Third Year Hon. Mention: Happy Homes for a Healthy Democracy? Creating “the Normal” in Cold War Canada

HIST 3533, The History of Women in Canada. CD: Megan Kirby.

Abstract

“Happy Homes for a Healthy Democracy” offers an articulate and well-supported accounting of the construction of social norms in the post-war period. The broad scope of the argument is treated with dexterity, and it is a great read. The author claims that in the first few decades after World War 2 ended, a normative nuclear family dynamic reigned in Canada, such that difference was pathologized, and resources deployed to maintain what was assumed to be a ‘healthy’ national consensus on family structure. Of course, the nuclear family was “inherently exclusionary”  since “few realize it due to material and psychological constraints.” But when, for instance, post-war feminists dissented from this narrative of familial bliss, they were characterized at worst as subversives undermining the West’s economic foundation, and at best as naïve children playing into the hands of international communists. In such ways were early social justice movements delegitimized in the early post-war period.