The Sixties: Passion, Politics, and Style (review)

Efforts to capture the essence of the 1960s are becoming popular in the historical literature of Western countries, including Canada. This collection of papers attempts loosely to find the zeitgeist of the decade in movements and individual actions that challenged the ubiquitous hegemony of modernist ideology during the early postwar period. Though the emphasis is on Canadian developments, most of the essays attempt to draw parallels with developments elsewhere, specifically the United States, and at least one essay deals entirely with the United States. Overall, indeed, a limitation of this collection is that any real sense of a set of changes with truly global reach, or even just a reach across the industrialized nations, simply does not emerge.

After a modest introduction for a set of essays drawn from papers for a conference, the book begins quite badly with a rambling reminiscence of the Quiet Revolution by journalist Gretta Chambers. Disappointingly, one of the other two Quebec articles in the collection also seems to have no place in the book. Olivier Courteaux outlines Charles de Gaulle’s reasons for supporting Quebec independence publicly during his visit to Canada in 1967 – reasons that said very little about Quebec and a great deal about de Gaulle. If de Gaulle himself symbolized something particular about the 1960s, this biographical piece does not reveal what that may be.

But The Sixties does prove effective in presenting several identifiable sub-themes for its emphasis on the divide between modernism and its challengers. Frances Early’s essay on the Voice of Women (VOW), the only piece in the collection that deals with social activists, makes use of that organization’s changing discourse and activities throughout the decade to demonstrate the shift from maternalism to second-wave feminism in left-wing women’s public activities during the decade. In practice, though, the organization found that maternalist tropes could be subverted towards radical ends. So, for example, in 1966, vow began a knitting campaign to provide clothing for Vietnamese children as a means of publicizing its opposition to the American-led war against North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam.

The ways in which changing notions of gender affected women’s ideas of their place in Canadian life, explored in the Early article, is picked up by Kristy A. Holmes in an article on artist Joyce Wieland and her ambivalent attitudes to Pierre Trudeau and his notions about the necessity to have reason triumph over passion. Holmes presents Trudeau’s notions of citizenship marked by dispassionate reasoning as male and technocratic. Unfortunately the imprecision in Holmes’s touchy-feely interpretations of Wieland’s work make Wieland’s gender challenge to Trudeau unclear and unconvincing.

Christopher Dummitt is on steadier ground as he examines the challenges to automobile culture in the 1960s, particularly as represented by the figures of Ralph Nader and Jane Jacobs, the former with an exposé of the flimsiness of the vehicles produced by the Big Three, and the latter with a demonstration of the bankruptcy of the modern city with its fixation on the automobile as the centrepiece of urban planning. Defenders of the modernist vision ‘found shelter behind the ideal trait of manly modernism: reasoned objectivity’ (88). Dummitt suggests that Jacobs’s critique of planning was gendered, the viewpoint of someone who lived in the communities that modern planning was creating rather than someone who drove through those communities on freeways meant to take middle-class male suburbanites to downtown offices.

Several articles on urban architecture and urban renewal provide the most interesting and interconnected papers in The Sixties. France Vanlaethem, putting the spotlight on Montreal, notes the questioning evident by the sixties regarding modernist architecture in Quebec and the rest of Canada. An interest in rehabilitating the past clashed with the architectural philosophy, with its emphasis on innovation and gigantism, that had characterized the 1950s. Meanwhile, as Krys Verrall argues, in Halifax and Nova Scotia generally as...