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Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South (review)

reform while the successes of the reformers opened up new opportunities for organizing. The interaction of the two with ‘the establishment’ was a good deal more complicated. On the one hand, MacLean tells the story of Eleanor Holmes Norton and Ruth Bader who moved from institutional reformer to part of the establishment. On the other hand, groups like the National Association of Manufacturers seemed to bend with the wind: giving in to pressure from the left in the late 1960s, rallying behind the challenges to affirmative action during the 1970s, then opposing the efforts of the Reagan administration to gut affirmative action in the 1980s because its members had learned to ‘cohabit’ with strategies of inclusion and diversity. MacLean’s focus on the centrality of economic inclusion to the civil rights movement is the book’s great conceptual strength, but the story is made compelling by the author’s investigations in to the work of grassroots organizers and activists who gave the movements impetus when their concerns were largely ignored by national politics. This interest in ‘infrapolitics’ extends to the struggles against affirmative action. MacLean tells an intriguing story of how affirmative action created a rupture between Jews and African American advocates during the 1970s. Even more interesting is her contention that Jewish women were critical to the policy reversal of many Jewish groups that defended affirmative action against the Reagan administration’s offensive. One significant gap in the book is its ignoring grassroots opponents of affirmative action. MacLean’s story of opponents focuses on the strategic machinations of legal advocates and the conservative establishment. The voice of ordinary people—one of the book’s great strengths in the case of civil rights advocates— is largely missing on the right. Working-class white women’s opposition to civil rights and its merging with the struggle over reproductive rights were critical to conservative successes after 1970s. Including this perspective would have provided a fuller and much more complex narrative. That said, Freedom Is Not Enough provides a compelling and illuminating interpretation of the victories and defeats of the economic inclusion movement. It allows us to make sense of the new African American inequality as an outcome that neither civil rights advocates nor their opponents sought, but one that provides both opportunities and challenges for those who believe that distributive justice must remain central to the nation’s political discourse.