Gender, Sexuality, and the Cold War: A Global Perspective ed. by Philip E. Muehlenbeck (review)

In order to make the most of our understanding of the past, we must take steps to fully comprehend the challenges and nuances of history. Philip Muehlenbeck’s edited collection Gender, Sexuality, and the Cold War,¹ recognizes the importance of this and makes the effort to analyze the Cold War era from a gender and sexuality perspective. The Cold War was an event and time period that shaped cultures, and decisions made during that era were also influenced by and in reaction to, culture at that time. To this point, Meuhlenbeck and the authors understand that “we cannot effectively analyze decision making at the very top without taking into account the cultural assumptions of the decision makers.”² Additionally, it is imperative to delve into specific cultural values and systems such as gender and sexuality, because “feminist scholarship has observed that wars occur because power hierarchies grounded in constructions of gender, sexuality, nationality, and ethnicity require them. Warring parties deploy difference to justify domination and, in the process, seek to sustain the hierarchies that imbue the system with meaning.”³ The assertion being made is that the Cold War was more than just a military standoff between nuclear powers; it was a battle between warring cultures and ideologies rooted, in part, in gender and sexuality hierarchies. While not arguing that the Cold War was necessarily caused by power hierarchies, Meuhlenbeck asserts that “[t]he Cold War fits well into this paradigm, since the maintenance of differences of all kinds remained fundamental to both the superpowers and their allies.”⁴ The following chapters reveal and explain how existing hierarchies influenced policy, were reinforced by the politics of the Cold War, and were used to “justify domination.” Such a discussion enables readers to better understand the context and motivations of the actions that were taken and the decisions that were made during the Cold War.

The book consists of three thematic sections: sexuality, femininities, and masculinities. With these foci, the chapters demonstrate that the Cold War was truly a global event, and they highlight how, while the hegemonic powers of the East and West were building up both borders and competing ideologies, the “politics of gender and sexuality”⁵ around the world was being shaped and manifesting in similar ways to reinforce patriarchal and normative hierarchies. The commonalities of these discourses and policies speak to the ways gender and sexuality are universally expressed, understood, and controlled. The three thematic foci specifically show how sexuality is often policed, women are controlled, and gender roles are defined by and conflated with citizenship.

The first section of the book focuses on how culture and policy during the Cold War were related to sexuality. This period of time saw an emphasis on natalism policies intended to encourage population growth and address depopulation concerns. Katherine Rossy and Kathleen Tobin write separately about the policies and concerns of France and the US during this era. France’s natalism policies resulted in the “repatriation” of numerous stateless children whose national origins were unknown in post-war France-occupied Germany, as well as in the perpetuation of patriarchal gender roles for French women. The US was meanwhile preoccupied with population levels around the world. Population was a specific concern in relation to “economic capacity”⁶ because “ideological battles centered on the sanctity of the free market.”⁷ In other words, the US was concerned about its population in terms of the sustainability and success of its free market economy. At the same time, Tobin explains that the quickly increasing population rates in Third World countries were seen as destabilizing, putting US trade interests at risk, as well as making Third World countries susceptible to the spread of Communism. All of these national concerns resulted in the implementation of natalism policies that inherently fell onto women, burdening them with the pressure to increase birth rates while simultaneously attempting to police their...