Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada by John Hagan (review)

humanities 501 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 media and reminds us of how hard women had to fight to gain respect and equality in the eyes of the press. There are many valuable lessons in this book, especially as we note how the Canadian media today frequently try to trivialize women=s issues and declare feminism outmoded. At times, Freeman allows her comprehensive archival research to overwhelm her own abilities as a critical scholar. This is a tendency of any social history, where it is often seen as enough to document without making strategic connections between the material. It is unfortunate because when Freeman does express her own analytical views, the results are worth the wait. In >Ladies Reminded They=re Women,= Freeman examines the way that the leaders of the Royal Commission were photographed, illustrated for editorial cartoons, and described in the news reporting. This is one of the only parts of the book where Freeman explores these questions of representation and provides a more critical rather than exclusively historical context. More investigation at this level would have been appreciated. The other areas addressed, including reproductive rights, Aboriginal and rural women, and working mothers, tend to focus on the minutiae of the debate during the time. This is unfortunate because it sets her analysis too deeply into the past. It suggests obliquely that feminism is a movement from yesterday, and that the problems she highlights have all been resolved. The feminist movement in Canada has tended to be viewed as an extension of that in the United States. Freeman shows that this is simply not the case. There is a history here that is uniquely our own. To America=s Betty Friedan, we give you Florence Bird. It might therefore have been interesting for Freeman to engage with this problem of Canadian history from a media studies perspective. How have the Canadian media failed to create icons with the same intrigue and mythic proportions as our American counterparts? Why isn=t Bird, a veteran journalist and social activist, a household name? Certainly, she is known within the appropriate circles, but how many could pick out her picture in a newspaper today? I suggest these issues not because I feel that Freeman has overlooked something but because her book challenged me to think further about the relationship between feminism and the media in Canada and our short memories. She has taken a solid step towards rectifying this and opening up avenues for other scholars to follow. (REBECCA SULLIVAN) John Hagan. Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada Harvard University Press. xvi, 268. US $27.95 Author John Hagan has combined oral history, autobiography, survey methods, and archival research to write a masterful work on one of the most important episodes of twentieth-century North American history. During the American war in Vietnam, at least fifty thousand young men 502 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 and women, crossed the border from the United States into Canada. Their migration changed both nations and themselves, as documented in Hagan=s study. Hagan was one of the draft-age men who opposed the war and fled conscription by going to Canada. He crossed the border for good in 1969 and in 1974 arrived in Toronto, where he became a Canadian citizen and began building a new life. Today, Hagan holds positions in sociology and law at Northwestern University and the University of Toronto. Hagan=s own story deepens this book=s authenticity but it is not about him. It is about the resistance to the war, the struggles to change immigration policies, and the legacy of a bold generation. Hagan lays to rest the idea that the anti-war migrants were slackers who took the easy way out. Far from being a way to avoid a difficult duty, the trek north was seen by many of them as a way to do more of what they knew needed to be done B bring the war to an end through their own resistance. Here is an account of the anti-war movement=s international dimensions from which we...