Winning Women's Hearts and Minds

Over the past 25 years, we have seen a proliferation of exciting new perspectives on the Cold War that have both broadened and deepened our understanding of it as a global phenomenon of remarkable complexity. Historian Diana Cucuz's Winning Women's Hearts and Minds, a deeply researched and fascinating discussion of the gendered nature of the U.S. propaganda war in the 1950s and 1960s, is a welcome addition to the revisionist canon. Through her painstaking analysis of the iconic U.S. women's magazine the Ladies’ Home Journal (LHJ), Cucuz demonstrates that LHJ not only aimed to define womanhood for American women but also reinforced the U.S. government's Cold War rhetoric by contrasting the (allegedly) happy lives of American women with those of their (supposedly) exploited and distinctly unfeminine Soviet sisters. Cucuz also demonstrates the extent to which the United States Information Agency (USIA) borrowed liberally from LHJ tropes to present ideal American womanhood to Soviet readers in the glossy Russian-language propaganda magazine Amerika.In the book's first half, “Shaping Women, Gender, and the Communist Threat through the Ladies’ Home Journal,” Cucuz paints a vivid picture of the stultifying conformity of the times, reified in the pages of LHJ. Her account here stirs many memories for me, and I must confess a personal engagement with this material that transcends professional expertise. Not only am I a scholar of Cold War cultures, particularly Soviet popular cinema and U.S.-Soviet cinematic relations; I was also a witness to, and participant in, some of what these chapters describe. I grew up during the high Cold War in a U.S. household that was not only staunchly anti-Soviet but also strictly governed by the tenets of the LHJ, which was my mother's bible for all things womanly. However, I did not realize until I read Cucuz's book the extent to which LHJ also informed (and skewed) my mother's opinions about global politics, especially about the alleged superiority of American life and its consumer culture, particularly when compared to the “backward” USSR. The two chapters in this section—on the “special privileges” of U.S. women and the “special hardships” of Soviet women (again, according to LHJ)—were revelatory as a detailed exploration of how “free enterprise” (like LHJ) supported the state's ideological goals and how soft propaganda functioned in U.S. society.The second half of the volume, “Selling Women, Gender, and Consumer Culture through Amerika,” is less successful. Here, too, I approach the material as both a witness/participant and a specialist. In the book's first half, Cucuz is in full command of her sources, both primary and secondary, and is obviously extremely knowledgeable about U.S. culture of the 1950s and 1960s. But she is not an expert on the Soviet Union and does not know Russian, and this limitation is evident, despite her efforts to read most of the relevant recent scholarship in English (except, curiously on film, which was the most important conduit for showcasing American values in the USSR). The USIA propaganda magazine Amerika was published in Russian, which Cucuz apparently had translated into English for her. Because her knowledge of Soviet culture is all second-hand (through reading the works of Russian/Soviet scholars), she tends to accept official claims of Amerika’s success with Soviet women at face value, although she occasionally remarks that some of what was reported about the reception of the journal, the attitudes of Soviet women, and general living conditions in the USSR may have been skewed to satisfy U.S. preconceptions. What a U.S. diplomat's wife has to say about her experiences in the USSR, for example, is highly filtered through class and ideology, not to mention the natural constraints of her position—or the language barrier. (When I lived in Moscow in the late 1970s under the auspices of the official U.S.-Soviet doctoral student exchange program, few U.S. embassy staff, not to mention their families, knew much Russian, ventured far out of their compound, or ever rode the metro.)Cucuz's lack of Russian-language ability and limited knowledge of Soviet history also leads to small errors, like thinking that “Petrovna” is the surname (rather than patronymic) of Nikita Khrushchev's wife, Nina Kukharchuk, or the bigger problem of using “Russian” when she means “Soviet” (roughly 45 percent of Soviet citizens were not ethnic Russians, including many of the people she mentions). Given these problems, which are not uncommon in comparative scholarship involving more than one language, what is most valuable in the second section of the book is Cucuz's insightful primary research on how Amerika and its handlers tried not to oversell the ease and riches of American life, recognizing that many Soviet citizens at the time, including women, recoiled from it. This material is far better than Cucuz's derivative and sometimes problematic depiction of Soviet life. My own observations when living in Moscow suggested that Amerika was not regarded as true or persuasive. Rather, it was treated with some amusement, at least by the Soviet intelligentsia, similar to the way USSR/Soviet Life was viewed in the United States, except by diehard U.S. Communists. For example, when I presented a Soviet friend with a copy of Amerika that I had picked up at the U.S. embassy, he handed it back with a smile, quipping: “We have our own propaganda. We don't need yours.” This anecdote does not necessarily prove anything, but it does point to the need for serious research into the reception of propaganda, a topic absent from most historical accounts of the subject.Despite these caveats, Winning Women's Hearts and Minds makes a valuable and original contribution to Cold War studies that I expect will inspire additional explorations into women's varied roles in the conflict and stimulate discussion about the effectiveness of U.S. Cold War propaganda. As Cucuz demonstrates in this engaging book, the USIA (and LHJ) cared a great deal about influencing women at home and abroad, but to what end? Winning Women's Hearts and Minds belongs in every university library

Cold war · Economic history · Political science · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law