Creating Postwar Canada: Community, Diversity, and Dissent, 1945–1975 (review)

Magda Fahrni and Robert Rutherdale’s Creating Postwar Canada: Community, Diversity and Dissent, 1945–1975 is an impressive collection of thirteen chapters that provides a welcome addition to the growing literature on the social, cultural, and political history of postwar Canada. The compiled chapters represent a wide range of case studies that, taken together, help forge a new direction for postwar scholarship through an exploration of such themes as consumption, family, national identity, gender, and medicine. Firmly situating this collection within the existing historiography, the editors argue that unlike much of the scholarship on this era, these chapters do not focus on Canada’s involvement in and response to the Cold War. Rather, they stress the importance of local and regional frameworks as a vehicle to explore larger developments taking place in postwar Canada. This task, however, is not an easy one. As the editors note, although the authors pursue a narrow field of study, the collection also reveals what the selected case studies mean ‘for Canada as a whole, its regions, and its citizens.’ The collection covers 1945 to 1975, a period referred to by European historians as ‘les trentes glorieuses’ (translated by Eric Hobsbawn as the ‘golden age.’) The editors remind us that this thirty-year period was characterized by ‘unprecedented prosperity, developed welfare states, high modernity and advanced capitalism.’ Exploring this era, the chapters demonstrate how these characteristics materialized and defined Canada in the postwar years, a period also marked by a population explosion and the rise of social movements.

Creating Postwar Canada is divided into two thematic sections. The first section, ‘Imagining Postwar Communities,’ is borrowed from Benedict Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities.’ This section contains seven chapters that examine how communities were socially and culturally constructed, three of which stand out as exceptional contributions to postwar historiography. Joan Sangster’s chapter explores how travel writing and publications in the Beaver written by white women living in the Canadian North reinforced colonial notions of Inuit persons. These writings reveal how the ‘Eskimo other’ was created through images and writings that characterized the Inuit as ‘primitive’ and ‘premodern,’ explored through such themes as marriage, consumption, and sexuality. These descriptions were in stark contrast to conceptions of the Canadian South that promoted notions of ‘white settlement and “progress,”’ that worked to emphasize the ‘ideological construction of a hierarchy of white progress, culture, and history.’ Joel Belliveau’s chapter explores New Brunswick’s Acadians and their postwar experience with integration and participation in the province’s political state structure. During the 1960s the Acadian community questioned the effectiveness of Acadians’ participation in the formal provincial political sphere, leading to a critical ideological shift that culminated in political and social unrest and saw the rise of Acadian neo-nationalism and the creation of le Parti Acadien. Steven Penfold’s chapter traces the history of the establishment of fast-food chains in Canada, and how influences such as the meteoric rise of the middle class, the automobile, increased disposable income, the pressures of American culture and business, and youth all contributed to the country’s construction as a ‘drive-thru nation.’ Fast-food establishments became symbolic flashpoints that sparked intense conflicts about leisure activities, consumer space, and store hours. Penfold argues that these issues were framed by notions of liberal capitalism that surfaced in community debates over consumption, citizens’ rights to preserve their communities, and the rights of corporations to engage in business practices. Overall, this section provides a sense of how different postwar communities were shaped by political forces and various social and cultural representations.

The second section of Creating Postwar Canada, ‘Diversity and Dissent,’ explores Canadian responses to the pressures to conform to social, cultural, and political postwar ideologies. One of the section’s strongest contributions is Michael Dawson’s case study on store-hour regulation in Vancouver and Victoria, which provides a strong example of how an examination of local issues sheds light...