Reviews

Just Watch Us: RCMP Surveillance of the Women's Liberation Movement in Cold War Canada by Steve Hewitt, Christabelle Sethna

jennifermilanovic's review against another edition

informative medium-paced

4.0

dashadashahi's review against another edition

3.0

This book does an excellent job discussing the ethical concerns around the sources it employs and provokes an important discussion around how scholars should and can use such sources. Moreover, Sethna and Hewitt provide a very transparent conclusion in noting that this work can be viewed as an “unreliable” narrative as a result of such sources (p. 170). This work provides a glimpse at the Canadian state responded to second wave feminism and how the RCMP understood that threat. However, perhaps the history presented in this book would be less “unreliable” and “fragmentary” if other sources were used to affirm or complicate the reports of the RCMP. As George S. Kealey (2019) points out in his review, there could have been more use of oral history and interviews, in addition to the four that the authors utilize. Similarly, newspaper reports from the period may also be interesting if they reveal anything at all about the public perceived these groups and if they also felt the influence of a “red-tinged prism.”