In the 1950s, the exclusion of women and of black and Latino men from higher-paying jobs was so universal as to seem normal to most Americans. Today, diversity in the workforce is a point of pride. How did such a transformation come about?

In this bold and groundbreaking work, Nancy MacLeanshows how African-American and later Mexican-American civil rights activists and feminists concluded that freedom alone would not suffice: access to jobs at all levels is a requisite of full citizenship. Tracing the struggle to open the American workplace to all, MacLean chronicles the cultural and political advances that have irrevocably changed our nation over the past fifty years.

Freedom Is Not Enoughreveals the fundamental role jobs play in the struggle for equality. We meet the grassroots activists—rank-and-file workers, community leaders, trade unionists, advocates, lawyers—and their allies in government who fight for fair treatment, as we also witness the conservative forces that assembled to resist their demands. Weaving a powerful and memorable narrative, MacLean demonstrates the life-altering impact of the Civil Rights Act and the movement for economic advancement that it fostered.

The struggle for jobs reached far beyond the workplace to transform American culture. MacLean enables us to understand why so many came to see good jobs for all as the measure of full citizenship in a vital democracy. Opening up the workplace, she shows, opened minds and hearts to the genuine inclusion of all Americans for the first time in our nation's history.

Freedom Is Not Enoughexamines not just the dramatic events and legal breakthroughs of the 1950s and '60s, but also the complex grassroots struggles to implement and enforce the new laws, and the workers who carried new formal rights into hostile workplaces in order to make them real...Her powerful narrative suggests how a more diverse working class might draw on past traditions of struggle to get back on the offensive at work.

Maclean’s book is a remarkable achievement: narrating in a single compelling, lucid, and reasonably comprehensive manner the American Civil Rights movement (particularly as it applied to labor struggle), women’s fight against “Jane Crow laws,” Mexican Americans’ push for full citizenship, and the complex relationship between Jewish Americans and African Americans in the latter halfof the twentieth century. She traces the subtle and dramatic shifts in American conceptions of race, gender, and work.

'With a sweep rare in history books, Nancy MacLean shows how affirmative action and the civil rights movement transformed the experience of every group in American society during the last half century. A bold and dramatic contribution.'

[An] important new book...Effectively melding social, legal, and political history, the book makes clear just how central the assault on workplace discrimination was to the African American civil rights struggle and the movements it spawned...It is a broad transformation of hearts and minds, as well as hiring practices and political affinities, that MacLean seeks to explain, and she accomplishes much in less than 350 pages of text. For showing how African American activists set in motion a fundamental shift in American workplaces from unthinking acceptance of exclusion to celebration of inclusion and diversity, Freedom Is Not Enoughdeserves a wide audience.

One of the most significant contributions of MacLean's work is her examination of the backlash engendered by economic inclusion and its continued impact on current attitudes and practices...MacLean builds a well-documented argument that details how conservatives...turned a conversation based on past injustices to one based on "color-blindness."

MacLean's book...is vital to understanding where the struggle for civil rights has gone since the 1960s, and the case she makes for equal-employment laws is powerful.

This excellent history shows how real equality was only possible when African Americans, other minority groups, and other second-class citizens like women had equal access to work, when good jobs were no longer the sole provenance of white men...One part that had me glued to the text was that of the birth and development of the contemporary American conservatism movement in 1955...Reading the arguments and strategies of William F. Buckley, Jr., and other leaders of this movement was absolutely shocking to me...So was realizing that this conservative movement, born to defeat social justice, has the same intention and increasing power to do that today. This book really helped me see more deeply into very important issues, and I strongly recommend it.

There is a power in the tale [MacLean] tells--of a world remade and then of reform tragically deflected--that makes this a can't-put-down book. It will spark vigorous argument and provocative discourse. It may even spur some improvements in our public life.

By placing Black and Latino struggles for jobs and justice at the center of her story, Nancy MacLean has boldly re-written the history of the Civil Rights movement as well as 20th century American political and economic history. While lunch counters were powerful symbolic sites of contestation, the transformation of the workplace holds the secret to the transformation of America. More than a hamburger, indeed.

Superb and provocative...In a bold and sweeping new interpretation, [MacLean] argues that ordinary working people pushed forward the challenges to the centuries-old barriers that excluded women and minorities from America's best jobs...But what's new and extraordinary about MacLean's work is her ability to incorporate the histories of several groups at once. She tells the story of African-American, Mexican-American and female workers in tandem, even while recognizing that their struggles to break into once-off-limits jobs took different paths...MacLean uses the story of the struggle for workplace equality to consider nothing less than the major political realignments of the past quarter century...This is contemporary history at its best.

The civil rights movement was about much more than abstract legal freedom, formal equality, or voting rights. It was, as Nancy MacLean shows in the sweeping national survey, also about access to good jobs...This book — based on primary research in well over a hundred manuscript collections 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.

Nancy MacLean has written a powerful, important and luminous account of the uncanny synergy between three social movements: the magisterial civil rights struggle for jobs and freedom, the feminist quest for equity in the late 20th century, and the conservative political jujitsu that adopted the rhetoric of inclusion in order to pull the rug out from under the very idea of governmental reforms.

Nancy MacLeanis Professor of History andAfrican American Studies at Northwestern University.

List of Illustrations

Prologue: Jobs and Belonging

Part I: African Americans Shake the Old Order

1. The Rightness of Whiteness

2. The Fight Begins

3. Civil Rights at Work

Part II: Others Reposition Themselves

4. Women Challenge "Jane Crow"

5. Are Mexican Americans "Whites" or "People of Color"?

6. Jewish Americans Divide over Justice

7. Conservatives Shift from "Massive Resistance" to "Color-Blindness"

Part III: The Challenge of the New Order

8. The Lonesomeness of Pioneering

9. The Struggle for Inclusion since the Reagan Era

Epilogue

Abbreviations in Notes

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index