Just Watch Us: RCMP Surveillance of the Women's Liberation Movement in Cold War Canada by Christabelle Sethna and Steve Hewitt (review)

The frontispiece of Just Watch Us is an image of an Abortion Caravan protester carrying a placard that reads: "The state has no business in the wombs of the nation." Little did these activists know that they ought to have been concerned with the state's interest in their meetings and ephemera. Christabelle Sethna and Steve Hewitt combine their expertise in feminist organizing and the security state to document Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) surveillance of women's liberation activism from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. The book is a timely addition to the growing international literature on Cold War surveillance of dissent. Their reflections on the ethics of working with declassified documents is an equally important methodological contribution to history and the broader field of surveillance studies.

Sethna and Hewitt pored over thousands of pages of redacted intelligence files on women's liberation groups. Despite this vast archive, they conclude that the RCMP was less concerned with the impact of feminist demands on Canadian society than it was with "real and/or imagined connections to left-wing activism." State surveillance was shaped by "the red-tinged prism" that dominated Western state security systems. Informed by the post-war obsession with Soviet espionage and the containment of communism, the RCMP's security branch infiltrated labour, pacifist, ethnic, and youth organizations in search of subversives presumed to be more loyal to international communism than to Canadian democracy. This international loyalty to Moscow has been debunked by the rich historiography on which the authors build, but Old Left organizing was more centralized than New Left groups and the social movements of the 1960s. This was especially true for women's liberation organizing, which privileged consensus building over hierarchical models deemed inherently patriarchal. Sethna and Hewitt argue that the RCMP did not understand the tactics and goals of the women's liberation movement because its investigations used outdated surveillance techniques. Moreover, the RCMP remained a male-dominated force in this period, which created challenges not only for infiltrating women-only groups but also, ultimately, for their analysis of the political potential and limitations of women's liberation.

Because of the "red-tinged prism," the security branch underestimated the significance of feminist political demands for radical transformations to gender relations. Using the 1970 Abortion Caravan and the Indochinese Conference, which was held in Vancouver and Toronto in 1971, as case studies, Sethna and Hewitt demonstrate how these blinders prevented the RCMP from recognizing the political significance of these events. Concerned with Trotskyist links to Caravan organizers, the RCMP advised the federal government to undermine the legitimacy of the group rather than heed feminist demands for fundamental changes to abortion law. Because they misjudged women's militancy, rooted in affective demands for control over their reproduction, they could not foresee the significant security breaches to Parliament and the prime minister's residence. This security failure resulted in publicity for the Caravan organization, which established its status as the first national action of the Canadian second wave. The RCMP's interest in the Indochinese Conference, which brought together American, Vietnamese, and Canadian peace activists, was rooted in its long-standing conviction in the Voice of Women's communist sympathies; it also gave them an opportunity to spy on American activists. Focusing on the left ties of the groups who attended, the RCMP overlooked the implication of the fractures happening among American and Canadian delegates who were recognizing the "limits of global sisterhood."

Throughout the book, Sethna and Hewitt analyse the challenge of negotiating the 1985 Access to Information Act and the 1983 Privacy Act. Because state security systems have been more concerned with protecting informants than those who are under surveillance, they insist that researchers have ethical obligations to ensure that those who have been spied on are not revictimized. The difficulty of...