Winning Women's Hearts and Minds: Selling Cold War Culture in the US and the USSR

This presentation will discuss how print culture, or "polite propaganda" was utilized to deploy images of supposedly happy American women as feminine wives, mothers and homemakers living under a capitalist consumer culture. Through magazines such as the Ladies' Home Journal and Amerika, the latter distributed in the Soviet Union, the U.S. government hoped to convince American women and Russian "babushkas" of the superiority of the American way of life and in the process, undermine a Soviet regime that promoted "gender equality" in place of the "special status" of American women. More broadly, it sheds light on the significance of women, gender, and consumption to international politics during the Cold War. Analyzing the Cold War through this unique lens reveals a broader U.S. foreign policy approach which sought to gradually destabilize the Soviet government not just through political and military means, but also through cultural diplomacy.

Speaker: Diana Cucuz, Assistant Professor, University of Toronto and Toronto Metropolitan University

This event is free but please register to attend (click the registration button on the top right of this page)