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

The literature of the Cold War could fill a library. Tarah Brookfield’s book, however, represents a very special approach: the reaction of the population, especially women, to Cold War dangers and tensions. The book is also a story of Canada, a country that is “sandwiched in between the Soviet Union and the United States,” (p.30), but was not in the first trenches of the Cold War confrontation. These features make the book both interesting and also somewhat marginal.

The discussion is divided into two quite separate parts: the home front and abroad. Canada was involved in wars with its Western allies and shared the Cold War hysteria and even the American anti-Communist crusade of McCarthyism in the 1950s and 1960s. The Canadian government warned the population to be prepared for a nuclear war and possible nuclear attack. The population reacted in various ways. Volunteers accumulated and stored food, even built family bomb shelters, trained nurses, and spread useful information among the population.

Postwar Canada, however, like the postwar West in general, was a flourishing place where birthrates steeply increased and an efficient welfare system was created. In a country of 18 million inhabitants, only 3,000 families built bomb shelters. The most important popular reaction was the mobilization of activist women from various layers of the society against war. “One October morning in 1968 Claire Culhane began a ten-day hunger strike and demonstration on Parliament Hill to protest what she considered to be the Canadian government’s hypocritical position on the war in Vietnam” (p. 161). The popular movement started out in opposition to nuclear war but soon became a movement against the war in Vietnam. A great number of volunteers collected money for the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund to save children and adopted children from war-ridden Vietnam. In 1965, 10,000 homeless children were placed in 36 orphanages in South Vietnam, and their number doubled by 1973. Canadian families, among them the Simpsons, Bronsteins, and Cappucinos, adopted several of them. The reader can learn about their motivations and feelings because Tarah Brookfield’s is based heavily on oral history with activists. This strongly personal characteristic is a special value of the work, a major addition to archival sources.

The book presents the everyday life and reaction of the Canadian population to the Cold War danger. This reaction, in turn, changed Canadian welfare policy, educational curriculum, and immigration law, as well as several other spheres of life and politics.

The book, prepared originally as a Ph.D. dissertation, is Brookfield’s first monograph. Although definitely not in the first lines of Cold War studies, it still has a place in that vast literature and offers an interesting, sometimes moving account supported by well-selected photographs.