The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a civil-rights organization founded in 1909 to fight racial discrimination through legal and political action. The book focuses on the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund (LDF), led by Thurgood Marshall, which employed Constance Baker Motley as its only female lawyer for many years. Motley helped write the brief in Brown v. Board of Education and won nine of the 10 cases she argued before the Supreme Court. Yet, when Marshall became a judge in 1961, he chose a white man, Jack Greenberg, to lead the LDF rather than Motley. The episode complicates the civil-rights movement’s heroic narrative and illustrates The Intersecting Burdens of Race and Gender, as even this leading civil-rights institution didn’t always extend leadership to its most accomplished women.

The New Deal was the set of federal programs that Franklin D. Roosevelt launched in the 1930s in response to the Great Depression. O’Donnell presents Frances Perkins, Roosevelt’s labor secretary, as its primary architect. Perkins secured his commitment to a broad agenda before accepting the post, and the result included Social Security, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, the 40-hour workweek, and limits on child labor. O’Donnell traces its origin to tragedy, quoting Perkins’s claim that the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was “the day the New Deal was born” (246). Bethune, head of Roosevelt’s informal “Black Cabinet,” worked to ensure that programs reached Black youth. This mattered because the original Social Security Act excluded agricultural and domestic workers, occupations held largely by Black Americans. The New Deal proves that women reshaped US democracy from within the halls of power, not just from its margins.

The book considers segregation through the lens of the Jim Crow laws enforced in the Southern US from the Reconstruction era up to the mid-1960s. This legislation enforced racial segregation and suppressed Black voting, disenfranchising Black voters through various means like poll taxes and literary tests taxes even after the 19th Amendment. However, the book shows that legal segregation extended far beyond the South. After Mary Tape won her case against school exclusion in San Francisco, legislators created separate schools for Chinese American children, foreshadowing the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (172). The term anchors the book’s argument that the nation’s laws contradicted its ideals, illustrating The Hypocrisy of American Democratic Ideals. It also contextualizes the New Orleans Four’s 1960 school desegregation and Constance Baker Motley’s legal campaign against segregation.

Title IX, part of the Education Amendments of 1972, prohibits sex-based discrimination in any federally funded education program. O’Donnell centers this legislation to illustrate her conclusion that women moved “from margin to center, from inclusion to influence, from breakthrough to normalcy” (308). This development is exemplified by Representative Patsy Mink, the first woman of color in Congress. O’Donnell credits Mink as the law’s principal author and frames it as a product of Mink’s lived experience: Mink was denied entry to medical school because she was a woman, and the law dramatically expanded women’s athletic and scholarship opportunities. The book highlights Title IX as part of the “domino effect” of 1970s legal victories that answered grievances like the denial of education, which was listed in 1848’s Declaration of Sentiments.