Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Webb, Todd

144 Reviews 
evolution of textual interpretations fully explains the social and political impact 
of political economy? Did not the changing material world at least influence 
later generations of radicals and social democrats to produce new ideas that 
seemed to fit the conditions of their own time? More than once while reading 
this book, Stedman Jones's method (though not conclusions) reminded me of 
Gertrude Hirnrnelfarb's two volume intellectual history of ideas about poverty, 
Tke Idea of Poverty (1985) and Poverty and Compassion (1991). Fifteen years 
ago, amidst the fury of the debates about the linguistic turn, such a comparison 
would have seemed shocking. In this instance, it is not the method that distin- 
guishes the scholarship of Stedman Jones and of Himmelfarb, only their politi- 
cal commitments. 
Stephen Heathorn-McMaster University 
David Rogers and John McLeod, eds., The Revision of Englishness 
(Manchester and New York:  anc chest er University Press, 2004). 
This collection of articles operates on two levels. It sets out to analyse the reac- 
tion of various English writers, poets, and film makers to both the influx of 
immigrants from across the former empire that began in the postwar era and to 
the shifting definition of Englishness associated with that rapid demographic 
transformation. Given that Rogers and McLeod invited the contributors to 
"reflect self-consciously upon their relationship with Englishness as a part of 
their critical endeavours" (10), the articles also document the reaction of mod- 
ern scholars to the question of what it meant to be English during the same peri- 
od. 
Focused on the issue of Englishness and how that identity has been chal- 
lenged and changed since the effective collapse of Britain as an imperial power 
in the years after 1945, The Revision of Englishness is more cohesive than most 
collections of conference papers. Almost all of the essays have something 
thought-provoking to say about the lived experience of Englishness, whether 
portrayed through novels like Adam Thorpe's Still, Hanif Kureishi's The Black 
Album, and Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses; through the poetry of Philip 
Larkin, Ted Hughes, and GeofTrey Hill; through films like Bhaji of the Beach; 
or through the lives of the contributors themselves. In the last case, however, 
The Revision of Englishness sometimes seems to teeter dangerously on the 
brink of self-indulgence. Some of the self-conscious reflections invited by 
Rogers and McLeod convey the sense of being part of a captive audience at an 
academic conference perfectly, but that is probably not what the editors had in 
mind. For instance, Alan Sinfield's autobiographical admission that "I was in 
love with Derek, and wanted to have sex with him in some partly comprehend- 
Left History 1 1.1 145 
ed way" (32) does not add a great deal of analytical depth to what is already a 
very effective examination of the interface between queerness and Englishness. 
Despite the fact that Rogers states that the essays in The Revision of 
Englishness "expose the workings of the ideology of pre-war 'Englishness,"' 
(172) that is not always the case. And that is one of the chief criticisms that 
must be leveled against this collection: its overall lack of historical context. 
Certainly, some of the essays do recognize that the question of what it means to 
be English has been hotly debated for centuries-David Gervais's article on 
Geofiey Hill's poetry and Vesna Goldsworthy's analysis of Englishness and 
suburbia being particularly strong cases in point-but this tends to be the 
exception, rather than the rule. It is, to say the least, somewhat odd that, in a 
collection about national identity, Linda Colley's work is cited only once and J. 
G. A. Pocock, who has written extensively on the relationship between 
Englishness and the collapse of empire after 1945, is overlooked entirely. Many 
of the essays in The Revision of Englishness quite rightly bemoan the fact that 
the modern sense of Englishness is so often synonymous with a hatred of the 
"other," whether that "other" appears in the form of an ethnic, religious or gen- 
der minority. That, however, is hardly a postwar development. There has been 
a strong connection between Englishness and a hatred of the "otherv-mostly a 
Catholic "otherv-since the Reformation. 
Even when the contributors do delve into the past, they often get it wrong. 
In his otherwise insighthl comparison of the novels of William Faulkner and 
Graham Swift, Rogers notes that "England . . . supported the South" in the 
American Civil War (175): a statement that is true only in a very limited sense. 
It would be more correct to say that the English government did not support the 
North, while popular opinion across the country was often bitterly divided over 
the war. Though only a minor point in Rogers' article, this lack of historical 
nuance is representative of many of the articles in the collection. 
For a collection that focuses so often on the experience of immigrants in 
postwar England, The Revision of Englishness is also surprisingly narrow in 
terms of its geographic scope. How has Englishness been defined on the crum- 
bling imperial periphery and did the sense of self that was created there affect 
the shaping of identities at the imperial centre? Several of the contributors 
approach these questions, but they do not address them in any comprehensive 
way. According to Martin Corner, one of the characters in Salmon Rushdie's 
The Satanic Verses comes to England and vows, at first, to make "himself more 
English than the English" (159). Arguably, this same desire to appropriate met- 
ropolitan culture was a feature of life not only among immigrants in England, 
but also among the peoples of various countries within the nineteenth and twen- 
tieth-century British Empire. James Belich and J. G. A. Pocock have both 
argued for the existence of a series of 'neo-Britains' across the world: large or 
small groups of colonial subjects who self-consciously attempted to forge a 
146 Reviews 
replica of Britain in what was usually an entirely different geographical and 
social context. Exactly like Rushdie's Saladin Chamcha, the inhabitants of 
these countries often ended up claiming to be "more English than the English." 
The contributors to The Revision of Englishness might have made more of what 
appears to be a strong connection between colonial and metropolitan experi- 
ences of Englishness, whether in terms of historical reality, artistic representa- 
tion or the interface between the two. If nothing else, such an approach might 
have given the collection a wider academic appeal. 
Such criticisms notwithstanding, The Revision of Englishness does consti- 
tute an often effective effort to analyse how various artists have attempted to 
deal with the question of what it has meant to be English in the postwar era. The 
essays are uniformly well written an4 for the most part, free of that academic 
jargon that can make literary criticism such a horror to read. The collection 
ends, suitably enough given its title, with a rousing call for a new sense of 
Englishness "resonant as a signifier for a 'civic' vision encompassing the local 
and global" (184). It is a beautiful dream, though, one suspects, not much more 
than that. 
Todd Webt-Brock University 
Peter Winn, ed., Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism 
in the Pinochet Era, 1973-2002 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 
2004). 
Peter Winn is on a mission. He is out to shatter the persistent fantasy of an eco- 
nomic miracle in Chile under the dictatorship of de facto president General 
Augusto Pinochet. Toward that end, Winn has assembled a consistently excel- 
lent collection of analyses. Beyond any reasonable doubt, he has laid waste to 
the claim that Pinochet brought prosperity to Chileans. Reason, though, has 
often had little to do with how the "miracle" argument has taken shape over the 
past thirty years. In fact, despite the strong analysis of Winn and others, it is 
likely that the miracle myth will have legs for some time to come. 
In 1973, after Pinochet led the Chilean military in a US CIA-backed coup 
d'Ctat he launched a two-pronged internal war against so-called Communist 
subversion. First, the dictatorship set about destroying political enemies by 
killing them, jailing them, driving them into exile, or forcing them into so- 
called internal exile in the South. Second, over the next decade and a half, the 
Chilean government dismantled government involvement in the economy wher- 
ever it could. This project boasted multiple components. In the 1970s these 
included the positioning of the "Chicago Boys" (University of Chicago-trained 
right wing economists) in positions of authority, the destruction of organized 


David Rogers and John McLeod, eds. — The Revision of Englishness

Koos, Cheryl A.

Review Essay 
New Directions in the Histories of Men, Masculinity, and War 
Cheryl Koos 
California State University, Los Angeles 
Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann, and John Tosh, eds., Masculinities in Politics 
and War: Gendering Modern History (Manchester, UK: Manchester 
University Press, 2004). 
Paul Jackson, One of the Boys: Homosexuality in the Military during World 
War 11 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004). 
Christina S. Jarvis, The Male Body at War: American Masculinity during World 
War 11 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004). 
Jeffrey S. Reznick, Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving 
in Britain during the Great War (Manchester, UK: Manchester University 
Press, 2004). 
Sandra Whitworth, Men, Militarism and UN Peacekeeping: A Gendered 
Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004). 
On 1 May 2003, after two dramatic fly-bys, United States President George W. 
Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln in a Navy jet, with "Navy 1" and 
"George W. Bush Commander in Chief' emblazoned under the cockpit win- 
dow. Bush disembarked from the CO-pilot's seat under a massive banner declar- 
ing, "Mission Accomplished," waving to the crowd while wearing a green flight 
suit and with a white helmet tucked under his left arm. Flanked by two Tom 
Cruise Top Gun look-alike pilots with gleaming white teeth, Bush proceeded to 
gladhand and salute the flight deck. Several hours later, after the controversial 
photo-op, Bush would declare an end to official combat operations in Iraq. 
It does not take a brain surgeon--or even less, an historian-to decode the 
symbolism of that staged event over three years ago. An image-making White 
House staff, led by Karl Rove, staged the event to burnish Bush's war creden- 
tials prior to the heavily contested 2004 election. Facing withering criticism of 
his 'chicken-hawk' administration who had largely sat out the Vietnam War 
(Bush piloted an F-102 fighter jet in the Texas Air National Guard and Vice 
President Dick Cheney received multiple deferments), Bush playing Top Gun 
was a ploy to show that he truly was, in his own words, "a war president." In 
other words, strutting in a flight suit made him a more of a certain kind of man 
139 
0 Left History 
11.2 (Fall 2006) 
140 Koos 
and provided evidence of a persona that played directly to cultural understand- 
i n g ~  of the integral relationship between war and manhood that have been cen- 
turies in the making and foundational to the construction of the modern nation- 
state. 
Similarly, the five diverse books under review in this essay all examine, 
either centrally or tangentially, how masculinity/masculinities and war seem 
inexorably linked. From looking at theoretical constructions of the relationship 
of men, masculinity, and war to the representations of masculinity in times of 
war and the experiences of men who fight and do not or cannot participate as 
soldiers and how gender constructions affected their lives in profound ways, 
these works engage and add to a developing area of scholarship in both the 
fields of gender studies and history. 
Taking their cues from the groundbreaking work of historian Joan Scott 
and sociologist R. W. Connell, among others, Stefan Dudnik, Karen Hagemann, 
and John Tosh have assembled a wide-ranging and impressive anthology with 
Masculinities in Politics and War. With its sixteen authors addressing related 
subjects in a post-1750 global context, covering every continent except 
Antarctica, the volume raises many important issues about the integral relation- 
ship between constructions of masculinity and the modern nation-state. All 
essays examine how historically contingent manifestations of both have 
revolved around questions and definitions of citizenship and military service. 
Three theoretical pieces anchor the book, two by the editors. The first, by 
Dudink and Hagemann, identifies the primary questions that the volume seeks 
to address. In asserting that the book seeks "to situate the history of masculin- 
ity in struggles over power, over claims to political and other forms of authori- 
ty and legitimacy that were made in gendered terms," they want to interrogate 
"what masculinities were invoked, produced, and discarded in shaping the 
autonomy of modern citizens, peoples, and nations" in regard to state politics 
and the making of war (6). John Home extends this discussion in the volume's 
second chapter, raising important points about the evolution of the modem 
nation-state's military as a "source of masculine authority and privileged arena 
of male activity" (3 1). According to Horne, following from ideas that Dudink 
and Hagemann set forth in their essay, historians must consider how republican 
notions of citizenship ('nationalized masculinity') became imbued with and 
indeed inseparable from 'militarized' masculinity. He rightly contends that 
these constructions would be challenged, though, by the two World Wars. With 
these total wars, women as well as men could make claims to a form of milita- 
rized citizenship, through direct participation in the military, but more often in 
factories and homes as workers andfor mothers. In addition, with civilians 
being targeted in bombings and affected by occupation, the line between the 
front and home was muddied, thus destabilizing the war as a source of mascu- 
line authority. 
Men, Masculinity, and War 141 
John Tosh explores some of these ideas further in the volume's third intro- 
ductory essay, "Hegemonic Masculinity and the History of Gender." Tosh 
examines sociologist R. W. Connell's identification of "hegemonic masculini- 
ty" and the category's potential for historical gender analysis, much in the same 
way Joan Scott did with Foucault and poststructuralism. According to Tosh, 
this model "seeks to explain how the political and social order of men is creat- 
ed in the image of men, and expressed in specific forms of masculinity" (42). 
Key to understanding this concept are gendered relations of power, those 
between not only men and women/masculine and feminine, but also dominant 
and subordinate expressions of masculinity among men; the examination of 
unequal social and political power distribution is at the core of this. Among its 
contributions to the study of history, according to Tosh, is that hegemonic mas- 
culinity, a la Gramsci, is always contingent and subject to challenge from those 
subordinated, thus forcing the adaptation and response of dominant structures 
and cultures. Tosh underscores an important conceptual tool for studying how 
certain men, formulating and deploying gendered, social, and cultural construc- 
tions, use formal political and military structures for the acquisition and main- 
tenance of power. He rightly lauds Connell for keeping material power rela- 
tions in view and formulating an interpretive schematic that encourages the 
examination of how masculinity and its various forms are mediated by other 
polyvalent yet experientially salient identities, such as race, class, sexuality, and 
religion. 
Thinking about how forms of hegemonic masculinity function or do not 
function in war provides an analytical tool for examining the remaining four 
books under review. Jeffrey Reznick's book, Healing the Nation, is an excel- 
lent monograph that examines the care giving apparatus that served wounded 
British soldiers during the First World War. Remick carehlly traces how insti- 
tutions and their employees and volunteers cared for soldiers, from respites set 
up behind the front lines that were operated by the YMCA and Salvation Army 
to military hospitals both in France and in Great Britain and rehabilitation cen- 
ters at home. Remick argues that a "culture of caregiving" developed between 
19 14 and 19 18 that enabled those left on the home front to participate in the war 
on some level by taking care of the wounded and helping with their rehabilita- 
tion; he argues that the resulting system was perhaps more effective in doing the 
latter than in dealing with wounded veterans. Using institutional records from 
non-profit organizations like the YMCA, military hospital records, and maga- 
zines published by the soldiers themselves, as well as soldiers' letters and mem- 
oirs, Reznick maintains that shared institutional experiences, like those of 
trench warfare, served to concretize their bonds and comradeship and highlight- 
ed differences between care givers and the cared for. 
For the purposes of this review, though, I would like to focus on Remick's 
claims that the study significantly contributes to a growing field of wartime 
142 Koos 
masculinity along the lines of Joanna Bourke's and Seth Koven's work on dis- 
abled male veterans and their bodies. As he states in the book's introduction, 
"[it argues] that expressions of and attempts to preserve manliness within the 
wartime culture of caregiving had outcomes that ranged from reinforcement to 
destabilization of manliness as defined by the male-breadwinner ideal and by 
emphasis on independence, moral courage, sexual purity, athleticism and sto- 
icism" ( l  l). While Reznick plants the seeds of such analysis throughout the 
book, they beg to be developed more fully. Bringing out the cultural dimension 
of gender in much greater depth would have added a provoking dimension to a 
fine institutional history. Perhaps by employing a more pronounced theoretical 
approach to his work, one along the lines suggested by John Tosh, he would 
have come closer to obtaining his goal. 
Paul Jackson and Chstina Jarvis, however, more directly analyze how cer- 
tain forms of masculinity functioned in the arenas of American and Canadian 
participation in World War 11. Jackson's provocative work on homosexuality in 
the Canadian military offers an important addition by looking at how forms of 
hegemonic masculinities affected the formation of institutional military policy 
toward homosexual men as well as their experiences overseas and on bases in 
Canada. The first half of the book focuses on the military's attempts to regu- 
late homosexual behavior. Jackson's findings are fascinating; he discovers that 
far from being uniformly applied, military discipline of soldiers caught per- 
forming homosexual acts ranged from the severe (dismissal) to moderate 
(active discouragement) to a slap on the wrist and an admonition; much depend- 
ed on base commanders and officers' personal attitudes. Enforcement was 
erratic and court martial proceedings were much more damaging to unit cohe- 
sion than the homosexual servicemen. Not surprisingly, fellow soldiers were 
far more tolerant of such expression than the authorities after a soldier had 
proven his loyalty (28). 
Jackson provides a solidly researched social and institutional history that 
reveals the complexities of gay life in and around the military. He is an astute 
observer of mid-century mores that shaped attitudes toward homosexuality as 
well as the unique cultural opportunities that arose with the dislocation of the 
war. The result is a rich two-pronged study based primarily on court martial 
proceedings as well as copious and often frank personal interviews; the com- 
plex interrelations of masculinity and queer sexuality are made clear. The 
book's gender analysis works well and is integrated into the narrative, teasing 
out subtleties and nuances of attitude and expression. 
Inasmuch that Jackson's study is about 'real' men and their experiences at 
the hand of an intense military regulatory order, Christina Jarvis looks at how 
American servicemen's bodies were used by military and state officials to 
remasculinize not just American servicemen during World War 11, but also the 
entire nation. Jarvis provides an important corrective to the study of twentieth- 
Men, Masculinity, and War 143 
century American masculinities by investigating this crucial era of history; 
essentially, she does what Susan Jeffords did for the Vietnam War and post- 
Vietnam period. Explicitly relying on Connell's idea of hegemonic masculini- 
ty as an interpretive tool to examine the myriad meanings attached to white 
male bodies, Jarvis argues a vision of "hegemonic militarized masculinity" 
emerged during World War I1 that was constructed against and in relation to 
Japanese and German masculinities as well as those of ethnic American minori- 
ties (8, 155-56). The resulting ideal of manhood, well-muscled and primarily 
white, rested on a cult of heroism and sacrifice and emerged as the dominant 
vision of American masculinity for the latter half of the twentieth century and 
into the twenty-first. 
To do this, Jarvis marshals an impressive array of sources that informed the 
production of this dominant masculine ideal. She carefully charts official prop- 
aganda coming out of the State Department and US Armed Forces, including 
posters, brochures, and military and governmental reports, and analyzes them 
within the context of what she calls the "cultural g r id  of the era, including pop- 
ular magazines, films, and novels (6). In this way, Jarvis shows how first the 
government and the military successfully remasculinized American men in the 
wake of the Great Depression. This process began with the New Deal and was 
furthered by the exigencies of war. She argues that the rebuilding of the 
American body politic occurred through the refashioning and deployment of 
men's bodies through representation, but also through their physical deploy- 
ment in war. 
Political scientist Sandra Whitworth likewise looks at the construction of a 
militarized masculinity, but in the context of its impact on Canadian United 
Nations peacekeeping forces in Cambodia and Somalia. She concludes that an 
inherent contradiction emerges when soldiers trained in a hyper-masculine 
environment-that extols brutality and killing and routinely rewards recruits 
for participating in behavior that subjugates the weaklfeminine-are used as 
peacekeepers in non-combat situations. She finds that the result is a fundamen- 
tal contradiction in identities, one that produces conditions ripe for the exploita- 
tion of women in these localities through sexual and racially-charged violence, 
as well as those that produce conflicts and contradictions for the soldiers them- 
selves, leading at times to post-traumatic stress disorder (13). 
Whitworth boldly suggests that the United Nations has not adequately con- 
sidered these contradictions between military training and fitness for peace- 
keeping duties from the perspective of gender and must do so if they want to 
increase the efficacy of these missions. Using Connell's formulation, she main- 
tains that the militarized masculinity created in the Canadian context, as in most 
others, becomes culturally exalted or hegemonic to the point where alternative 
masculinities are subordinated, as are the feminine and traits coded as feminine. 
To this end, she deftly combines the theoretical with the practical analysis of 
144 Koos 
soldier training and military culture to argue that the constructed identities of 
'soldier' and 'peacekeeper' collide with each other, producing exacerbated con- 
tradictions and negative results for both local populations and soldiers. Thus, 
Whitworth concludes "militarized peacekeeping results in greater insecurity for 
far too many people . . . [it] is founded on a series of contradictions, such that it 
cannot deliver on the promises it makes to those who are subject to the missions 
or even to those who are deployed on peacekeeping missions" (186). She wor- 
ries, along with others that peacekeeping will become more, as a United 
Nations report calls for, militarized and 'robust,' thus further blending 'peace' 
and 'war' and raising even more contradictions with serious implications for the 
warriors who keep the peace and those they are supposed to protect. The words 
of George W. Bush, eleven months before he put war and masculinity on dis- 
play on the USS Abraham Lincoln, fit aptly here: "I just want you to know that, 
when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace." 
Whitworth's book and the others under consideration here remind us, as 
does presidential posturing on an aircraft carrier in the not-too-distant past, that 
it is incumbent upon scholars to take the connections between masculinity and 
war seriously when writing the history of each. When analyzing "shock and 
awe" and missions accomplished and unaccomplished in the past and the pres- 
ent, the physical toll of body counts, missing limbs, and wounds as well as the 
emotional aftermath that hegemonic masculinity, as expressed and constructed 
through war, inflicted and inflicts on soldiers, civilians and enemy combatants, 
is not just necessary but also politically relevant. 


New Directions in the Histories of Men, Masculinity, and War

Barenscott, Dorothy

Reviews 
Mark Salber Phillips and Gordon Schochet, eds., Questions of Tradition 
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 
Within the current global cultural climate, where political "way-of-life" rheto- 
ric and "clash of civilization" theses CO-mingle with an explosion of interest in 
family genealogy, heritage sites, memorial museums, and all manner of history 
making, there are serious stakes involved in the way scholars continue to 
engage with notions of cuitural memory, legitimacy and authority. In Questions 
of Tradition, the authors of a dynamic new collection of essays suggest that a 
critical aspect of this project lies with broadening current definitions and under- 
standing~ of the term "tradition" - a concept that they rightfully contend is 
long overdue for reassessment and critical consideration. 
At the core of this book is a persuasive argument for tradition as a more 
fluid, constructive, and adaptive category, one that Edward Said has described 
not only as "a weapon in the service of state-directed manipulation of cultural 
memories" but also a means to "empower the people that cultural memory pos- 
sesses" (144-5). A vital element of this reappraisal involves confronting what 
the editors, Mark Salber Phillips and Gordon Schochet, characterize as "the 
taint of traditionalism" (X). Together with the preponderance of the ideological 
(read: anti-modem) usage of the term, discussion around tradition has been 
made difficult outside the limited and deconstructive framework of "pseudo- 
traditionality" and a kind of implied disassociation from the past. The result, 
according to the editors, is that "tradition in its wider sense has remained under- 
valued, underutilized, and certainly undertheorized (X). 
The timely and critical reappraisal set out in Questions of Tradition, while 
seemingly ambitious in scope, avoids the pitfall of seeking an all encompassing 
definition of tradition. Instead, the volume of essays originating first with a 
conference held at Rutgers University in 1997 under the same title (sponsored 
by The Journal of the History of Ideas and the International Society for 
Intellectual History), and then continued as a year-long thematic lecture series 
at the University of British Columbia's Green College, draws from a cross-dis- 
ciplinary pool of contributors who the editors have chosen specifically for their 
varied approaches to the topic. The book itself is divided into two sections. 
Part One is described in the Preface as covering tradition as understood and 
studied in anthropology, art history, and museum curating, while Part Two takes 
up the disciplines of intellectual history, philosophy, and political science. Each 
section is then capped with a review essay which attempts to draw together the 
individual essays while placing the authors' concerns in a wider frame. 
While this project is meant to explore how different disciplines construc- 
135 
0 Left History 
10.2 (Fall 2005) 
136 Reviews 
tively think and write about notions of tradition, one unintended downside to 
the book's approach is that the contributions and review essay from Part One 
seem relegated to a more loosely constructed cultural argument while the more 
"serious" weight of politics, history, and theory seems favoured in the essays 
and review of Part Two. This is indeed unfortunate since all of the essays fea- 
ture a mutual and forcehl engagement with a wide range of interrelated issues 
and could usefully be compared and contrasted with one another. Perhaps the 
reliance on case studies and focus on different methodological and disciplinary 
approaches is partly to blame for this perception, but there is a way in which the 
overarching themes of the two parts of the book could stand to come into sharp- 
er focus. 
Notably, one commonality across the volume is that the authors of nearly 
each of the eleven essays cite or allude to Eric Hobsbawm's highly influential 
book The Invention of Traditions (1983). At times, it even seems that 
Hobsbawn (and to a lesser extend Pierre Nora) is seen as the foil to a broader 
understanding of tradition as a constructive category of knowledge. Still, there 
is a careful effort to recognize Hobsbawm's critical impact on the way we think 
about tacit knowledge and the role of historian as myth-buster. The continued 
popularity of Hobsbawm's scholarship and commitment to a politically 
engaged and more radical style of history writing stands as a testament to the 
rhetorical strength of his arguments, the social and political context out of 
which he writes, and the power of a persuasive hypothesis to remain largely 
uncontested for over two decades. These facts do not go unnoticed in a num- 
ber of the essays. Still, a consequence of Hobsbawm's legacy and impact, as 
many of the authors go on to point out, is that almost all notions of tradition 
have subsequently been rendered suspect and fictitious, seeming to serve only 
questionable political ends and engendering what Phillips calls a "politics of 
disenchantment" (8). 
In short, the book argues that Hobsbawm's take on tradition has, ironical- 
ly enough, become something of its own tradition in academic circles and espe- 
cially among historians. Such characterizations have spread and therefore 
made it difficult for scholars within many other disciplines to raise a discussion 
of individual traditions or traditionalism without running up against problems 
of perceived conservatism or an implied resistance to modernity. So while the 
fact of invented traditions seems clear enough, the "why" of invented traditions 
remains ambiguously unclear. Are all traditions suspect? And if not, where do 
invented traditions begin and the more "genuine" traditions suggested by 
Hobsbawm end? Are such distinctions problematic and at what point do they 
become conceptually flawed? 
Two of the book's essays that are particularly rigorous in engaging with 
these specific dilemmas are worth commenting on further. First is Mieke Bal's 
complex and fascinating discussion of the Zwarte Piet or the "Black Peter" tra- 
Left History 10.2 137 
dition in her home country of Holland. There, Christmas revellers engage in a 
form of blackface, wearing afro wigs and acting in a comical dim-witted man- 
ner as embodiments of a beloved Moorish character. Challenging academics' 
own implication in the terms of the tradition debate and the "Althusserian idea 
that critical analysis can stand outside its object of critique" (112), Bal engages 
in a serious and self-reflexive discussion of how her fond and sometimes inex- 
act childhood memories of Zwarte Piet shaped her own subjectivity as a white 
woman and Dutch citizen. In turn, Bal argues that "traditions are neither dis- 
missible fictions nor acceptable truths" (141). Drawn into her discussion are 
painted and photographic re-presentations of Zwarte Piet that suggest a more 
critical commentary on the tradition, extending Bal's analysis into the realm of 
art and its ability to probe the ambiguities of tradition. 
In the second essay, Michael McKeon asks the compelling question of 
what "does the work" of tradition after it has lost its authority in modern cul- 
ture. Through this interrogation, he complicates the tradition versus modernity 
perception so engrained in today's scholarship. Exposing how the conception 
of tradition transformed during the time of the English Enlightenment, a 
moment commonly believed to be predicated on the full repudiation of tradition 
in toto, McKeon deftly examines the way in which "ideology" came to replace 
the concept of tradition "in the sense not of a correction but of a modernization" 
(1 85) through a number of key examples. Extending his arguments to the realm 
of modern science and aesthetics, McKeon challenges the terms of the tradition 
versus modernity divide by suggesting how "modernity has most successfully 
theorized and extended the idea of tradition in other terms" (196). 
Overall, Questions of Tradition is an important and substantial book that 
sketches out the framework for a much needed interdisciplinary reassessment 
of the discourses surrounding tradition writ large. Undoubtedly, a number of 
the collection's essays will become key additions to course reading lists across 
the humanities. And not unlike Hobsbawm's original hypotheses about tradi- 
tion, which in part inspired this book, the authors intentionally leave many 
questions unanswered and suggest hrther work to be done. The book's themes 
are perhaps best expressed in the enigmatic John Everett Millais painting, The 
Boyhood of Raleigh which was cleverly chosen as the cover artwork for the 
book but unfortunately not discussed in its pages. Painted in 1870 at the height 
of the British Empire, Millais's image was approved to be hung in almost every 
educational institution in the Commonwealth following World War 11. When 
painted, it was an image that seemed to speak to the greatness and traditions of 
a seafaring nation yet-to-be, experienced through the eyes of the young six- 
teenth century British explorer Walter Raleigh. But by mid-twentieth century, 
when Britain was facing the reality of its diminished power in its colonies and 
around the world, the abstract traditions implied by the painting and alluded to 
by the sailor pointing off to the horizon beyond the boys' sight, had not only 
138 Reviews 
undergone profound transformation, but would come to elicit far different read- 
ings that no longer held the same weight or relevance. Nevertheless, the shared 
experience of British subjects viewing the image across time and from varied 
ethnic, social, and political positions performed a kind of exchange or cultural 
transmission that formed a vital, if even conflicted, part of individual and col- 
lective national identity. In the end, it is precisely within these kinds of con- 
texts that the notion of tradition becomes less stable, more ambiguous and less 
easily determined, and it is to these kinds of theoretical problems and their 
material fall-out that the editors of Questions of Tradition are pointing us. 
Dorothy Barenscott 
University of British Columbia 
Wiliam J. Peace, LeslieA. White: Evolution and Revolution in Anthropology 
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). 
David H. Price, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's 
Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Durham: Duke University Press, 
2004). 
Over the past few years the American Anthropological Association (AAA), the 
main organ uniting US cultural anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, and 
physical anthropologists, has been struggling to redefine its position in relation 
to both an increasingly "culture-conscious" public and new political projects 
(e.g. multicultural state policies, identity politics, ethnic conflicts, etc.). At the 
same time, the AAA has had to come to terms with its own past and with the 
legacies, for better and for worse, of the relationship between US anthropology 
and US politics at home and overseas. Both William Peace's Leslie A. White: 
Evolution and Revolution in Anthropology and David Price's Threatening 
Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI5 Surveillance of Activist 
Anthropologists should be read against the current situation that the AAA, and 
US and Canadian academics more widely, now face. 
Peace's biography of Leslie White (1900-1975), who pioneered a cultural 
evolutionary approach to anthropology, and was steadfastly marginalized for 
his theoretical positions, is a welcome contribution to the history of anthropol- 
ogy. White was a strange figure during his own time, almost always at odds 
with the dominant strain of US cultural anthropology (i.e. Boasian cultural rel- 
ativism), which he felt was not only ahistorical but also theoretically vacuous. 
As Peace nicely illustrates, White paid dearly for his theoretical positions, in 
both his professional and personal lives. 


Mark Salber Phillips and Gordon Schochet, eds. — Questions of Tradition

Beckett, Greg

138 Reviews 
undergone profound transformation, but would come to elicit far different read- 
ings that no longer held the same weight or relevance. Nevertheless, the shared 
experience of British subjects viewing the image across time and from varied 
ethnic, social, and political positions performed a kind of exchange or cultural 
transmission that formed a vital, if even conflicted, part of individual and col- 
lective national identity. In the end, it is precisely within these kinds of con- 
texts that the notion of tradition becomes less stable, more ambiguous and less 
easily determined, and it is to these kinds of theoretical problems and their 
material fall-out that the editors of Questions of Tradition are pointing us. 
Dorothy Barenscott 
University of British Columbia 
Wiliam J. Peace, LeslieA. White: Evolution and Revolution in Anthropology 
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). 
David H. Price, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's 
Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Durham: Duke University Press, 
2004). 
Over the past few years the American Anthropological Association (AAA), the 
main organ uniting US cultural anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, and 
physical anthropologists, has been struggling to redefine its position in relation 
to both an increasingly "culture-conscious" public and new political projects 
(e.g. multicultural state policies, identity politics, ethnic conflicts, etc.). At the 
same time, the AAA has had to come to terms with its own past and with the 
legacies, for better and for worse, of the relationship between US anthropology 
and US politics at home and overseas. Both William Peace's Leslie A. White: 
Evolution and Revolution in Anthropology and David Price's Threatening 
Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI5 Surveillance of Activist 
Anthropologists should be read against the current situation that the AAA, and 
US and Canadian academics more widely, now face. 
Peace's biography of Leslie White (1900-1975), who pioneered a cultural 
evolutionary approach to anthropology, and was steadfastly marginalized for 
his theoretical positions, is a welcome contribution to the history of anthropol- 
ogy. White was a strange figure during his own time, almost always at odds 
with the dominant strain of US cultural anthropology (i.e. Boasian cultural rel- 
ativism), which he felt was not only ahistorical but also theoretically vacuous. 
As Peace nicely illustrates, White paid dearly for his theoretical positions, in 
both his professional and personal lives. 
Left History 10.2 139 
White had a lonely childhood in rural Kansas, and he came of age during 
World War I, and like many intellectuals of his generation, these biographical 
elements were formative of his later outlook on life. White began his engage- 
ment with anthropology during the interwar years, when he studied at the 
University of Chicago. There, he was caught between fissures within the 
department, and White's own views on this period have become "part of the 
folklore of Chicago anthropology" (Peace, 23). Throughout this period, White 
grew increasingly disenchanted with the American mythos of Capitalism and 
Democracy, noting after his stint in the Navy during World War I: "I was over- 
whelmed when the realization that everything is not as it pretends to be, struck 
me; almost everything seemed to me to be 'out of joint"' (Peace, 9). In the end, 
it was White who was "out of joint," ending his career and life lonely and 
embittered, with serious doubts about the ability of the modern nation-state, or 
humanity, to survive. He retired in 1970, after 40 years of teaching at the 
University of Michigan (where he helped forge one of the top anthropology 
departments in North America). 
White was an ambitious and prodigious ethnographer, conducting chal- 
lenging work among the Acoma, a secretive Pueblo Indian group in the US 
Southwest that was assumed to be impervious to anthropological research. 
Unfortunately, as Peace notes, he is rarely remembered for this research (except 
by those who continue to work in the US Southwest); rather, he is known for 
his theoretical contributions - in particular as one of the main proponents of a 
cultural evolutionary framework. Yet, by the time his ideas of cultural evolu- 
tion were finally accepted in the discipline (only to be dismissed soon after by 
a new turn to relativity and postmodernism), White seemed so inured to fight- 
ing that he lacked the necessary finesse or ability to politick. In the end, he 
remains a marginal figure, a situation that Peace's book will hopefully redress. 
When read alongside David Price's account of FBI surveillance of anthro- 
pologists during the McCarthy era, Peace's book becomes much more than a 
biography of a difficult, often forgotten figure. Indeed, together these two 
books offer a rich and nuanced account of the history of US anthropology, one 
that might help us understand the position we find ourselves in today. The lat- 
ter is exactly what Peace and Price are up to, albeit in somewhat different ways, 
since they both seek to excavate the relation between anthropological theory 
and practice on the one hand and the wider social and political field on the 
other. 
While there have been numerous other studies of McCarthyism and the 
academy in the US, both Peace and Price argue for a richer consideration of the 
relationship between academics, political action, and the socio-political climate 
of the time. For example, Peace notes that Leslie White was one of a number 
of US anthropologists who censored their own work in order to avoid more 
stringent forms of surveillance and persecution. While there did not seem to be 
140 Reviews 
any direct proof that White was a member of the Communist Party (not that 
such proof was required during this period), a confidential informant in an FBI 
report noted that White "had Communistic tendencies" (Peace, 159), and the 
FBI considered opening a formal investigation after White's name appeared in 
a background check of another anthropologist. (The FBI did not, however, 
seem to be aware of White's earlier writings for the Socialist Labor Party under 
the pseudonym John Steel.) Peace makes a strong case, however, for reconsid- 
ering the reasons why anthropology as a discipline was seen as subversive. In 
White's case, his professional problems stemmed from his ardent (and at times 
mean-spirited) critiques of Boasian anthropology. His public and political 
problems, though, were the result of his atheism and his writings, public state- 
ments, and lectures against organized religion in general and the Catholic 
Church in particular. White's cultural evolutionary theories also challenged 
deeply-held convictions about race in the US (though perhaps less than the cul- 
tural relativism of the Boasian school). 
Several other anthropologists suffered much more directly from political 
persecution, and David Price argues convincingly that the discipline as a whole 
suffered too. His account of FBI surveillance and the discipline's own auto- 
censorship is impressive, and it is worth noting the determination which Price 
has displayed in seeking out the material necessary for this history. He filed 
over 500 requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and an addi- 
tional 250 appeals in the course of research for his book. If nothing else, he is 
to be cornmended for that - and for providing an appendix that will be of great 
use to others seeking FOIA documents. Yet, there is much more to commend. 
While much of Price's book was written before 9/11, he notes how crucial his 
historical account is to an understanding of our present conditions, under which 
"American academic freedom and the freedom of political dissent are threat- 
ened with an intensity not seen since the McCarthy period" (Price, 352). In this 
sense, Price's book is more ambitious and more wide-ranging in its history of, 
as his title nicely suggests, threats posed by and to anthropology. 
Price approaches his material in a wide-ranging, though systematic man- 
ner. Among other things, he takes the AAA to task for the sheer lack of com- 
mitment the organisation often demonstrated in advocating on behalf of its 
members. He also thoroughly exposes many of the FBI's methods, which range 
from the somewhat humorous technique of "confidential trash cover" (search- 
ing through one's garbage) to the much more serious interrogation of one's 
friends, family, and colleagues. (The latter is oddly reminiscent of ethnograph- 
ic methods.) Price also offers fascinating case studies of the trials and tribula- 
tions of several anthropologists, many of whom were effectively chased out of 
the discipline, the academy, and at times even the country. Throughout all of 
this, though, it is his insistence that there was, indeed, something threatening 
about anthropology that makes his book such a unique contribution. 
Left History 10.2 141 
In an important analytical move, Price rejects the verificationist projects 
that often dnve similar-minded historical research, since he is never too con- 
cerned to prove or disprove formal ties between scholars targeted for surveil- 
lance and the Communist Party. Such a focus, he argues, reproduces much of 
the logic of the McCarthy era, in which the mere mention of one's name in rela- 
tion to any organisation deemed to be subversive was enough to have real last- 
ing consequences. Consider for example one of the more shocking moments in 
the history of anthropology that Price reveals. At its annual business meeting 
held in Toronto in December 1948, the AAA discussed the recent dismissal of 
Robert Morgan from his position of curator at the Ohio State Museum, seem- 
ingly for his wife's involvement with progressive organisations. After a heated 
meeting about the responsibilities of the AAA Executive Board in relation to its 
members, a well-known and influential anthropologist, George Murdock, wrote 
a private letter to J. Edgar Hoover detailing what he characterized as an attempt- 
ed take-over of the organisation by a subset of its members, 15 of whom he 
named as people he could confidently state were or had been members of the 
Communist Party (Price reprints the letter in its entirety, 71-5). 
One of those mentioned in Murdock's letter was Gene Weltfish (1902- 
1980), a renowned anthropologist who studied under Franz Boas and taught for 
almost two decades at Columbia University. Weltfish was one of a set of promi- 
nent anthropologists called to testify before several governmental committees 
in public show trials. While Senator McCarthy and others were very concerned 
about Weltfish's possible membership in the Communist Party, her testimony 
reveals that time and again, the main threat posed by anthropology had much 
less to do with radical politics or Communist Party membership (though that 
was surely an issue), than with the relationship between anthropological theory 
and what we might call the structural foundations of US society. As Price 
argues, "the central reason that Weltfish and the other anthropologists discussed 
in this text were identified for investigation by the FBI ... is because they were 
committed activists for racial, economic, gender, and global equality" (Price, 
119). Weltfish's story is similar to that of many others, including Kathleen 
Gough, who suffered from post-McCarthy era restrictions on academic freedom 
and was eventually fired from her position at Simon Fraser University for her 
critique of Western imperialism and her involvement in progressive political 
movements in the US and in Canada (Price, 306-26). 
Price ends the book with a bang, perhaps unfairly calling the "dominant 
American historicist school" (most members of which have been trained or 
influenced by George Stocking) to task for "its inattentiveness to political econ- 
omy" (Price, 342). He ends by questioning the persistence ofArea Studies pro- 
grams and their relation to US government funding and strategic interests and 
insisting that anthropologists "shrug off the negative connotations of radical 
political associations and reexamine the historic political actions that anthropol- 
142 Reviews 
ogy's collective colonized mind learned not to see" (Price, 342). That is a tall 
order indeed, but one worth pursing, as both Price and Peace have done. 
Greg Beckett 
University of Chicago 
Robert M. Lichtman and Ronald D. Cohen, Deadly Farce: Hawey Matusow 
and the Informer System in the McCarthy Era (Urbana: University of 
Illinois Press, 2004). 
This is a brilliantly told story of a most unique informer, the figure with the con- 
science to repudiate his own charges, face down the institutional inquisition 
now directed toward himself, and try to make up for sins during the rest of his 
life. On the American scene, perhaps no one but Mrs. Rice, erstwhile anti-com- 
munist savant of the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU) but later 
an avid supporter of the farmworkers, carries quite so much weight. Several 
prominent radicals-become-CIA-pets in the Congress for Cultural Freedom 
during the 1950s and early 1960s returned to something like radicalism during 
the Vietnam War - Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy most prominent- 
ly - but could not or would not deal with the public meanings of their quietly 
funded success. Harvey Matusow did, and we now know how and why. 
The larger scope of this story is the institutional operation of the domestic 
Cold War, something with more relevance today than at any time during the last 
30 years or so. As scholars of the blacklist know so well, no "investigating 
committee" ever really intended to turn up facts, and every committee knew 
how slim the likelihood was of any "subversives" presently giving away sup- 
posed secrets to America's enemies. The FBI had placed its informers so 
expertly in myriad organizations that every name, every activity had been 
tracked before the investigation opened. The point of hearings and further FBI 
activity was, then, simply to shut down the Left and to warn liberals (along with 
the general populace) that loyalty would always be in question, and a failure to 
offer open approval of US global operations could bring the sudden end to a 
career and assorted rights, perhaps citizenship itself. The authors make the 
point that the Justice Department was behind it all, more sinister than J. Edgar 
Hoover's operation because its officials made the key decisions to indict and 
imprison. 
The lesser scope but also inevitable center of the story is the pathetic crea- 
ture, Harvey Matusow. Born into a middle-class Bronx neighborhood in 1926, 
he came along too late for the glory days of the Depression struggles. He 
moved toward the Left in the inauspicious year of 1946, joined the Party the fol- 


William J. Peace — Leslie A. White: Evolution and Revolution in Anthropology; David H. Price — Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists

Cohen, Ronald D.

144 Reviews 
By 1960, when a term in prison on this charge ended, he was a mere 33. A 
half-decade or so later he became a successful exile in London, leader of 
Harvey Matusow's Jew's Harp Band and then Naked Software, i.e. hipsters 
who encouraged London's youth in the direction of the counter culture (thus a 
successful "corrupter" of youth after all). Returning to the US, he joined a com- 
mune, later became active in children's theater, still later running a kitchen for 
the homeless in Arizona. Near the end of his life, he worked in public access 
television. 
What was the meaning of it all? The authors do not push the envelope far 
in their speculations. But with scrupulous research and personal sympathy for 
Matusow, they explore a life of a young rebel corrupted, ruined, then partly 
redeemed. What could a Harvey Matusow have been and done in a world going 
a different direction in 1947? We will never know. 
Paul Buhle 
Brown University 
Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, Hide In Plain Sight: The Hollywood 
Blacklistees In Film and Television, 1950-2002 (New York: Palgrave 
Macmillan, 2003). 
This is the fourth study of Hollywood, the blacklist, and the Left that Paul 
Buhle has published with Dave Wagner: A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham 
Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left (200 l), Radical Hollywood (2002), 
and Blacklisted: The Film Lovers 'Guide to the Blacklist Movie (2003). He has 
also combined with Patrick McGillian in compiling interviews of many of those 
blacklisted, Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (1997). 
It might appear that after all of his research and thinking about the subject, there 
could be little that Buhle has not covered, or that could be challenged. Yet there 
has been considerable controversy concerning his research and interpretations; 
indeed, virtually all of his recent publications have been questioned by those 
who disagree with his political views andlor seemingly questionable research. 
I would argue, however, that he and his co-authors have greatly enhanced and 
enriched our understanding of the American Left and its trials and tribulations 
following World War 11, in Hollywood and elsewhere. In Radical Hollywood, 
Buhle and Wagner thoroughly documented the (often subtle) political influ- 
ences of left-wing movie writers, directors, actors, and producers into the 
1940s, although this was usually denied, then and subsequently. Hide In Plain 
Sight follows the story through the dark age of blacklisting, when most of those 
purged somehow managed to survive and even influence popular culture until 
Left History 10.2 145 
the present. 
Buhle and Wagner begin and end with brief discussions of the few 
Hollywood movies to treat the blacklist, including The Way We Were, The 
Front, and The Majestic. Their focus is on the movie and television work of 
countless left-wing writers, directors, producers, and actors who managed to 
survive through the 1950s and after, even while often attempting to reflect their 
politics in their art. For example, the short-lived TV series East SideIWest Side 
featured hard-hitting social dramas, which employed suspect writers, including 
the blacklisted Millard Lampell. The Defenders was another show exhibiting a 
social conscience, predating the anti-war feelings in M*A*S*H. The authors 
next mine the world of Hollywood B movies in the 1950s, where they interpret 
various science fiction films from a left perspective. Even TV shows for chil- 
dren could furnish employment for blacklistees Ring Lardner, Waldo Sal'i, and 
Adrian Scott, who worked on the British program The Adventures of Robin 
Hood. Some of those excluded by Hollywood wound up in Europe, where 
Joseph Losey, who gets his own chapter, established himself as a creative pres- 
ence. Jules Dassin also relocated to Paris, whose RzJiJi was popular in both 
Europe and the US. Others also wound up in France, and England, where they 
found some work and a much more welcoming political climate. Meanwhile, 
Michael Wilson wrote screenplays not only for the controversial film Salt of the 
Earth but also the mainstream Friendly Persuasion. Behind the scenes, Dalton 
Trumbo was using fronts to churn out numerous screenplays, including Roman 
Holiday and Lonely Are the Brave. Indeed, the authors summarize and interpret 
a large number of films, teasing out their overt or covert progressive messages. 
Buhle and Wagner manage to salvage much from the carnage of the 
Hollywood political purge. While some of those blacklisted did not fare well, 
many others, in their telling, not only survived through the 1950s, but reap- 
peared in public in subsequent decades and regained their careers. The decline 
of the major movie studios also allowed for a decentralized industry with 
greater freedom and experimentation. Car1 Foreman, for one, soon emerged as 
a major force in Hollywood with The Guns of Navarone, The Kctors, and even 
Born Free. Dalton Trumbo wrote not only Spartacus, Lonely Are the Brave, 
Hawaii, and Johnny Got His Gun, but also Papillon. Waldo Salt scored tri- 
umphs with Serpico and Coming Home. 
And the authors conclude on their upbeat note: "Hollywood was always 
about money .... But at its best it was and eventually might once again be some- 
thing a great deal more - a glimmering of a democratic art form returning the 
embrace of its vast audience with equal sincerity and the sense of a common 
fate" (268). 
Interest in the Hollywood blacklist and its consequences have not abated in 
recent years, and not only among historians. Norma Barzman, in The Red and 
the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate (2003), gives a 
146 Reviews 
very personal account of the consequences of the blacklist. She and her hus- 
band, successful writers, were forced out of Hollywood and spent thirty years 
in exile in France. Elizabeth Frank's Cheat and Charmer: A Novel (2004) cre- 
atively explores the social, personal, and traumatic consequences of life in 
Hollywood, beginning in the 1930s, as the Red Scare unfolds. The focus is on 
the travail of one sister testifying against the other, a situation with only dire 
consequences, and no happy ending. But Buhle and Wagner try to put the best 
face on the blacklist. They emphasize more the survival and artistic contribu- 
tions of the victims, rather than their personal sufferings, as Hollywood movies 
and TV programs felt their creative as well as political contributions. This is a 
refreshing, thought-provoking study. 
Ronald D. Cohen 
Indiana University Northwest 
Christine Acham, Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for 
Black Power (MinneapolisILondon: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 
In her examination of television programmes which featured African Americans 
in the 1960s and 1970s, Christine Acham argues against the utilisation of a sim- 
ple binary of "negative/positive" images and instead searches for the ways in 
which "African American actors and producers disrupted television's tradition- 
al narratives about blackness and employed television as a tool of resistance 
against mainstream constructions of African American life" (xii). She uses a 
variety of genres - selected news magazines, variety shows, situation come- 
dies, talk shows which featured African Americans - to interrogate the medi- 
um as constrained site that was often opposed in a variety of ways. 
Acham begins by challenging the assertions of J. Fred MacDonald (Blacks 
and White TV [2nd ed., 19921) and Donald Bogle (Prime Time Blues [2001]), 
who dismissed the 1970s (in particular) as a period of minstrels and jokers and 
posits that although "television has been used to oppress the African American 
population" during the Black Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, for African 
American producers and performers, television was "a site used to challenge 
hegemonic notions of race in America" (3). Making use of Kevin Gaines' ideas 
about "racial uplift" (Uplifting the Race [1996]), W. E. B. DuBois' concept of 
"double consciousness" (The Souls of Black Folk [1989]), and Robin Kelley's 
notion of "hidden transcripts" (Race Rebels [ l  994]), Acham argues that for var- 
ious segments of the African American community television represented, at 
one and the same time, an opportunity for more "positive" portrayals of the 
community (to itself and to the white community) and the broadening of "com- 


Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner — Hide In Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees In Film and Television, 1950-2002

Dummitt, Christopher

Left History 10.2 
ing activism. If suburbanization and protest were merely two faces of African 
American striving for equality, as Wiese contends, should such activism be 
understood as located within the working class, the middle class, or both? 
Probably no historical work can answer all the questions it raises, and the 
fact that these important issues are unresolved should not detract from the cal- 
ibre of Wiese's achievement. Places of Their Own makes a powerful case for 
giving renewed attention to the concept of space as we explore the fundamen- 
tal problem of race in history. Whether we are thinking of suburban homes or 
suburbanites, Wiese has demonstrated that they did not all look the same. 
Jack S. Blocker Jr. 
Huron University College, University of Western Ontario 
Michael Dawson, Selling British Columbia: Tourism and Consumer Culture, 
189&1970 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004). 
Tourists are not supposed to stay. At least not any more, they are not. For the 
most part we do not expect that the bus loads of American tourists who bundle 
onto Vancouver cruise ships to settle down when they get off the boat, open up 
all-you-can-eat restaurants, speculate on the local real estate market, and end up 
on the Board of Trade in a few years' time. Even the long-term tourists, the 
Asian language students who fill the Vancouver public library to capacity each 
day, are only meant to stay for a while, boosting sales of video-games while 
they are here certainly, but not becoming the mainstay of the local economy. 
One of the fascinating things about Michael Dawson's new book, Selling 
British Columbia, is the reminder that this was not always so. Up to the 1920s 
in this western province (and probably later in some regions), tourist promotion 
was immigration promotion. Come, called the local boosters, look around. 
And stay. 
The early part of this book is, in other words, a world apart, both from our 
present era and from what came only a few decades later. Selling British 
Columbia is also different in the kinds of questions it asks about the history of 
tourism and the places where it goes looking for answers. Dawson's book is 
about the sellers, the promoters and the boosters. In a way, it is like Paul An&& 
Linteau's, The Promoters' City (a book Dawson cites) in that it tells us about 
how a place was packaged and made ready for economic development by a 
coterie of busy-bee entrepreneurs and civic-minded patriots. And the compar- 
ison, especially in the early years from the 1890s to the 1920s, is more apt than 
it might first appear. For the early tourists, despite all their desires to escape the 
enervating effects of modern life in the bracing western mountain air, nonethe- 
less saw in this province great possibilities for industrial and commercial devel- 
152 Reviews 
opment. It was these people who, in the early years, the promoters wanted to 
convince to stay. We never get a sense here of how many of them stayed 
(indeed, the book purposefully steers clear of the experiences of tourists them- 
selves) but Dawson shows us the extent to which the economic side of tourism 
focused not on the money they spent but rather on the visitors' potential as set- 
tlers and investors. 
Dawson takes us through eighty years of tourist promotion in British 
Columbia. His main point is to show how, when, and why ideas about tourism 
changed throughout the twentieth century. It is an ambitious task and time 
frame and the decision to focus on one province means that he can do a thor- 
ough job. He is writing as a counterpoint to a great deal of recent writing on 
tourism (and consumption more generally) that dwells almost exclusively on 
the tourist or consumer experience. This is not a book that will convince those 
who think reception-theory is the be-all-and-end-all of academic genres. 
Dawson admits that tourists could indeed interpret their experience in many 
ways, but he argues that the important story to be told - and the one that has 
been overlooked - is that of how tourist experiences were shaped and created. 
And for this, he turns to the promoters. 
In British Columbia, these promoters tended to live in the two main cities, 
Victoria and Vancouver. Early on they were individuals with a mixture of eco- 
nomic and personal interests in selling their respective cities. Dawson traces 
the history of cooperation between these promoters as well as the tensions 
between the province's two main cities, prosperous Vancouver on the mainland 
and Victoria, once the province's main city and increasingly being left behind, 
on the island. Indeed Victoria takes up a greater share of the book than one 
would expect. As Vancouver became the main economic centre of the province, 
Victoria's boosters increasingly turned to tourism as a solution to economic 
marginalization. 
For Dawson, Victoria's trajectory was soon to be British Columbia's. By 
the later 1920s and 1930s, the ideal of the tourist as settler began to be taken 
over by an ideal that we are more familiar with: the tourist as consumer. The 
transformation carried with it a great many implications. The way that promot- 
ers sold the province changed, becoming more psychologically sophisticated 
and, one might argue, hypocritical. In order to convince tourists to come to the 
province the boosters had to come up with a line that made the province seem 
unique; they had to find a way of differentiating British Columbia from any- 
where else. This was especially the case when they directed their attention, as 
they increasingly did, to Americans. Why come to Victoria when you could go 
to Seattle? What did Vancouver offer that Portland did not? 
For anyone the least bit familiar with British Columbia, the answers are 
monotonously familiar: wilderness, Mounties and totem poles. Victoria led the 
way in selling Britishness, moulding its downtown to fit the quaint image of a 
Left History 10.2 153 
city devoted to perpetual tea drinking and china crockery buying. At one point 
the Victoria and Island Publicity Bureau even campaigned for gas companies to 
build their stations in mock Elizabethan architecture and refer to gas by the 
British term "petrol." The change in attitudes towards aboriginals is illuminat- 
ing. For early promoters, the province's First Nations were a hindrance, a 
reminder of the lack of civilization that jarred with the boosters' emphasis on 
growth and dynamism. By the 1950s and1960s, however, the tide had turned 
and tourist campaigners were trying to get Vancouver's new athletic stadium 
renamed "Totem Stadium" and were talking in promotional films about "our 
Indians." Lest anyone think this represented some growth of appreciation for 
those displaced by colonialism, Dawson shows that the change in attitude had 
more to do with changing economic priorities. "Having contributed directly to 
the colonial process in its first phase," he argues, "tourism promotion then con- 
tributed to a process of selective amnesia in its second phase - a process that 
normalized European control of the land and encouraged both visitors and hosts 
to reimagine the 'resettlement' of British Columbia as benign, comforting, and 
consumable fare" (176). 
All of this is both interesting and convincing. Where Dawson loses me is 
with the chronology. The standard interpretation of Canadian history in the 
twentieth century makes a sharp divide in 1945. In a great many ways, what 
came after - the postwar economic take-off, the baby boom, more conserva- 
tive gender relations - is said to be a backlash against what came before - 
economic depression, delayed family formation, and unstable times for gender. 
Dawson tries to bridge the divide. He argues that the postwar boom in tourism 
did not just stem from pent-up demand, stymied by depression and war. 
Instead, he argues that the activities of tourist promoters in the 1930s and 1940s 
deserve a lot more attention than they have been given. Through their work in 
advertising and their success in increasing government involvement and invest- 
ment, British Columbia's tourism promoters helped in "creating the demand for 
leisure activities before the 'boom 'occurred" ( 1  5 1 ,  emphasis in original). 
It is a hard argument to prove. Dawson shows that tourism did not disap- 
pear altogether in the 1930s and 1940s, and he also shows that it was in these 
years that governments at the federal and provincial level were won over to 
tourism. But the numbers of actual tourists dramatically declined. Tourist vis- 
its went down throughout the war years, rising slightly in 1945 and then taking 
off dramatically in 1946. This certainly fits the picture painted by the pent-up 
demand argument. How much of a role did Dawson's years of consolidation 
play in this take-off! Without a comparative study, it is impossible to know. 
Were there other areas that did not go through this consolidation? Were there 
fewer tourists in areas where local tourism promoters failed to consolidate the 
industry? It is only these kinds of comparisons that could prove the argument. 
Yet if this particular argument is not altogether convincing the book pro- 
154 Reviews 
vides many other compelling points and, even more importantly, refreshing 
questions. How was tourism shaped? How were tourist experiences created 
and why? How and why did this change over the twentieth century. This book 
should set up a great debate about the nature of consumer culture in Canada. 
How much control have consumers had in controlling the meaning of what they 
purchase, whether this be household furniture or tourist getaways? And how 
much attention should historians give to the advertisers' and producers' rheto- 
ric as compared to the consumers' responses? In this book, Dawson sides with 
the former, giving us a thorough account of the way British Columbia's promot- 
ers sold the province to visitors. 
He has a point. If you every have the chance to wander down to the totem 
poles in Vancouver's Stanley Park you are bound to find groups of tourists 
milling about. The fact that there are rarely any First Nations people around, 
and that, on most days at least, most Vancouverites walk by the poles without 
even noticing them does not seem to matter. For many tourists the totem poles 
are what Vancouver is all about. And if there just happens to be a cafk and shop 
nearby . . . well, I am sure that is just a coincidence. 
Christopher Dummitt 
Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London 
Jordanna Bailkin, The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in 
Modern Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 
At first glance Jordanna Bailkin's The Culture ofproperty might well have been 
titled The Strange Death of the Liberal Museum. It is a book that seems to want 
to use Edwardian debates about museums to cast new light over George 
Dangerfield's classic thesis of a sustained crisis brought about by Edwardian 
feminism, labour activism, Irish home rulers, and a group of Liberal parliamen- 
tarians bent on limiting the power of the landed aristocracy. But this book is 
actually far more interesting and significant, as Bailkin is not merely warming 
over Dangerfield's dated thesis. The "crisis of liberalism" for her is really 
shorthand for the complex tensions between property and citizenship within lib- 
eralism. Thus, Bailkin sets out to explore the nature of "cultural property" and 
detail the contested relationship between culture and property during the 
Edwardian era. 
Bailkin starts her study with some probing questions - what kind of prop- 
erty is art? Is art property at all? Does the possession of art reinforce existing 
social inequities, or can it transcend, even "revolutionize" them? - and offers 
four case studies and a wealth of evidence from court transcripts, gallery 
archives, exhibition reviews, private correspondence, cartoons, and photo- 


Michael Dawson — Selling British Columbia: Tourism and Consumer Culture, 1890-1 970

Lander, Ben

Graphic Novels as History: Representing and Reliving the Past

Heathorn, Stephen

154 Reviews 
vides many other compelling points and, even more importantly, refreshing 
questions. How was tourism shaped? How were tourist experiences created 
and why? How and why did this change over the twentieth century. This book 
should set up a great debate about the nature of consumer culture in Canada. 
How much control have consumers had in controlling the meaning of what they 
purchase, whether this be household furniture or tourist getaways? And how 
much attention should historians give to the advertisers' and producers' rheto- 
ric as compared to the consumers' responses? In this book, Dawson sides with 
the former, giving us a thorough account of the way British Columbia's promot- 
ers sold the province to visitors. 
He has a point. If you every have the chance to wander down to the totem 
poles in Vancouver's Stanley Park you are bound to find groups of tourists 
milling about. The fact that there are rarely any First Nations people around, 
and that, on most days at least, most Vancouverites walk by the poles without 
even noticing them does not seem to matter. For many tourists the totem poles 
are what Vancouver is all about. And if there just happens to be a cafk and shop 
nearby . . . well, I am sure that is just a coincidence. 
Christopher Dummitt 
Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London 
Jordanna Bailkin, The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in 
Modern Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 
At first glance Jordanna Bailkin's The Culture ofproperty might well have been 
titled The Strange Death of the Liberal Museum. It is a book that seems to want 
to use Edwardian debates about museums to cast new light over George 
Dangerfield's classic thesis of a sustained crisis brought about by Edwardian 
feminism, labour activism, Irish home rulers, and a group of Liberal parliamen- 
tarians bent on limiting the power of the landed aristocracy. But this book is 
actually far more interesting and significant, as Bailkin is not merely warming 
over Dangerfield's dated thesis. The "crisis of liberalism" for her is really 
shorthand for the complex tensions between property and citizenship within lib- 
eralism. Thus, Bailkin sets out to explore the nature of "cultural property" and 
detail the contested relationship between culture and property during the 
Edwardian era. 
Bailkin starts her study with some probing questions - what kind of prop- 
erty is art? Is art property at all? Does the possession of art reinforce existing 
social inequities, or can it transcend, even "revolutionize" them? - and offers 
four case studies and a wealth of evidence from court transcripts, gallery 
archives, exhibition reviews, private correspondence, cartoons, and photo- 
Left History 10.2 155 
graphs as a means to discuss the contradictions evident in the liberal idea of art 
as property. 
Her first study is of the idea of cultural "repatriation" using the so-called 
Celtic Gold controversy. Bailkin details the court case brought against the 
British Museum by the attorney general for Ireland in 1903 over the patrimony 
of some gold artifacts dug out of a Deny peat bog in 1896. The case tumed on 
the complex wrangling over the legal principle of treasure-trove, which threw 
up awkward questions for both British unionists and Irish nationalists about the 
meaning of "national" artifacts. Indeed, the case revolved around a series of 
ironies. In seeking the repatriation to Dublin of items of somewhat dubious 
Irishness, uncovered in a distinctly unionist part of Ireland, the Irish nationalist 
protagonists successfblly argued for repatriation on the principle that the pro- 
tection of property rested with British monarchical authority. 
The second case study concerns the travails of the Scottish National 
Museum Bill, debated at Westminster between 1901 and 1906, which was 
essentially about reform of the financial and governing arrangements of the 
Edinburgh institution. Bailkin shows that the debate here tumed on the history 
and continuing problematic nature of the Anglo-Scottish union and the status of 
law in regulating national cultures: in this case the discussion over culture and 
property allowed for the questioning of the Liberal assumption that British cit- 
izenship was a product of the ownership and possession of property. 
The third case is of the attempts to prevent the export of a privately held 
Hans Holbein portrait in 1909 on the grounds that it represented part of the 
British national heritage. Again, the "national" claims about the object were 
actually quite dubious. Bailkin skillfully uses this example to probe the com- 
plex interactions of gender and art in the Edwardian museum, connecting the 
fears of the removal of "British" art treasures and the claims and actions of the 
Suffragettes. As gallery art had been slashed by feminist activists as a means 
of bringing attention to the hypocrisy of valuing the pictures of women more 
than real women themselves, the revelation, or at least suspicion, that a femi- 
nist had actually saved the Holbein from being sold overseas through an anony- 
mous donation caused a sensation and raised further questions about the con- 
tentious relationship among women, property and cultural patrimony. 
The fourth and final study is the story of the founding of the new London 
Museum in 19 12, and the confrontation over the celebration of "folk culture" in 
this new urban, civic museum, captured in the invented terminology of the 
"civi-otic" (the combination of the civic and the patriotic). Here elite and pop- 
ular visions of culture, and liberal individualism and liberal (republican) collec- 
tivism, all came into collision. Bailkin argues that the new museum survived 
precisely because it incorporated elements of protest and critique of classic lib- 
eral assumptions within its collections. 
The case studies reveal that collective claims on culture collided with lib- 
156 Reviews 
era1 individualist notions of art as property, and were sometimes responsible for 
changes in the law and sometimes a complex re-evaluation of political posi- 
tions. The supposed role of art and artifacts in bolstering the claims of nation- 
al identity is shown to be far more convoluted than either contemporary nation- 
alists or recent historians and museum specialists have supposed. Similarly, 
categorical understandings of gender, and to a much lesser degree, class, are 
shown to imbricate claims about art and property in a manner that belies easy 
social designations of cultural institutions. In her analysis Bailkin asks some 
fascinating and provocative questions, and complicates our understanding of 
culture and its relationship to politics. Indeed, she successfully adds the cultur- 
al realm to the story of the "crisis" of liberalism. 
Arguably, however, one of the real strengths of her analysis - the demon- 
stration of how the ambiguities of liberal claims about cultural property were 
debated outside of the realm of political theory - is also one of the book's lim- 
itations. For Bailkin finds no way to connect the debates in the press and 
among the agents in her cases, with the ongoing refashioning of liberal ideas by 
intellectuals and political activists in other realms. The "new" liberal thinkers, 
Fabians, and even populist liberals are part of the backdrop, but are rarely if 
ever present in her narratives. So at times the book reads quite like Dangerfield 
in that all the challenges to the liberal conceptions of citizenship and cultural 
property seem to be coming from without, when clearly Liberal thinkers them- 
selves were also trying to reformulate the liberal tradition from within. Still, if 
at the end of the book the reader is still left with nagging doubts that she has 
really answered all her own questions, they will nonetheless be impressed with 
Bailkin's extremely sophisticated and coherent discussion. 
Stephen Heathorn 
McMaster University 
Rudolf Rocker, The London Years, translated by Joseph Leftwich 
(Nottingham: Five Leaves Press; EdinburghIOakland: AK Press, 2005. 
London in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century was a breeding 
ground for politically based reform movements. While the country's Liberals 
and Conservatives jockeyed for power at the parliamentary level, a hearty and 
disparate variety of radical groups emerged at street level. They organized and 
agitated, marched and demonstrated, sometimes even rioted, but in general 
laboured after the reform of everything from tax, landholding, and education. 
Radical socialists were among the most active groups in Britain's Labour move- 
ment and the Jewish Anarchists, an offshoot of the Jewish Labour Movement, 


Jordanna Bailkin — The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain

Henderson, Stuart

"All Pink and Clean and Full of Wonder?: Gendering "Joni Mitchell," 1966-74

Stettner, Shannon

160 Reviews 
of course, a federal responsibility, while crown lands, after 1930 were under the 
province's control. The author demonstrates little understanding of the com- 
plexities of federal-provincial relationships when dealing with the situation of 
aboriginal communities in Saskatchewan's north. 
The narrowness of this book's intellectual and ideological framework is 
partly a product of its intensive, but tightly focused research. Twenty-one inter- 
views with northern residents were all, with one exception, conducted in July 
and August 1999. There is some material on First Nations peoples, but it is not 
extensive: Olive Dickason's work, to cite one example, is not mentioned, nor 
are Thomas Berger's studies of northern development. In short, this is PhD 
research, which should have been given a wider context before being published. 
Doctoral studies - usually highly specialized projects - need to marinate a 
while before being turned into books. This work is no exception. 
Readers of David Quiring's book will get a close-up view of 
Saskatchewan's northern policies after 1964. They will not get contextual or 
ideological breadth. 
J. Douglas Leighton 
Huron University College, University of Western Ontario 
Emilie Stoltzfus, Citizen, Mother, Worker: Debating Public Responsibility for 
Child Care After the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North 
Carolina Press, 2003). 
During World War 11, parents across America relied on publicly hnded child- 
care; it was a service many, especially mothers, did not want to relinquish. 
Accordingly, when the Federal Works Administration announced the termina- 
tion of federally funded daycare at war's end, mothers across the US formally 
organized to oppose the closures. They confronted both fiscal concerns and a 
conservative gender ideology that supported the breadwinner ideal and envi- 
sioned women as specially suited to mothering. Using case studies of 
Cleveland, Ohio, the District of Columbia, and the state of California, Emilie 
Stoltzfus documents each campaign to retain the wartime program in the post- 
war era. Her juxtaposition of the failures in the first two places with the even- 
tual success in California, offers a glimpse into barriers confronting women 
across the country. Moreover, she demonstrates through their struggles that 
women's responses to the impending loss of public childcare were much more 
complex than sometimes believed; many women did not go gently back to their 
kitchens. Rather, they practiced what she calls "dissident citizenship," engag- 
ing in protests such as a day-long sit-in at Cleveland's city hall. As suggested 
Left History 10.2 
by the title, her analysis hinges on the interaction between motherhood, citizen- 
ship, and women's waged work, and "the way in which enduring gendered obli- 
gations of citizenship affected the possibilities for expanded social rights" (1). 
In post-war America, the debate over public childcare occurred within 
the context of a consumer driven and growing economy, the increasing com- 
monality of two-earner households, and the shifting of childcare from low-or- 
unpaid work inside the home to low-paid work outside the home. Within these 
circumstances, Stoltzfus notes, two preconditions had to be met before public 
childcare could be accepted. First, women would have to be considered full- 
time, not temporary, labourers. Second, the public would have to believe that 
children would flourish away from their mothers. Barriers to these precondi- 
tions included: popular culture, professional psychiatric, psychological, and 
social work wisdom, and Cold War political goals. Additionally, opponents of 
publicly funded childcare were motivated by personal biases and self-interests; 
the Cleveland Catholic Diocese, for example, was both a strong opponent of 
public childcare and, as Stoltzfus observes, "had a large presence in the city's 
private child welfare establishment" (56). 
Additionally, the author identifies three stages in public decision making 
on state-funded childcare. First, advocates had to secure new hnding to replace 
wartime arrangements. In peacetime, women lost the "patriotic rationale" for 
publicly funded childcare. Stoltzfus maintains, "virtually overnight the public 
provision of childcare changed (in the minds of many) from a legitimate war- 
related service to a 'welfare need,"'; tax-subsidized childcare was viewed as 
"quasi-public charity" (50, 26). Second, activists had to redefine eligibility in 
a manner that would gamer support for continued funding. Several measures 
were used to make permanently state-funded daycare more palatable, including 
means tests, salary caps to determine eligibility for tax breaks, and the assign- 
ment of "caseworkers," to decide need. Third, advocates had to establish a per- 
manent justification for public childcare. Arguing the "economic necessity" of 
a second wage was not always a successful rationale. In the end, Stoltzfus 
claims states realized that federal efforts to help "rehabilitate" families and pro- 
mote independence would prove lucrative in the form of federal matching funds 
payments. The success enjoyed in each place is determined by their ability to 
perform these three "tasks" and the challenges they encountered doing so. 
As noted, California was the only state to establish permanent post-war 
childcare. Stoltzfus argues that the state's "post-war 'neo-Progressive' political 
culture stressed nonpartisanship, pragmatism, moderation, and activism," and 
enabled unity among a range of daycare supporters (138). As well, the post-war 
economy was strong and encouraged a growing number of women in the paid 
labour force; consequently, daycare became depoliticized because it became 
economized. Additionally, the state's prevailing "productive citizenship" 
rationale supported childcare centres because they allowed women to partici- 
162 Reviews 
pate in the booming post-war (defense) economy and helped reduce the need 
for Aid to Dependent Children. Finally, she argues that education was highly 
valued in California, with the most important support for daycare coming from 
the teachers, directors, and supervisors of daycares as educational profession- 
als; unlike DC and Ohio, California did not remove daycare from education to 
welfare, easing the challenge of selling permanent daycare funding. An addi- 
tional and important factor in California's success came from the continuous 
support of Governor Earl Warren. 
Daycare was problematic for opponents because they felt it elevated state 
over family responsibility for teaching citizenship values and as such could be 
viewed as "communistic." Conversely, parents saw daycare as creating desir- 
able, trustworthy citizens who learned lessons in democratic citizenship. 
Moreover, advocates argued that women workers were necessary to win the 
Cold War; this argument, Stoltzfus asserts, in effect, turned the notion of 
domestic containment on its head. Unlike Cleveland and DC, however, and 
given the more liberal Californian environment, women were also able to argue 
for continued funding not only on the basis of economic need, but for personal 
satisfaction, as well as a right of citizenship and as taxpayers; doing so defeat- 
ed the derisive, though effective elsewhere, notion that they were working for 
"pin money." Although the campaign was waged for over a decade, the author 
argues advocates of childcare succeeded as the state's legislators became con- 
vinced of the irreversibility of several societal changes. These included an 
increase in divorce, separation, desertion, and juvenile delinquency, an increas- 
ing number of married, middle-class women entering the workforce, the view 
that the ADC was producing dependant generations, and, once the idea of intro- 
ducing a tax deduction for childcare materialized, a challenge of the idea that 
unpaid motherhood had no market value. 
This book is exhaustively researched. It is a slow, but incredibly com- 
pelling read. Its greatest strength is the richness of the narrative. By using 
excerpts from letters of protest, council meetings, and congressional hearings, 
for example, Stoltzfus uncovers the voices of women who argued so earnestly 
for the necessity of continued public funding. By introducing several extraor- 
dinary ordinary women who spoke so persuasively for their cause, the author 
convinces the reader that the post-war experience of women heading back to the 
home was not only against the desires of many, but contrary to their financial 
needs. If there is any shortcoming, it is that the book's analysis is not as theo- 
retical as suggested by the introduction, but this omission probably makes the 
book more enjoyable. 
Shannon Stettner 
York University 


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