From Left to Right: Maternalism and Women's Political Activism in Postwar Canada by Brian Thorn

Reviewed by: From Left to Right: Maternalism and Women's Political Activism in Postwar Canada by Brian Thorn Amanda Ricci Brian Thorn, From Left to Right: Maternalism and Women's Political Activism in Postwar Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2016) Brian Thorn undertakes an ambitious comparative study in From Left to Right: Maternalism and Women's Political Activism in Postwar Canada. In this, his first book, Thorn compares and contrasts the differing perspectives of women involved in Alberta's Social Credit Party (scp or Socreds), British Columbia's Communist Party of Canada (ccp) as well as that province's Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccp) from 1945 to 1960. The comparison is an intriguing one. In their campaigns to build the "New World Order," as Thorn argues, left- and right-wing women relied upon a common maternalist ethic – that is, exalting women's role in the home and the family – in order to advance very different political, public agendas. In short, the ccp and cpc members advocated for a stronger welfare state, appropriating a maternalist language in part as a means to gain respectability in the conservative Cold War era. Conversely, scp women envisioned a return to pre-capitalist, pre-industrial values. Through their activism, however, the latter implicitly suggested that women deserved a larger role in society. The use of maternalism then, was strategic, complex, and often contradictory. Relying on biographies, the first two chapters outline, respectively, left- and right-wing women's views on collectivism and individualism. They introduce the book's "cast of characters," (18) many [End Page 318] of whom appear in later sections. So that the reader has the luxury to flip back and forth between the text and the appendix, the author helpfully includes brief biographies at the end of the book. In the remaining chapters, Thorn offers a series of case studies in order to illustrate women's views on peace and nuclear disarmament (Chapters 3 and 4) as well as juvenile delinquency (Chapter 6). In Chapter 5, he discusses women-only organizations in all three parties, arguing that they led to a stronger voice for women. Here Thorn adopts the term "safe space" (126) in order to explain the function of these gender-segregated spaces. The latter, however, reads anachronistically, even if it is directed towards today's political parties. Whereas the first two pairs of chapters are mirror images of one another, the last two integrate both left- and right-wing women, drawing connections as well as tracing divergences. Thorn pays careful attention to structures relating to class, ethnicity, family, religion, place, and region in shaping women's activism. From Left to Right, however, could have benefited from a greater engagement with critical whiteness studies, the study of the social construction of whiteness as tied to power and privilege. One Social Credit woman in this study, for example, claimed she was "an honorary Indian princess of a Pegein tribe" and had "been given the name Princess Blue Bird." (51) Yet the author provides no further comment or context. Overall, I was left wondering if more could have been said about the cpc, ccp and Socred women's rapport with racialized and Indigenous women beyond some members' clear evocation of a sense of superiority based on Britishness. Nevertheless, the book provides a window onto the ways in which women's politics were informed by highly local as well as familial factors. Herein lie its strengths. More specifically, From Left to Right vividly presents the personal and political trajectories of cpc, ccf, and scp women, arguing that the two were in fact intertwined. In Chapter 1, for example, we meet Mary Crowe from Nelson, BC, a rank-and-file Communist party supporter. Crowe came from a family of Welsh miners who immigrated to Canada when she was a child. Later, she and her husband joined the cpc under the auspices of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. Indeed, as Thorn points out, resource-based areas often produced a pro-union, leftist culture, while small towns and rural areas with economies based on farming, such as those in Alberta, fostered a more conservative political climate. Significantly, both Crowe...

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