ABSTRACT
Regarded as both an era of socially conservative values in the West, and a presage of 1960s liberatory social movements, the decade following World War II embodies a complex nexus of cultural retrenchment and resistance. In North America, this period signifies the cold war – a period American military analyst Rebecca Grant suggests is illustrative of a troubling corollary between repressive gender norms and national security.1 This historical epoch is concurrently associated, in official Canadian history, with the burgeoning welfare state and accompanying notions of ‘caring and sharing ... [as] ... central to our Canadian identity’.2 However, these sentiments appear incongruous with other local and national realities: the ongoing cultural denigration and residential school abuses inflicted upon many First Nation peoples; the displacement of African-Canadian women from hard-won factory positions occupied during the war;3 the 1946 inception of Canada’s McCarthy-esque national security regime – the Security Panel – which would subsequently purge the Canadian military and civil service of hundreds of gays and lesbians;4 and the hegemonic (re)production of idealized wife/mother subjectivities for Canadian women – read: Anglo-Celtic, bourgeois and (hetero)feminine.5
