Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Palmer, Bryan D.

BOOK REVIEWS
Karen Dubinsky, Catherine Krull, Susan Lord, Sean Mills & Scott
Rutherford, eds., New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of
Global Consciousness ( Toronto: Between the Lines, 2009).
Do you like your ‘Sixties’ hard-boiled or over easy; well-done or bleu?  No mat-
ter, the menu of this eclectic collection accommodates most tastes.
That is both the strength and the weakness of this compilation, gath-
ered together from the many papers presented to the June 2007 Queen’s
University conference on the Global Sixties. The editors revel in the complicat-
ed nature and legacies of the 1960s, and while they offer few injunctions about
what the decade actually was, t h ey are adamant about thre e key interp re t ive mat t e rs.
First, they construct the memory and scholarship of the Sixties as a
“dominant logic” that they challenge. That logic is perhaps best (if bluntly)
summed up in the opening essay, Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi’s “Whose 1960s?,”
which addresses gender, resistance, and liberation in Palestine. Abdulhadi
asserts that the narrative of the 1960s has been for too long a property right of
“the U.S. white heterosexual male radicals (in particular, members of the
Students for a Democratic Society)” (13). New World Coming’s second and third
premises flow from acceptance of this questionable social construction by
insisting on shifting the gaze away from the United States, attending to a range
of happenings elsewhere, and extending our view of the “long sixties” to
include anti-colonial struggles of the 1950s (Algeria) through the 1980s
(Nicaragua). Accenting resistance to colonialism, this edited collection frames
the 1960s, as did Frederic Jameson some time ago, within an implicit paradigm
of “Third Worldism,” in spite of an illuminating epilogue by Chinese scholar
Tina Mai Chen that rightly questions much that shores up such a perspective.
No one can possibly argue against extending the reach of our appreci-
ation of the 1960s globally, although just how the decade shaped world con-
sciousness requires more discussion and explanation than is present in this vol-
ume. Nor is there anything inherently wrong with striving to grasp the impor-
tance of continuities within history, making connections that have been
obscured or ignored. This inevitably creates understandings of linkages across
decades and through eras.
That said, if we are to understand the 1960s as anti-colonial, anti-
imperialist struggle (which of course was one large part of the decade’s tumul-
tuousness), then we can extend the origins of the 1960s back to the 19th century
and earlier, and reach the Sixties forward to the present. For as long as there
have been Empires (which, of course, still exist) there have been struggles
against colonialism and imperialism.
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My own view is that we need to situate the rupture that constituted the
1960s within an understanding of important historical continuities. This does not
necessarily demand submerging the decade’s uniqueness within a ‘long’ peri-
odization that inevitably understates the peculiarities of the decade. I see no
contradiction in recognizing rupture within continuity, just as I do not think such
an approach valorizes what the editors and some authors present in this collec-
tion regard as a conventional accent on the nature of Sixties radicalizations.
What is perhaps most unique about the global consciousness of the
1960s was how youth in the advanced capitalist political economies co-joined
their struggles against various oppressions with the fights against racism in their
homelands and elsewhere, linking their politics of wide-ranging challenge to
anti-colonial movements around the world. It was an anti-war decade that took
various wars of position into almost all corners of everyday life. By the end of
the 1960s, many Pandora’s Boxes had been pried open, among the most impor-
tant being those that would come to be associated with anti-capitalist workers’
struggles, women’s liberation, aboriginal militancy, and gay/lesbian activism. To
suggest that attention to what was called in the 1960s “counterplanning on the
shop floor,” the Parisian events of May ’68, the Prague Spring, or the New York
City Columbia University occupation has somehow displaced attention to
Palestine, Vietnam, Cuba, or China, and the events that unfolded there over the
course of one of the 20th century’s most raucous and rebellious decades, strikes
me as odd. We need thought about, reflection on, and study of all such histories.
The point is that Ian McKay’s interesting account of his High School
radicalization in Sarnia in 1968 would have been, I think, unfathomable a decade
earlier. The influential developments he cites – Paris burning, the Black Panther
Party, the victories of the Viet Cong, magazines such as Ramparts or the widely-
read book, The Student as Nigger – were simply not there in any meaningful sense
in 1958. A fifteen-year old with McKay’s inclinations in the 1950s would have
been a rare bird. In the 1960s there were flocks of us.
A collection as rich and abundant as New World Coming is bound to fos-
ter disagreement about which of the 43 essays most effectively make their
points. Even organizing these short papers into coherent sections must have
been a challenge, for there is inevitably overlap among the four groupings of
articles labeled Nation-Decolonization-Liberation; Cultural Citizenship;
Mobilizing Bodies; and Legacies of the Sixties. But the very orchestration and
ordering in these kinds of parts tells us much about the editors’ perspectives.
In the opening section on Nation-Decolonization-Liberation, Canada
is addressed by McKay and Gary Kinsman’s account of the national security
state’s war on gays. There is, sadly, no discussion of Quebec’s vibrant, and
undeniably globally conscious, struggle for national liberation. Two essays on
Black Power in the United States come close to canceling each other out. Van
Gosse’s unnecessarily polemical insistence that Black Power was not a break with
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mainstream ‘civil rights-ism’ and indeed engaged the nation state by “moving
into the master’s house” (a process involving election of black mayors, the
establishment of a Congressional Black Caucus, and the mobilization of the
National Black Political Convention in 1972), contrasts with Dan Berger’s dis-
cussion of the Republic of New Afrika movement. This militant voice of
Black Power challenged that very master’s house, demanding national liberation
and reparations for the wrongs done to African Americans. Other essays chart
chapters of the global 1960s in their attention to a range of topics, including the
Soviet reaction to 1968, Latin American Maoism, and trade union-aboriginal
relations around uranium mining in the southwestern United States.
Perhaps the core section of the book is the one designated Cultural
Citizenship. It showcases the attraction to cultural struggle (and interpreting
culture as struggle) that in fact animates the bulk of the contributions to this
volume. Guatemalan poets, Cuban films, Japan’s Olympiad, soul music in Dar
es Salaam, Italian rock, Swedish rural theatre of revolt, Edinburgh festivals, Sao
Paulo and Chicago slums, Canadian peacekeeping in the Congo, antiwar travel
to Hanoi, and political posters are all the subject of mostly fascinating essays,
some of which nonetheless seem distanced from any engagement with what can
be meaningfully presented as “the global sixties.”
At their best, these essays are suggestive of important tissues of infer-
ence, in which suggested connections need further elaborations. Is it likely, as
Marilisa Merolla suggests, that the rock music of Italy’s 1950s was, in its soft
articulation of anguish, alienation, and abandonment, easily translated into “the
generational crisis” of 1968? (195)  Did the “reappropriation, reworking, and
revaluing” of Negritude that accompanied the contested introduction of James
Brown to Tanzania or the showcasing of African American artists in Senegal’s
First World Festival of Negro Arts create sites for “a dialogue about the possi-
bility of creating a global blackness?” (178, 186)  To answer such questions we
need to interrogate not only the new spaces of inquiry evident in this volume,
but the still obscured meanings of more conventional topics. We will need to
examine not only Elvis in Rome, but Bob Dylan (surprisingly absent from this
volume, he is mentioned, if my reading is thorough enough, by only one con-
tributor, the former Young Lord and current New York City trade unionist
Jaime Veve) in Greenwich Village and Newport. We will need to look more
closely, not only at James Brown’s “Please Please Please” (1959), but at
Muhammad Ali’s trickster rhymes and the strategic defences and demands of
Robert Williams, Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton.
Sheila Rowbotham kicks off the third section of New World Coming,
“Mobilizing Bodies,” with an evocative memoir of 1968 as a springboard for
women’s liberation. Illuminating essays in this part of the book tend to address
women, two of the best being Molly Geidel’s discussion of gender, develop-
ment and the United States Peace Corps and Lara Campbell’s invaluable
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reminder that women, too, left the United States in opposition to the Vietnam
War, and that their contribution to the politics of the 1960s in Canada was deci-
sive. Environmentalism figures in this section as well, with essays on scientists
as a Sixties vanguard and Agent Orange and dioxin as chemicals whose destruc-
t iveness re a ched out of the decade into our own eras of e c o l ogical consciousness.
One of Canada’s leading New Left figures, James Harding, takes this
theme of environmentalism into the final section of New World Coming, con-
tributing an important memoir of how the anti-nuclear origins of 1960s radical-
ization continued in the ecological movement of recent decades. Other com-
mentators on the “legacies of the 1960s” of note include David Austin, Cary
Fraser, and Jaime Veve.
Austin, who has written wonderfully on Black Caribbean-Canadians
and the 1960s provides a decisively important essay on the little-known
Montreal-based Caribbean Conference Committee and its embrace of the poli-
tics of C. L. R. James. The significance of the Cold War and the nuclear arms
race of the 1960s is perhaps best illuminated in Cary Fraser’s discussion of how
nu clear policies unleashed a destru c t ive colonialism from the Indian Ocean to Cuba.
Jaime Veve deserves, in my mind, to close this review. More than any
other contributor to New World Coming, Veve sums up the unique character of
the 1960s and translates the radicalization that constituted a decisive rupture
into later and ongoing struggles. Like Suze Rotolo, whose recent memoir of
Greenwich Village in the 1960s declared unequivocally that, “The sixties were an
era that spoke a language of inquiry and curiosity and rebelliousness against the
stifling and repressive political and social culture of the decade that preceded,”
Veve remembers “a time when a young generation with little historical connec-
tion to previous opposition movements or organizational frameworks took
upon itself to present a defiant challenge to the status quo.” (399)  Almost alone
among the contributors, most of whom see Barack Obama as promising some-
thing of the 1960s in our own times, Veve castigates the current Democratic
President for speaking dismissively of the need to overcome the “psychodrama”
of the 1960s (400). Veve lives with the Sixties still, not as a property right of a
masculine ‘A m e r i c a n’ l e f t , but as a commitment to social tra n s fo rm at i o n , writ larg e .
If the struggle for that end has changed somewhat, so too has it con-
tinued. Always global in its reach, the ethos of 1960s radicalism remains a
provocation to the politics of conformity, a prod to the complacent acquisitive
individualism of a consumer capitalism now obviously very long in its barred
tooth, and a push to never settle for the lesser of any evils, but to demand the
best that can be achieved (and more), so that the worst that is on offer can be
thwarted.
Bryan D. Palmer
Trent University
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Karen Dubinsky, Catherine Krull, Susan Lord, Sean Mills, & Scott Rutherford, eds., "New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness" (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2009)

Jowett, S. D.

Bryan Palmer, Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious
E r a (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
With Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era, Bryan Palmer has
made an impressive bid for authority in an area of historical inquiry that has,
until fairly recently, remained sorely understudied in Canada. Weighing in at
over 400 pages, the book covers most of the major issues of the decade without
succumbing to the nostalgia of generational rebellion or that tired triad of “sex,
drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll,” and it is therefore likely to displace Doug Owram’s
somewhat dated effort as the text on Canada’s Sixties.
The book takes as its central theme “the ironies of identity”: the crack-
ing of consensus around Canada’s sense of itself as a British colony, the strug-
gle for national autonomy under the juggernaut of postwar American hegemo-
ny, and the multiple voices that challenged official understandings of ‘Canada’
during a particularly nationalist period. The deterioration of Canada’s national
identity during this period has been dealt with before, and so Palmer’s argument
does not seem all that groundbreaking. Despite dressing it up in the sexy garb
of ‘irony’, at bottom Canada’s 1960s is yet another discussion of Canadian
national identity — a subject that has become such a scholarly obsession that
one wonders if we are becoming trapped in a rather stale interpretive paradigm.
In light of this notion it is more helpful to read Palmer’s book as a his-
toricisation of our obsession with national identity rather than as yet another
projection of it. The rebellious decade saw challenges put to the unifying
notion of Canada as a Northern outpost of the British Empire — challenges
that fragmented our sense of national identity so totally that we have not yet
recovered any viable alternative. Yet Palmer exhibits unease about any dominant
notion of Canadian identity, and he closes his book on an appropriately ironic
note, asking: “Is national identity really what we need?” (430).
Much like the decade itself, Palmer’s approach is at times rather frag-
mentary. He opens with a discussion of Canadian political economy and the
dollar crisis of 1962, thus constructing the foundations of his work on a struc-
tural analysis of Canada’s economic situation. But the pace then shifts dramati-
cally with several chapters that are largely narrative and biographical, where
characters such as Diefenbaker, Munsinger, Trudeau and McLuhan become foils
against which Palmer hones his discussion of identity. The latter parts of the
book are better, as Palmer seems to hit his stride with discussions of how New
Left student syndicalism, wildcat workers’ revolts, radical Québécois nationali s m ,
and Red Power each ch a l l e n ged notions of Canadian identity in various way s.
His discussion of Quebec is particularly welcome, given that this is a
subject often dealt with rather superficially by Anglophone scholars — although
he would have benefitted from a deeper engagement with the existing francoph-
one literature. Palmer’s analysis of Pierre Vallières White Niggers of America is
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excellent, highlighting both the anti-capitalist critique and the text’s indebtedness
to black power politics and national liberation movements across the globe.
Hopefully these efforts will go a long way towards revitalizing a book that
Palmer rightly identifies as “arguably one of Canada’s most quintessential New
Left text[s]” (338). His discussion of Red Power is equally important, as the
experiences of N at ive peoples remain t h e most understudied aspect of the decade.
Palmer’s failure to grant the burgeoning feminist movement more
attention than he does is rather disturbing. His discussion of women’s con-
sciousness-raising efforts directed against the masculine culture of the New Left
occupies a scant ten pages, and his coverage of such important subjects as the
Voice of Women is distressingly superficial. It is characteristic of the masculine
perspective that haunts this book that the only woman discussed with any kind
of depth is Gerda Munsinger, the sexy socialite who was treated as little more
than a pretty appendage by her suitors.
The lack of attention to women’s issues is troubling, but perhaps in the
end is really a reflection of the overtly masculine character of ‘the sixties’ them-
selves, and the fact that Canadian women’s experiences during this decade
remain woefully under-represented in the literature. That said, Palmer would
have done well to include a separate chapter on the feminist movement, as he
does with the New Left, Québécois radicalism, and Red Power.
As with his other works, Palmer’s ultimate message tends at times to
become obscured by cumbersome prose and awkward analogies, and the theme
of irony is, ironically, underdeveloped throughout the text. Despite these short-
comings, however, as a synthesis of existing works on Canada’s 1960s and as an
historicisation of our obsessions with national identity, Palmer’s latest offering is
a most welcome addition to a growing canon of Canadian Sixties lit.
S.D. Jowett
Queen’s University
Sandra Rollings-Magnusson, Heavy Burdens on Small Shoulders: The
Labour of Pioneer Children on the Canadian Prairies (Edmonton:
University of Alberta Press, 2009).
This is a useful little book, accessible to undergraduates in history, sociology,
Canadian Studies, and other fields, while providing a handy addition to the
libraries of scholars of child labour and family life. Its strength lies in its
detailed confirmation of children’s work as critical to family survival in the nine-
teenth and early twentieth century period of prairie farm settlement. Using
diaries, letters, memoirs, autobiographies, and other first person accounts, his-
torical sociologist Sandra Rollings-Magnusson draws on the evidence of 260
children, 97 girls and 132 boys, aged from three to their late teens, living in
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Bryan Palmer, "Canada's 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era" (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009)

Sonn, Richard D.

Royal Holloway, University of London
Terence Kissack, Free Comrades:  Anarchism and Homosexuality in the
United States, 1895-1917 (Oakland, CA and Edinburgh, Scotland: AK
Press, 2008).
Free Comrades strikes a nice balance between being scholarly and accessible to the
average informed reader. It is a revised version of Kissack’s doctoral disserta-
tion at CUNY, as he tells us in the Acknowledgments and also at the end of the
first chapter, where the phrase “examined by this dissertation” still appears in
the text. AK Press, an anarchist collective, could have done a better job in
proofreading. Occasionally the mistakes in the text produce smiles, as in the
phrase “a series of courts-marital” instead of courts-martial (this in the context
of a discussion of homosexual scandals in the upper echelons of Kaiser
Wilhelm’s court). AK need not be embarrassed about employing a proofreader;
in interwar France the proofreaders’ union was a virtual anarchist enclave.
Kissack argues that anarchists at the turn of the century were alone in
defending same-sex relations in the United States. He focuses on a handful of
influential “sex radicals,” including Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman,
Benjamin Tucker, John William Lloyd, and Leonard Abbott. A few other fig-
ures, such as the young Will Durant and Goldman’s lover Ben Reitman also
enter the picture. Kissack is careful in his introduction to specify what his book
does and does not include: “This is not a book about gay anarchists. While
some of the anarchists discussed below were attracted to members of their own
sex, for the most part, the anarchist sex radicals did not identify as homosexu-
al…  This is a study of public pronouncements, not private actions or feelings,
except as they relate to the creation and shaping of political discourse” (6). The
book has two parallel themes: anarchist recognition of the importance of sexu-
al identity, and their willingness to include homosexuality as a valid aspect of
that identity.
It is well known that anarchists considered free love to be the right of
every man and woman. However, while the term was in use in the 1890s, it did
not mean the same thing that it did when it reemerged in the 1960s. Rather
than promiscuous relations with multiple partners, free love usually implied
monogamous relations with one partner without the sanction of either church
or state. Institutionalized marriage was perceived as fundamental to bourgeois
capitalism, and restricted freedom of choice while rendering the woman a pos-
session of the husband. At the end of the book, Kissack comments on the
irony of the current push for same-sex marriage given the anti-marital rhetoric
of a century ago. Most anarchist exponents of free love after 1900 were not
explicitly favoring same-sex unions; nevertheless Kissack convincingly argues
that homosexuality was recognized as falling within the bounds of consensual
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relationships.
There were American anarchists before 1895, when this study begins,
but Kissack says they were not sympathetic to homosexuality, even though some
of them, such as Ezra and Angela Heywood and Victoria Woodhull, were noto-
rious sex radicals. Recognition of the right to same-sex love came only in the
1890s, he argues, in part because of a shift in locale from the Midwest to the
east coast on the part of anarchist ideologues such as Benjamin Tucker, in part
because of the tremendous publicity occasioned by the Oscar Wilde Affair.
Tucker and Goldman both defended Wilde at a time when few others would do
so. Kissack makes a point of differentiating anarchist toleration of homosexu-
ality from socialist conventional morality (though socialists did critique the insti-
tution of marriage). Kissack devotes a chapter each to the Wilde trial and to
the figure of Walt Whitman, the poet and bard who died in 1891, as a
spokesman for male comradeship. Also, the American anarchists were aware of
and influenced by the new sexologists of England and Germany, including
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, Edward Carpenter, and
Havelock Ellis. While the main message from the sexologists was the docu-
menting of the enormous variety of possibilities of sexual attraction, their influ-
ence is controversial. Some commentators criticize the anarchists for uncritical-
ly accepting the pathologization of homosexuals as “inverts” or degenerates.
Kissack is inclined to think the sexologists’ influence was overall beneficial; in
any case it helped spur the anarchists’ awareness of same-sex love at a time
when the terminology for homosexuality was rapidly evolving.
Though this book does not claim to represent homosexual practice in
America, there are two groups of people on whom anarchists reported and who
were seen to have higher levels of homosexual behavior than was true elsewhere
in society. By far the most important group was the prison population, for
which Kissack’s main source is Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, pub-
lished in 1912. Kissack reveals it to be a rich source for uncovering the homo-
sexual practices of incarcerated men. On his release from prison, Berkman, like
his close friend Goldman, lectured on toleration of homosexuality. The other
group where one frequently encountered homosexuality was among tramps and
hobos; the best testimony in this case came from Ben Reitman, who sometimes
fancied himself “king of the hobos. One will not encounter any discussion of
homosexuality among the working classes, either native-born or immigrant.
One may surmise that homosexuality was tolerated neither by anarcho-syndical-
ists nor their working-class followers. Certainly anarchist propaganda was bent
on masculinizing the workers, depicting them as mustachioed, muscular men
wielding pick-axes and shovels, while the bosses were usually old and overweight
parasites. Since workers were dominated, gender imagery required them to be
seen as violent and dominant, on the verge of perpetual revolution. There is
surprisingly little discussion of class in this book, or the ways in which the cate-
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gories of class and gender interacted.
Though the book title announces that it concerns the years 1895-1917,
that is the heyday of the anarchist movement, there is a final chapter on homo-
sexual activists of the interwar era, and a conclusion on the transformation of
homosexual politics after the Stonewall riots. He accepts the usual account of
the rapid decline of anarchism after America’s entry into World War I, as born-
again Americanism led to the persecution and deportation of radicals, and the
Russian Revolution gave added luster to communism as the serious revolution-
ary movement of the left. Somewhat paradoxically, as the culture overall
became more liberated sexually in the Roaring Twenties, the left turned socially
conservative. The sexual liberation of the “Lyrical Left” of the pre-war era was
soon forgotten, while aging anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Alexander
Berkman condemned current mores as favoring loose sex rather than free love.
Benjamin Tucker left for Europe as early as 1908, after a fire destroyed his
bookstore, and spent the next thirty years living in southern France, where
Berkman and Goldman also ended up after being deported to the Soviet Union.
Their examples underscores a point Kissack makes throughout, that there was
continuous dialogue between European and American theorists of sexual radi-
calism in this era. Kissack’s readable book highlights unique anarchist accept-
ance of deviant sexuality by ideologues who were not themselves homosexuals,
as well as anarchist realization that sexuality as well as labor played a key role in
defining how people related to their society and to themselves.
Richard D. Sonn
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the
American City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), and Lewis H.
Sidgelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).
The ongoing crisis in the automotive industry reminds us all that the car
remains a central tenet of the modern experience. While the angst and fallout
over the past, present and future of building autos garners all the headlines
(especially in North America), the driving of vehicles, and their social impact, is
so ubiquitous as to sometimes escape scrutiny. There have been thousands of
books on cars and driving and the auto industry, but often the simplest and
most direct consequences of the car are overlooked.
Two recent books on the automobile’s role in society break from that
ubiquity to provide us with disparate examinations of the far reaching and pro-
found role that the car has played in shaping our world, from the very
streetscapes we inhabit to Cold War battles over ideology and real politik. Both
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Terence Kissack, "Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895-1917" (Oakland, CA and Edinburgh, Scotlan: AK Press, 2008)

Whitefield, Harvey Amani

The American Background of Loyalist Slaves

Read, Geoff

Intersecting Traditions: Recent Contributions to French Political History

Clark, Jessica P.

inequalities and oppression of any kind largely go missing here. Neil Sutherland
reminded us years ago that survivors of painful childhoods often disappear
from view. That is certainly true here. The brutalization of girls and boys by
their own families and by their employers that commonly overwhelmed early
child welfare efforts on the prairies as elsewhere is nowhere to be found.
Ultimately, its reliance on a limited body of sources and inattention to differ-
ences of power and experience leaves Heavy Burdens vulnerable to romanticizing
the past, even as it re c ove rs details that may well inspire more critical inve s t i gat i o n s.
Veronica Strong-Boag
University of British Columbia
Rusty Bittermann and Margaret McCallum, Lady Landlords of Prince
Edward Island:  Imperial Dreams and the Defence of Property (Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008).
In Lady Landlords of Prince Edward Island, Rusty Bittermann and Margaret
McCallum show not only female landlords’ presence but also their centrality to
nineteenth-century Island developments. They argue that women’s “attempts to
ensure that Island law and policy supported their interests as landlords” made
them “significant players” in the project of empire (148). A refreshing approach
to Anglo-Canadian imperial history, the study speaks to any scholar interested in
gender, Canadian legal and political history, British social history, and experiences
of empire and colonialism, broadly speaking.
Lady Landlords aligns with recent trends in British economic history,
namely the reconfiguration of traditional economic narratives through a gendered
lens. Bittermann and McCallum join a growing contingent of scholars showing
that the very nature of economic and legal discourses often obscured female par-
ticipation. Careful research of provincial documents (detailed in a helpful
Appendix) show the extent to which British women featured in Island landhold-
ing; women, excluding those sharing property with husbands or family, owned
over one quarter of the land held by absentee owners in the 1870s and 1880s.
Bittermann and McCallum organize their work into biographic studies
of four such landowners: Anne Saunders, her sister Jane Saunders, Jane’s daugh-
ter Georgiana Fane, and acquaintance Charlotte Sulivan. Beginning with the
Saunders’ land inheritance in 1785, the authors plot a rough chronology through
the women’s lives, which aligned with “most of the history of British imperial
involvement with landlordism on Prince Edward Island” (8). This included local
anti-landlord resistance of the 1830s, legislative imperatives of the 1850s, and the
acquisition of absentee landowners’ property by the provincial government in the
1860s and 1870s. The women’s lives were so entwined with the Island’s political
developments, argue the authors, that the 1875 Supreme Court decision striking
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down large-scale landownership also “… marked the closure of… opportunities
for women to exercise political and economic power” (15).
Bittermann and McCallum highlight common elements among the four
women, which made possible their substantial imperial landholdings. Foremost
was the women’s class status. Make no mistake; Bittermann and McCallum’s sub-
jects are decidedly Ladies of the gentry classes, representing British social elites
(one must turn to Bittermann and McCallum’s other work on Island property pol-
itics for alternate class experiences). As the authors show, their subjects’ social
ranking afforded them economic possibilities unavailable to their middling female
counterparts. Typically inheriting their land from fathers and husbands, an estab-
lished system of lineage and circumstance placed the women in the unique posi-
tion of land ownership.
While the women inherited Island property through traditional systems,
they did not feel bound by traditional gender roles. Bittermann and McCallum
argue that their subjects challenged historic (and historiographic) representations
of nineteenth-century femininity through energetic engagement in their landlord
duties. This included ventures to their Island properties for three of the women,
with Jane Saunders residing in Charlottetown for almost a full year in 1839-1840.
Here, Bittermann and McCallum underscore the significance of increased mobil-
ity in the Atlantic world over the course of century. While understated, their dis-
cussion of female travelers speaks to the centrality of technological developments
to women’s participation in the colonial economy.
Further emphasizing the landladies’ divergence from traditional gender
mores was their relationship with Island tenants. Through skilful analysis,
Bittermann and McCallum pre-empt any romanticization of landlady-tenant rela-
tions. They show that their subjects did not necessarily adopt “feminine philan-
thropic roles,” which did not alw ays align with economic interests. While
Georgiana Fane courted Island tenants’ admiration, Charlotte Sulivan actively
resisted gendered expectations of benevolence, assuming an approach “ground-
ed…in strategic land purchases and effective property management” (124).
For all of their shared qualities, t h e re we re important diffe re n c e s
b e t ween the pro t ago n i s t s ; the four women rep resented an assortment of
marital stat u s e s, i n cluding lega l ly sep a rat e d , w i d owe d , and neve r- m a rr i e d .
B i t t e rmann and McCallum allude to heightened disdain for “spinsters,” a rg u-
ing that the Colonial Office failed to take seriously unmarried landow n e rs
“ who we re excluded from assuming the public roles at home that might have
p rovided some justification for their ex i s t e n c e ” ( 1 4 3 ) . Considering re c e n t
i n t e rest in the historical conditions of s i n gle life, it would have been fa s c i n at-
ing to hear more of the social context gove rning neve r- m a rried landladies’
economic autonomy. Th at said, the uniqueness of B i t t e rmann and
M c C a l l u m ’s ge n d e red ap p ro a ch negates such minor critiques. Lady Landlords
is an important contribution to the sch o l a rship in its ge n d e red re c o n s i d e ra-
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tion of the legalities and economy of e m p i re.
Jessica P. Clark
The Johns Hopkins University
Daniel Samson, The Spirit of Industry and Improvement:  Liberal
Government and rural-Industrial Society, Nova Scotia, 1790-1862
(Montreal: McGill Queens University Press, 2008).
In this excellent work, Daniel Samson explores the conflicted emergence of lib-
eral modernism in nineteenth century Nova Scotia. The book is a fascinating
exercise in political economy, combining a firm understanding of economic
activity with the evolution of policy, institutions and attitudes towards economic
change. A sub-theme of the book is the tendency of the poor to treat
resources as common property and the conflicts that emerged as wealthier par-
ties claimed the resources as their own private property.
Samson’s focus is rural. He supports earlier arguments that Nova
Scotian rural society was economically diverse. Some prospered, some fared
poorly, occasionally very poorly indeed. The failure of the potato crop in the
1840s resulted in intense hardship among the poor, particularly in Cape Breton.
More generally, the limited quantity of good quality land and its uneven alloca-
tion among settlers played a large role in creating the hierarchy of the country-
side. The passage of time failed to diminish the inequalities apparent at the
early days of settlement.
Merchants were an essential part of the rural economy, purchasing
agricultural goods and timber from farmers while selling them imported goods.
The merchants possessed economic power; they could choose to carry families
through hard times or to sue in court for unpaid debts. Suits allowed some to
acquire large quantities of farm land.. Merchants also possessed political power,
less by securing office than by their influence on office holders. They were not
reluctant to branch out from trade into mining, shipbuilding and the promotion
of manufacturing as opportunities appeared.
Mining was another ru ral activity that Samson ex a m i n e s. In early ye a rs,
grindstones we re an important ex p o rt . At firs t , poor settlers tre ated the quarries as
common pro p e rt y, but cooperated to manage access. Samson traces the process that
led to the ‘ e n cl o s u re ’ o f these re s o u rces by the more we l l - t o - d o. M i n e ral rights in
coal had been claimed by the Crow n , and the state exe rted more control of t h e s e
re s o u rces than of gr i n d s t o n e s. I n i t i a l ly, a few simple mines we re established that pro-
duced sufficient coal to supply the ga rrisons in Halifax and New fo u n d l a n d , a l t h o u g h
in defiance of gove rnment reg u l at i o n s, s e t t l e rs often dug coal from coastal outcro p s
or from seams on their own land.
Coal was ‘ e n cl o s e d ’ when the General Mining A s s o c i ation establ i s h e d well
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Rusty Bittermann and Margaret McCallum, "Lady Landlords of Prince Edward Island: Imperial Dreams and the Defence of Property" (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2008)

Lord, Kathleen

Faith Johnston, A Great Restlessness: The Life and Politics of Dorise
Nielsen (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2006).
A social contradiction exists in Canadian federal politics between the egalitarian
ideology of left-wing parties which prompt female representation in the House
of Commons and persistent sexist practices. Agnes Macphail’s and Dorise
Neilsen’s elections to Parliament, from 1921 to 1940 and 1940 to 1945 respec-
tively, illustrate the left-wing egalitarian ideology. Macphail, the first woman to
sit in the legislature, represented the CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth
Federation), and Neilsen was the first Communist MP (Member of Parliament)
for the United Progressive movement. Johnston bridges the contradiction
between left-wing ideologies and practice in a biography blending memoirs,
newspapers, photographs, government archives, and other documents. A
smooth-flowing narrative subtly interweaving personal stories and political inter-
pretation demonstrates Neilsen’s courage in pursuing revolutionary goals in an
anti-Communist environment. The harsh experiences of this Saskatchewan
farmwife during the dustbowl years further provide a dynamic interpretation of
women’s resistance to subjugation and to class oppression.
Johnston begins by chronicling the formative years of Neilsen’s life in
working-class North London in the 1920s and immigration to North Battleford,
Saskatchewan. After teaching in a one-room schoolhouse, she settled for a love-
less marriage to Peter Neilsen, a World War I veteran with thwarted ambitions.
Her frustration with the neverending work required in raising three children
(Christine, John, and Sally) in the abject poverty of the 1930s increased her iso-
lation and her loneliness, and yet all the while a vibrant political climate charged
her ambitions. The family sheltered On-to-Ottawa trekkers and listened to
accounts of the Regina Riot; leading social democrats Tommy Douglas and
David Lewis made passionate speeches in the region. Neilsen’s own talented
oratory and newspapers articles attracted the attention of Bob Paul and other
CCF organizers. She was committed to combating poverty, to stabilizing wheat
prices and farm income, to universal medicare, public health, and other social
measures. So she secured the local Unity candidacy, left her husband, and
moved to Ottawa where she worked as a single mother and a MP.
Chapters 5 to 10 cover the critical Ottawa years. Here Johnston’s
analysis of her militant support for the Union of Mine Mill and Smelter
Workers in Kirkland Lake, Sudbury, and Timmins, and Communist Party of
Canada (CPC) attempts to unite the Canadian Left, are significant contributions
to labour and left history. The CPC initiatives of the 1930s and 1940s are com-
parable to the creation of Québec solidaire, the recent amalgamation of the
Union des forces progressistes (UFP) with other parties of the Left in a period
of regressive neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism. The heightened anti-
Communism and nativism of the Second Red Scare of the 1940s posed serious
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challenges for a female Communist and explain her candidacy for the United
Progressives. From 1940-41, the federal government employed the War
Measures Act to declare Communism illegal. Canada was the only Western
democracy to do so at the time. The CPC was also made illegal in Ontario; Tim
Buck was temporarily forced to move operations to New York; and accustomed
to the anti-Semitic elements of the Pa d l o ck Law, Q u ebec activists went undergro u n d .
How did this anti-Communist campaign affect Neilsen specifically?
Both Mackenzie King and Macphail disliked Neilsen for being a Communist.
The RCMP did not arrest her, but carefully monitored her speeches and news-
paper articles, and the retention of secrecy regarding party membership was
essential to CCF candidacy. Her public pronouncements accusing the govern-
ment of acting like a Fascist state, as well as the 1941 election of Cora Taylor
Cameron, a second female Communist in the House of Commons, prompted
the Liberal caucus to think of ways to “shut her up” (118 ). King strategically
and unsuccessfully tried to co-opt her into the Liberal Party, and after her term
ended in 1945, he enacted some of the social leg i s l ation she had so va l i a n t ly upheld.
Neilsen championed health insurance and equal pay for equal work in
the wartime years when female employment was a temporary measure and
mother’s allowance covered egg money. By 1943, a Liberal-Labour coalition and
the creation of the Labour Progressive Party (LPP) and the Progressive
Conservative Party (PCP) enhanced piecemeal social measures. It was at this
point that she faced obvious sexist discrimination within her own party, when
she was told to accept the parliamentary leadership of Montreal Communist
Fred Rose. Here, Johnston’s biography explores feminist initiatives in the male-
dominant world of mainstream politics and, to a lesser extent, gender relations
and patriarchy within the CPC. A broader comparative approach could shed
more light on the particularities of Neilsen’s feminist stance for Linda Kealey
and Joan Sangster also note that both Macphail and Neilsen were relegated to
the backrooms of the CCF and the CPC and to the backbenches of Parliament.
Neilsen’s confinement to women’s issues based on the traditional roles of wife
and mother runs counter to the predominance of class over sex/gender and
ethnicity which was shown in Andrée Lévesque’s analysis of CPC militant
Jeanne Corbin. Drawing from her Marxist feminism and close reading of
Engels, Neilsen’s raising of the issue of male chauvinism within the party con-
trasts with the lack of feminist intervention on the part of Corbin (210).
Public life is hard on the relationships of politicians and their families,
so the attention to the personal completes this biography. The author is to be
commended for her discreet treatment of the ending of three long-term rela-
tionships over the course of Neilsen’s life: the first from her husband Peter
(with no legal divorce); the second extra-marital liaison with Bob Paul; and a
third relation with Constant Godefroy. Based on the belief that women are no
more monogamous than men, she entertained these interim relationships while
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desiring a lasting and loving companionship. Single parenting involved stints for
the children in boarding schools and with friends and colleagues, and this pro-
foundly affected the rebellion of her eldest daughter Christine. Her broad-
minded spirit extended to her children and to the support of single parenting
for Christine and an abortion for Sally.
After she lost her seat in Ottawa in 1945, a brief respite in anti-
Semitism and anti-Communism drew her to the inner-city enclaves of Toronto.
The unfolding of the Gouzenko affair shortly thereafter meant that the country
focused on Rose’s alleged spying for the Soviets during the Second World War.
This was followed by his arrest, trial, 1947 expulsion from Parliament, imprison-
ment, departure for Poland, and ultimately, the revoking of his Canadian citizen-
ship. Revelations of Cold War policing in Canada complement our knowledge
of US McCarthysism and the work of Gary Evans on John Grierson’s manipu-
lation of wartime propaganda with the National Film Board. The author pro-
vides disclosures of Neilsen’s fear of arrest, phonetapping, and also details her
involvement with the world peace movement in this period.
The recurrence of Cold War anti-Communism in Canada and her revo-
lutionary zeal took her to China in 1955 where she conducted teacher training in
the medical corps and died on Dec. 7, 1980 surrounded by comrades and her
daughter Christine. She witnessed the dramatic consequences of the Great
Leap Forward, feared expulsion during the Sino-Soviet split, and arrest or re-
education during the Cultural Revolution. Accompanied by her daughters and
six grandsons, her health steadily deteriorated as she worked on several projects
with the Fo reign Language Press and attended study groups and public meetings.
This book is a captivating and exemplary rendition of the life of
Neilsen. The explicit use of varied sources, the detailed political analysis, as well
as the keen attention to personal relations, collective solidarity, and social injus-
tice, are praiseworthy and original contributions to historical scholarship.
Kathleen Lord
Mount Allison University
William J. Turkel, The Archive of Place: Unearthing the Pasts of the
Chilcotin Plateau (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008).
The two-month Gustafsen Lake standoff near 100 Mile House in the summer
of 1995 briefly turned Canadians’ attention to the longstanding tensions that
marred relationships between Native and non-Native people in the Chilcotin
region of British Columbia. In this book, William J. Turkel, who grew up in the
region but now teaches at the University of Western Ontario, turns his attention
to the historical roots of several controversies that erupted in the region in the
1990s. In three parts, the book “explores the ways in which usable pasts are
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Faith Johnson, "A Great Restlessness: The Life and Politics of Dorise Nielsen" (Winnipeg University of Manitoba Press, 2006)

Lucas, Jeffrey K.

on fretting fathers to pay for drinks and pleasures.
Throughout The Nightinghouls of Paris, Kit intimates that he wants to
help Sudge and Ross financially. He offers them his studio. He thinks about
paying their hotel bill. He buys them drinks. Yet his interest in the young
men—they are approximately eighteen and 22 years old—is not entirely unmoti-
vated. In the sexual free-for-all of expatriate Paris, Kit keenly monitors Sudge
and Ross’s love affair. Almost as soon as Kit meets the young lovers, he ends
up in bed with Ross: “I don’t know how I got home, because when I left the
jazz gaiety of a Negro cabaret I forgot to remember. When I lifted my head
from the pillow in the morning, I saw Ross sleeping in rosy peace beside me.
He woke up as I wondered what we had done the night before. He sat up and
smiled winningly. ‘Sound night we had?’ he questioned with staunch cheer” (8-
9). The will to forget covers a multitude of sexual indiscretions. The “sound
night” might refer to revelries in bars and jazz clubs, but that does not explain
why Ross awakens in Kit’s bed. “Why a surreptitious fuss about a thing so
banal as sex?” Kit wonders, which is his way of not talking about his sexual pro-
clivities and activities (22).
Kit has an eye for male beauty. “Jan had a wonderful physique,” he
observes (44). Anatolio is “delicately boyish” (86). “Three exquisite boys” live
in a villa near Nice (138). Kit mystifies sexual relations by pretending that they
do not matter. Two women add to sexual and gender confusion by bearing
male names: Steve and Freddie. Kit approvingly quotes the lesbian sculptress
Colette on distinctions between men and women: “‘I don’t give a damn about
the bloody masculine or the bloody feminine’” (111).
Ross ultimately leaves Sudge and sails back to Canada. His departure
comes as no surprise to Kit, who documents the couplings and uncouplings of
expatriates with zest. As a sociology of bored, aspiring writers, Nightinghouls
rounds out knowledge of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Although this book
extols the glories of dissipation and youth, it remains alert to the irony that
“Youth is not inherently interesting” (61).
Allan Hepburn
McGill University
Tanalís Padilla. Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista
Movement and the Myth of the Pax Priísta, 1940-1962. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2008.
Throughout its seventy-one-year stint as Mexico’s ruling party, the Partido
Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI, faced multiple forms of resistance. To make
this point, Tanalís Padilla focuses upon the movement led by Rubén Jaramillo in
Morelos between 1940 and his assassination in 1962.
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Like any history, this tale really begins before the opening scene.
Following the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, political leaders promised to
bring lasting and meaningful social change. The most aggressive programs were
clearly those of President Lázaro Cárdenas. During his time in office (1934-
1940), Cárdenas initiated the land, labour, and education reforms promised by
the Constitution of 1917.
One of his many reforms was in Zacatepec, Morelos, where he direct-
ed the construction of the Emiliano Zapata sugar refinery. To run the mill, he
appointed a manager and a campesino-labourer council. Jaramillo was head of
the council, which supervised the whole operation, including management, and
answered only to President Cárdenas.
Arrangements like this made Cárdenas popular among the rural work-
ing class. It seemed to show that, properly administered, the national govern-
ment could act as a champion of the disenfranchised. Padilla explains that the
Zacatepec pact worked well enough while Cárdenas remained in office.
However, from 1940 to 1952, his successors – Manuel Ávila Camacho and
Miguel Alemán – allowed the mill manager to wield most of the power while
manipulating and restricting the leverage of the workers’ council. At times, con-
frontations between workers and management grew violent.
Increasingly frustrated by the plight of campesinos and labourers in
Morelos, Jaramillo ran for state governor in 1946 and again in 1952. Each time,
the national PRI permitted his candidacy, but orchestrated his defeat through
the usual PRI tactics of voter suppression, ballot box manipulation, voter fraud,
severely skewed vote counts, and sheer thuggery. Padilla’s account clearly illus-
trates the PRI’s practice of encouraging and even welcoming opposition, in
order to cast an aura of legitimacy over its blatant theft of elections.
After 1952, Jaramillo and his followers strove to acquire lands prom-
ised by revolutionary tenets. As these efforts encountered continuous refusals
from private and governmental interests, the Jaramillistas grew evermore militant.
For a three-year period beginning in 1959, they settled vacant lands in western
Morelos. The state and federal governments treated this act of “squatting” as
illegal, and came to regard the group and its leader as dangerous. A series of
tense confrontations occurred at the very time when the Cuban Revolution was
gaining fame throughout Latin America. Padilla points out that there was some
dialogue between Jaramillistas and communists, thus raising concern in Mexico
City and Washington. She treats this extended episode adequately, but misses a
chance at a more sophisticated discussion by overlooking Thomas C. Wright’s
Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution (2001). Nevertheless, she shows
that the murder of Jaramillo and his family by the Mexican army in May 1962
was a result of President Adolfo López Mateos’s duplicity in appearing to main-
tain amicable relations with Cuba while in fact yielding to the US government’s
perennial phobia of communism. In short, she convinces me that Jaramillo
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died because J. F. K. wanted him dead.
This is a concise recapitulation of little-known events during the PRI’s
heyday. It is truly a myth-breaker. Rural Mexicans are not, after all, profoundly
conservative; they embraced a variety of socialist operative structures from the
Revolution to the 1960s and beyond. The PRI did not enjoy opposition-free
reign from World War II to 1968. Quite the contrary: Mexico’s history during
that period is littered with rancorous and sometimes violent confrontations
between the PRI-controlled government and groups dissatisfied with the
Revolution’s failure to deliver egalitarianism and universal prosperity. Hence
Padilla argues persuasively that, rather than the watershed event that historians
have claimed, the October 1968 massacre of protesting students at Tlatelolco
was really a continuation of social movements and government brutality toward
them over the preceding quarter-century.
She errs, however, in characterizing “the fall of Mexico’s one-party sys-
tem as a product of popular resistance.” When the Partido Acción Nacional
(PAN) won the national election in 2000, it brought the former CEO of Coca
Cola-Mexico into the presidency. This is hardly a manifestation of popular
resistance. She correctly points out, however, that, by stealing the 2006 election
from the Mexican people and the Partido de la Revolución Democrática, the PAN
ushered in a new era in which the ruling party clings to power by any means
necessary, legitimate or otherwise. Thus the struggle continues.
Jeffrey K. Lucas
University of North Carolina at Pembroke
Sabrina Jones, Isadora Duncan: A Graphic Biography (New York: Hill
and Wang, 2008).
Isadora Duncan (1877-1927), one of the icons of modern dance, has been the
subject of several substantive biographies as well as Isadora, a 1968 biopic star-
ring Vanessa Redgrave and Jason Robards. She also penned an autobiography,
My Life (1927), which has been published in numerous editions and languages.
Sabrina Jones joins the discussion with her informative graphic biography, which
neatly encapsulates Isadora Duncan’s hectic and arguably eccentric life story into
125 action-packed pages.
Isadora Duncan was the youngest of four children, and as a teenager
she taught piano and dance to help support their impoverished family. In her
twenties she toured the major cities of Europe, from London and Paris to
Berlin and Budapest, seeking to promote her unconventional ideas about dance
and movement through her performances and lectures. Scorning the rituals and
protocols of classical ballet, she found inspiration in Greek art and mythology,
advocating a more free-flowing and naturalistic approach to human movement.
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Tanalís Padilla, "Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax Priísta, 1940-1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008)

McCord, Peter A.

Divergences on the Left: The Environmentalisms of Rachel Carson and Murray Bookchin

Grazley, Robin

They believed that the well-being of the people depended on their sexual health,
and more narrowly on healthy marriages. The evidence here shows how little con-
cerned these advisors on popular health and lifestyle were with sexual fulfillment,
as if sex (in contrast to the state) would wither away, its only function procreation:
A far cry indeed from Kollontai’s appeal to the ‘winged Eros’. Thus, neither the
sexual enlightenment of the 1920s nor the ‘Great Retreat’ of the next decade were
concerned with sexual satisfaction; rather, both sought to imbue (or inflict) the dis-
cipline of collective duty over the selfish pleasure of bourgeois individualism. It
was, as the author concludes, a negation of rather than a solution to the sex ques-
tion.
Jane McDermid
Southampton University
Paul Ru t h e r fo rd , A World Made Sexy: Freud to Madonna ( To ro n t o : U n ive rs i t y
o f To ronto Pre s s, 2 0 0 7 ) .
Born of a “chance remark” by Michel Foucault on the twentieth century’s shift
“from coercion to provocation” in regulating sexuality, Paul Rutherford’s A World
Made Sexy explores the rise of eroticism in the service of commerce with reference
to art, film, television, print media, and more, visiting several familiar pop culture
phenomena on the way (3). A World Made Sexy is “the story of the building of a
modern utopia of Eros where just about everyone (who was affluent, that is)
might dream, play, and above all, shop” (3). Rutherford traces the “Eros project,”
as he terms it, through museums and exhibitions devoted to sex and the “erotics
of power” in Bond films and Madonna videos. The book’s main thrust, however,
is a study of advertising and “the sexual sell”; Rutherford examines the intellectu-
al underpinnings of the Eros project in the works of Freud and his followers, a
few successful twentieth-century manifestations such as Playboy and Barbie, and
some of the angst such advertising engendered. The penultimate chapter consid-
ers the resulting “theatres of the libido” which characterized advertising by the
1990s with reference to a number of ads, primarily television commercials. The
book concludes with a return to Foucault and a meditation on his theories of sex-
uality in light of this post-1945 “libidinal economy.” Rutherford ultimately argues
that the Eros project, whatever else it might do, was in itself “liberating,” or at least
“did multiply the avenues of enjoyment for many, many people” (256).
A World Made Sexy attempts to answer a series of broad and slippery
questions about the relationship between commerce and sexuality in the affluent
West, with varying degrees of success. Rutherford convincingly contextualizes
Freud’s ideas and their dissemination through Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse,
and Ernest Dichter, examining the ways in which belief in “the subconscious” and
the pleasure principle shaped both erotically-charged advertising and the respons-
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es, particularly the fears, it generated. Chapter four’s discussion of such “angst”
with reference to Marshall McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride and Wilson Bryan Key’s
Subliminal Seduction is nicely rendered. His reading of Hugh Hefner and the yok-
ing of masculinity and marketing in Playboy is similarly incisive (99-112). Such
nuance is not brought to female and ‘feminist’ responses to advertising, however.
For instance, Rutherford’s critique of Jean Kilbourne’s documentary Killing Us
Softly rests on a rather short-sighted insistence that Kilbourne simply made an
“error” in failing to understand the “cleansing” power of “humour” in advertising
that borrowed imagery from pornography (148-154). This interpretation sits awk-
wardly with his later arguments about the potential liberation for all inherent in the
Eros project. His discussion of audience responses to advertising in the chapter
entitled, “A Theatre of the Libido,” likewise rather too easily accepts the notion
that women easily “take offence” at commercials which display sex without  “[a]
little bit of romance … [to] help soothe a ruffled female soul” (232). He tends to
assume that women’s responses to advertising are affected by gender, yet are also
somehow unaffected by discourses regulating female sexuality. Setting this against
his discussion of the Calvin Klein underwear ads which allow for a “homoerotic”
reading as well as an aspirational one on the part of male viewers, his portrayal of
women’s engagement with the erotics of advertising is lacking (203-204).
Such analytic inconsistency is A World Made Sexy’s greatest weakness. To
some extent, the amorphous nature of the subject matter, not to mention its inher-
ent discourses about what is normal and “sexy,” creates ample space for this kind
of slippage. While Rutherford does acknowledge that his “focus is mostly (but not
exclusively) on things American,” he perhaps does too little to turn a critical eye
back on this kind of modern mass culture’s self-presentation as universal (9).
Rutherford is not a historian of sexuality, and unfortunately his analyses often rest
on overly facile interpretations. Even a rudimentary consideration of the interplay
between discourses about sexual morality and advertising would have bolstered
Rutherford’s discussion of the Old Milwaukee “Swedish Bikini Team” debacle
(234-236). Nor does he give adequate attention to changing conceptions of what
was deemed “sexy,” “provocative,” “playful,” or “offensive” beyond arguing that
what were once considered “perversions” were progressively considered accept-
able (256). As noted above, he should have acknowledged the effects of attitudes
toward female sexuality in the second half of the twentieth century on women’s
responses. Simply casting this as “prudery” or an absent “sense of humour”
ignores the prevalence and the power of the discourses which allowed Hefner to
retaliate against a “matriarchy” even as American women were being conditioned
that “nice girls don’t” (107-108). The discussion of “fetish Barbie” does acknowl-
edge the possibility of subversion on the part of the audience, but again, a fuller
analysis would have greatly enriched this book (118-122). Moreover, because sex-
uality, desire, and humour are all so subjective, Rutherford’s examples are at times
so randomly chosen that they do not always provide strong evidence. Perhaps the
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Left History 13_1 (final)  9/24/08  9:49 AM  Page 216
most glaring example is Table 6.1 in “A Theatre of the Libido,” in which he “out-
lines 100 numbered examples of erotic commercials”, indicating with an asterisk
those he has “designated ‘hot’”, defined as “full of sexual hunger and sexual ten-
sion” (205-212). While he deserves credit for being upfront about the selective
nature of his case studies, it still does not always work.
A World Made Sexy is nevertheless an interesting read, and much of my
criticism stems from the ambitious nature of Rutherford’s project. Ultimately, A
World Made Sexy is a thought-provoking but frustrating study. Delving deeper into
some of its organising assumptions, and particularly into the complexities of
American attitudes toward sexuality in the 1950s through the 1970s, would have
done much to expand our understanding of the interrelated histories of consump-
tion and sexuality in the West. As it stands, A World Made Sexy emphasizes ‘liber-
ation’ at the expense of a more detailed historical analysis.
Robin Grazley
Queen’s University
Elyssa Faison, Managing Women: Disciplining Labour in Modern Japan
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
Shortly after the Tokugawa bakufu was overthrown in 1868, the primary task of the
new Meiji State was to build a “Rich Nation and Strong Army” to prevent Japan
from becoming a European or American colony, and to industrialize the nation as
quickly as possible in what would become, in effect, Japan’s first bourgeois revolu-
tion. The industrial revolution in Japan, which took place especially in the 1890s,
was carried out, first and foremost, in the textile industry—where Japan’s first car-
tels were formed—and predominantly on the backs of young, female workers.
Paralleling the industrial slogan of ‘rich nation, strong army’ was the gendered slo-
gan of ‘good wives, wise mothers’ (ryosai kenbo). The latter slogan was a dominant
discourse of the Meiji period’s state-building project that ideologically equated the
nation-state to the concept of the family. The most important contribution of
Elyssa Faison’s book, Managing Women:  Disciplining Labour in Modern Japan, is that
she shows how this gendered discourse combined with an ideology of the nation,
and was put into institutional, disciplining practices in the textile industries of
Japan’s industrial factory system during the interwar period.
Faison’s book, which will become a valuable contribution to labour and
gender studies in the field of Modern Japan, argues that disciplinary techniques,
especially in the cotton spinning factories, were vehicles for coding factory women
not as workers, but rather as women in need of being ‘cultivated’ as ‘ideal women’.
These discourses, which Faison shows to have directly affected women’s bodies,
materialized most clearly in on-the-ground practices initiated by the cotton spin-
ning and silk reeling factories especially after night work was abolished in 1929,
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