Unequal Freedom

The inequalities that persist in America have deep historical roots. Evelyn Nakano Glenn untangles this complex history in a unique comparative regional study from the end of Reconstruction to the eve of World War II. During this era the country experienced enormous social and economic changes with the abolition of slavery, rapid territorial expansion, and massive immigration, and struggled over the meaning of free labor and the essence of citizenship as people who previously had been excluded sought the promise of economic freedom and full political rights.After a lucid overview of the concepts of the free worker and the independent citizen at the national level, Glenn vividly details how race and gender issues framed the struggle over labor and citizenship rights at the local level between blacks and whites in the South, Mexicans and Anglos in the Southwest, and Asians and haoles (the white planter class) in Hawaii. She illuminates the complex interplay of local and national forces in American society and provides a dynamic view of how labor and citizenship were defined, enforced, and contested in a formative era for white-nonwhite relations in America.

This is an important and timely book. Evelyn Nakano Glenn has employed an innovative approach to the complex questions she raises by providing a historical overview of trends unfolding at the national level, and then exploring the operation of these trends at more local levels through case studies of the American South, the Southwest, and Hawaii. Unequal Freedom is a very smart and thoughtful synthetic analysis on the vexed questions of race, class, gender, citizenship, and labor in a critical period of U.S. history., Glenn has put her finger on the two key institutional sites that have been central to the structuring of both racial and gender inequalities. This makes an important contribution to our knowledge of the working of gender and race in American society., Although contemporary scholars often seek the integration of race, class and gender into a single coherent analysis of inequality, Glenn is rare indeed in offering just such a balanced, comprehensive and practical understanding of all three interlocking forms of oppression in American history and politics. Vivid with telling detail and yet sweeping in scope, Unequal Freedom shows how the interplay of gender, race and class shaped actual citizenship and labor markets in the United States, leaving a legacy of inequality that we are far from overcoming today. The similarities and differences among the South, Southwest and Hawaii provide a convincing picture of how local conditions produce specific forms of class, gender and race relations. The attention Glenn gives not only to such structures but to the varied patterns of resistance by different groups in particular settings also greatly enriches our historical understanding of what is now sometimes mistakenly seen as a new politics of identity., Unequal Freedom delivers the goods on scholars' longstanding promises to study race, class, and gender as they were actually experienced in the U.S. past, in all of their dynamic interplay and regional particularity. It is a work of breathtaking synthesis and deep originality. The emphasis on both labor markets and on substantive rights of citizenship allows Evelyn Nakano Glenn to set local stories in which quite different demographics of race are at play in national and global contexts. This book changes how we teach about the centrality and variety of inequality in U.S. history. Indeed, it changes how we think about those critical questions., A hugely capacious and penetratingly insightful work, Unequal Freedom shows how race and gender are inseparable in the constitutions and consequences of citizenship and labor. And with equal attention to national and local spaces, historical and contemporary times, and repressive and resistant forces, this book exemplifies the kind of scholarship that can transform our thinking and our lives.

Evelyn Nakano Glenn is Professor of Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.