Cold War Comforts: Canadian Women, Child Safety, and Global Insecurity by Tarah Brookfield (review)

Cold War Comforts is a fascinating account of Canadian women's international activism during the Cold War. Through two sections ('Home' and 'Abroad') and seven chapters, Brookfield highlights women's varied roles as civil defence wardens, ban-the-bomb protestors and organisers of development aid and transnational adoption. Uniting these disparate activities is the concept of maternalism, whose focus on the well-being of children was both strategic and sincere (p. 228). As Brookfield reminds us, because the Cold War did not simply happen 'over there', the traditional gendered division of labour that ruled previous wars no longer applied. As a result, women's grassroots activism was central to protecting homes and families by minimising war's costs and ultimately preventing its outbreak (p. 5).

Brookfield's study is strongest when it reveals the ironies of women's activism. As she highlights in the 'Home' section, women's maternal 'instincts' were mobilised by civil defence programmes to save the nuclear family from an atomic holocaust. However, those programmes provided women with an education on the realities of nuclear war that led them to believe that only disarmament could secure their children's future (pp. 68-9). Second, women's maternal activism depended on mobilising their unpaid reproductive labour. However, as with women engaged in paid labour, they were still expected to carry on these activities for their own families. In some cases, women's commitment to caring for the families of others meant that their own became 'casualties' in the war on war.

That said there are a couple of areas of the book that require greater attention. Like many histories produced in English Canada, we know little about how the story played out in Quebec. Though she admits this is due to the Central Canadian middle-class Anglophone bias of the organisations involved, the neglect of French Canadian women's role makes it difficult, for example, to understand why the Quebec government was far more accommodating of transnational adoptions. Furthermore, though she is right to question the motives behind foster parenting and international adoption, its characterisation as 'an intimate form of Cold War imperialism' (p. 136) may need more nuance, particularly in light of her rather uncritical stance on women's support for UN humanitarianism (i.e. UNICEF). As others have noted, Canada's support for the UN was driven as much by the way it promoted Western hegemony as it was for any idealistic objectives. Given that Canada's humanitarian policies have been characterised as having 'mixed motives', could the same not be said for transnational adoption?

Overall, Brookfield does a wonderful job of bringing women out of the shadows of Cold War histor y, giving them a role alongside the white male diplomats who normally stalk such accounts. She does well to remind us that women (e.g. Lotta Hitchmanova) were on the front lines of the Cold War as leaders, not auxiliaries, of humanitarian organisations. However, her study also reminds that even when they were comfortably ensconced in their suburban family homes, women's seemingly mundane motherly activities were crucial to the larger project of promoting what Lester Pearson called 'peace in the family of man'.