TY - JOUR
AU1 - Guard,, Julie
AB - Canada’s Cold War was arguably as nasty as that in the U.S., although it was conducted more covertly—a stratagem that allowed governments to mask illiberal policies of intrusive domestic surveillance and state-sponsored and state-encouraged persecution of dissidents, leftists, gay men, and others behind a carefully cultivated facade of liberalism. Absent the McCarthy-era legislative committees, show trials, and anti-communist legislation that are now synonymous with the era, Canada’s Cold War was rarely publicly acknowledged and, until the 1990s, largely undocumented. Since then, a minor deluge of scholarly studies has challenged the comfortable assumption that Canadians who were active in social movements that criticized state policies and embarrassed governments, or who held membership in leftist political parties or organizations, were exempted from state surveillance. In Just Watch Us: RCMP Surveillance of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Cold War Canada, coauthors Christabelle Sethna and Steve Hewitt contribute to dismantling those assumptions. Based on a close reading of surveillance reports and other material created and collected by Canada’s national police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and then acquired under Access to Information Act and Privacy Act requests, Sethna and Hewitt document the decades-long surveillance of the women’s liberation movement and its progeny, the feminist movement, from the 1960s through the 1980s. Police surveillance, they show, was intense and intrusive, justified on the grounds that the women’s movement was, like virtually all other subjects of RCMP surveillance, subversive. Yet what made them subversive was not what animated the movement—such as women’s demands for reproductive rights, including the right to abortions; the right to define their own sexualities, unconstrained by social convention upheld by the apparatus of the state; and their opposition to patriarchal social, economic, and political arrangements. On the contrary, RCMP file notes and other sources suggest that the Mounties were rather bewildered by those demands. Instead, they viewed the women’s movement through what Sethna and Hewitt dub a “red-tinged prism” (18) and fixated on the interpenetration of the women’s movement and the New Left. The book’s opening discussion of RCMP surveillance methods and their categorization of particular individuals and groups as subversive is useful, if too lengthy. “Subversive,” they explain, was (and is) an imprecise category that senior Mounties applied to people and organizations they perceived as constituting a threat, but in which the threat itself was rarely explained or defined. In practice, it was applied to virtually everyone on the left and rarely to those on the political right, even—as we now know from subsequent research—to some unequivocally fascist organizations active in Canada during the Second World War. RCMP surveillance records begin in 1969, in the wake of the 1967 Royal Commission on the Status of Women, an event comparable in its impact on the politicization of women’s equality to the 1961 President’s Commission on the Status of Women in the United States. Trotskyists in the League for Socialist Action (Ligue socialiste ouvrière), who were already engaged in social causes, quickly became active in the women’s liberation movement, and in so doing, they attracted the attention of the RCMP. Once initiated, police surveillance continued into the 1980s. Sethna and Hewitt’s excavation of the police surveillance records does much more than reveal the security obsession of the Cold War state, however. Such records provide an invaluable perspective on the internal debates, conflicts, and conversations within the emergent and developing women’s movement through these dynamic years. Indeed, this is the major contribution of the work. A significant chapter describes in fascinating detail the 1970 Abortion Caravan, a trek initiated by the Vancouver Women’s Caucus, who drove across the country from British Columbia to Ottawa to confront the prime minister in a van emblazoned with their demands: “Abortion Is Our Right” and “Smash Capitalism” (89). Denied an audience with the prime minister, eighteen women entered the House of Commons and chained themselves to the seats. If the Abortion Caravan represented a high point in the women’s activism, in that they overcame significant hurdles to gain access to the seats of power and in so doing inserted abortion into the public discourse, their 1971 Indochinese Conference reveals the rifts that had been fomenting within the movement. The conference attempted to link the struggles of North American women to those of Indochinese women in the midst of the Vietnam War, but documents in the RCMP files reveal contentious debates within the movement about the meaning and objectives of “global sisterhood” (105). Particularly illuminating in this regard are the soul-searching reflections of white, mostly middle-class Canadian women as they strive for solidarity with women whose concerns and experience are diametrically different from their own. These foreshadow the problems that would eventually contribute to the decline of the movement itself. Historians of social movements will appreciate Sethna and Hewitt’s creative use of RCMP records to provide an intimate view of the women’s movement, one that has not otherwise been available. Others will see value in their accumulated evidence of Mounties’ attitudes about the women they watched. This evidence sheds useful light on a matter of urgent and current concern. Mounties’ sneering dismissal of the women as political actors and their refusal to treat women as legitimate social actors with genuine claims on the state are all too redolent of problems that beset the force today, and provide perspective on the force’s recent difficulties as it attempts to deal with rampant misogyny within. Sexual and gender harassment, discrimination, and abuse within the force have been amply documented and continue, despite repeated promises of “zero tolerance” and internal reviews. As this history suggests, what has been dubbed a “toxic culture” in the RCMP is a problem of long standing that will take more than halfhearted measures to resolve. © The Author 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Christabelle Sethna and Steve Hewitt. Just Watch Us: RCMP Surveillance of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Cold War Canada.
JF - The American Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ahr/rhz497
DA - 2019-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/christabelle-sethna-and-steve-hewitt-just-watch-us-rcmp-surveillance-BCf2shoJd8
SP - 1059
VL - 124
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -