| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Helen Laville. Cold War Women: The International Activities of American Women's Organisations. New York: Manchester University Press. 2002. Pp. xi, 220. $64.95.
In this account of the activities of American women's organizations in the Cold War international arena, Helen Laville promises to challenge "the prevailing view of the 1950s as a period of inactivity and political apathy" for American women (p. 6) and to call into question "the idea of an international gender-based identity" (p. 7). Much work has already been done to restore a reinvigorated American woman to the postwar period, and Laville acknowledges the efforts in this area of historians such as Susan Ware, Susan Lynn, Joanne Meyerowitz, and others. What is most original about this book is Laville's delineation of the limits of a maternalist, international sisterhood during the Cold War era. Culling the records of women's organizations, specialist publications, letters, popular literature, and secondary works, Laville has done an admirable job in assembling this complex story.	1
Although American women's groups often proclaimed a gender-based universality, Laville convincingly demonstrates that what really drove these groups in their relations with foreign women was a nationalist rather than a maternalist ideology. Laville also detects a smug assumption of superiority that informed how American women approached their less fortunate sisters in other countries. This tendency was especially obvious in Germany, where American groups such as the Woman's Affairs Division and the League of Women Voters tried to rehabilitate German women by educating them in the ways of American democracy. As Laville puts it, "American women expected to be in a superior position to German women and were not receptive to any criticism of their own system by the Germans ... In other words, German women travelled to the USA to learn, while American women travelled to Germany to teach" (p. 80). Curiously, even though German women were enfranchised before the rise of Nazism, American women's groups took them to task only for their supposed political "apathy," while absolving them of any suggestion that they might have supported Adolf Hitler (pp. 73, 72).	. . .

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