Christabelle Sethna and Steve Hewitt. Just Watch Us

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.

Legislation · Legislature · Liberation movement · Persecution · Political science · Politics · State (computer science) · Canadian Identity and History · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Public Administration