convinced that poor whites were "white" in the first place. Indeed, analyzing poor whites (as well as upwardly mobile people of color, whom Glenn does treat in more detail) forces a consideration of just how messy and intertwined the categories of gender, class, and race have been. Including poor whites would have complicated Glenn's already formidable task, but it would also have yielded a richer and somewhat less schematic study.

This dilemma should be instructive to those who call for fewer case studies and more synthesis: Is it possible to convey the complexity of history while, at the same time, covering large swaths of time and space and advancing new ideas? Overall, Glenn has met this challenge with great panache. Unequal Freedom is an exceptional work that not only cogently summarizes existing literature but also makes original contributions of its own.


Kate Masur University of Maryland

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