Immigration-policy debates in the early twentieth-century United States centered chiefly on one issue: the literacy test. A literacy requirement would have compelled every adult male immigrant, and some adult female immigrants, to demonstrate that she/he could read before being granted entry to the United States. In her insightful new book The Men and Women We Want, Jeanne Petit offers a thorough and detailed history of the immigration literacy test, from its genesis in the 1890s to its passage in 1917.

Most historians of the literacy test debates – and immigration more generally – have asserted that race and ethnicity lay at the center of controversies over who should enter the US and who could be a member of the nation. Petit offers a corrective, demonstrating that the racial and ethno-national arguments about citizenship and immigration were, in fact, deeply gendered. Petit ultimately shows, quite convincingly, how gender and race intertwined in discussions of immigrants and their effects on American life. To tell this story, Petit focusses on three organizations – the Immigration Restriction League (IRL), the Immigrants' Protective League (IPL), and the American Association of Foreign Language Newspapers (AAFLN) – and their efforts to shape immigration legislation.

Interestingly, Petit shows that both those who wanted to restrict the entry of newcomers and those who wanted to maintain the open door proceeded from a similar set of racial and gendered assumptions. From the 1890s through the 1910s, the IRL maintained that a literacy test would protect the United States by “making sure immigrant men and women were ‘the best specimens to breed from’” (2). The IRL argued that potential male immigrants from outside northwestern Europe were insufficiently masculine and that male and female immigrants from those areas would reproduce with genetically superior native Americans – all of which would destroy the United States' genetic makeup and its future. The AAFLN made a similar link between race and gender, but in a manner that led them to oppose the literacy test. Newcomers from outside northwestern Europe, but not from outside Europe, had the strength and virility to reinvigorate an effete American stock; “breeding” between Europeans would secure the nation's future. Petit notes that both the IRL and AAFLN envisioned a nation that privileged white masculinity, though they differed on the definition of white. The IPL, and its leader Grace Abbott, saw these gender and racial concerns as largely irrelevant to the real problems facing newcomers. Thoroughly opposed to the literacy test, Abbott contended that the federal government ought to enact legislation that protected “economically exploited men and sexually exploited women” (129) who immigrated to the United States.

The IRL and supporters of the literacy test faced enormous difficulties in winning passage of the policy. Presidential politics, the strength of a bipartisan coalition of immigrant-friendly urban politicians, and the influence of well-placed and powerful immigrant advocates (like Theodore Roosevelt) kept the literacy test from becoming law, even as the IRL gained more support for its position – the best example being the 1911 Dillingham Commission. The Great War, according to Petit, shifted the political ground decisively in the favor of the IRL, however. Anti-immigrant sentiment swelled with the war, and the IPL and AAFLN came under vicious attack that essentially robbed them of their influence. On the eve of American entry into the war, Congress passed a literacy test as part of the Immigration Act of 1917. Petit notes, though, that the racial and gendered assumptions that shaped immigration debates at the beginning of the 1900s remained in play through the century.

While the focus on these three organizations allows for a compact narrative, the book also suffers from this tight focus. Missing from Petit's account are the ways in which newspaper and magazine editorial pages, religious organizations, business groups, and immigrant and ethnic organizations contributed to these debates over the literacy test. Surely, since Petit shows that highly charged notions of race and sex lay at the center of immigration affairs, these other segments of society were just as energized as the IRL, IPL, and AAFLN. The streamlined narrative of the three groups ultimately leaves one to wonder about the debate's resonance in the larger political culture.

Despite this gap, Jeanne Petit's The Men and Women We Want is an essential contribution to the scholarship on the vital policy issue of the literacy test. Likewise, her central argument about the interaction of race and gender in immigration affairs sheds new light on the rise of restrictionist immigration policies in the United States.