Winning Women's Hearts and Minds: Selling Cold War Culture in the US and the USSR by Diana Cucuz (review)

Reviewed by: Winning Women's Hearts and Minds: Selling Cold War Culture in the US and the USSR by Diana Cucuz Alison Rowley Cucuz, Diana – Winning Women's Hearts and Minds: Selling Cold War Culture in the US and the USSR. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023. 317 p. Diana Cucuz's new book, Winning Women's Hearts and Minds, is a valuable contribution to the scholarship on Cold War culture. The study, which compares the contents of glossy magazines produced by both the Americans and the Soviets, underscores the extent to which the contours of idealized everyday life in their respective societies served as propaganda in the post–Second World War era. Cucuz argues that women were a crucial audience for these publications, not only because they were citizens of their countries but also owing to their central familial roles, which meant they influenced the thinking of future generations as well. Over the course of six chapters, she demonstrates what messages were presented to women and how these changed as the Cold War evolved. The book's first two chapters foreground Ladies' Home Journal, which Cucuz argues formed a template for Amerika, an American magazine produced for a Soviet audience, when it was revived by the United States Information Agency (USIA) in the 1950s. Ladies' Home Journal promoted a world inhabited by middle-class, White mothers who were content to be housewives. While these women did not seek employment, they were presented as politically active, particularly when it came to issues such as education—then seen as vital to protect against the attractions of communism—and civil defence at the local level. At the same time, the magazine sought to inform readers about the lives of Soviet women. Here, the coverage changed depending on fluctuations in US foreign policy, with a positive line evident during the Second World War but slowly giving way to a bleaker portrayal of Soviet everyday life as the Cold War deepened. In close readings of texts produced for the magazine by noted writer John Steinbeck, Lydia Kirk (the wife of the US Ambassador to the USSR from 1949 to 1951), and journalist Dorothy Thompson, Cucuz shows readers how Ladies' Home Journal explained why so many Soviet women needed to work, how that could affect their parenting, and how women's lives were adversely affected by a consistent lack of consumer goods. In the end, as she puts it, the "comparison was clear: under a Soviet regime, government dictated the manufacture, availability, and price of all products, to the detriment of women, but under a US system of government, the female consumer was boss" (p. 89). In Chapter 3, Cucuz explains how the US government came to be more interested in public diplomacy, which was assumed could shape opinions and policy formation in other countries, and it provides a short publication history of Amerika. Cucuz argues a pivotal moment for both came when President Eisenhower set up the USIA in August 1953. Four goals guided its work: first, to persuade people around the world that their interests matched US ambitions; second, to inform people of US stances on major issues; third, to ensure that officials based abroad should be flexible enough to adapt information as needed to match local situations; and finally, to provide information that would be seen as truthful and reliable rather than over-the-top. To reach Soviet women, the USIA relied on Amerika, whose contents are analyzed and contrasted with rival USSR (which aimed to inform American women [End Page 180] about Soviet life) over the next three chapters. As Cucuz outlines in Chapter 4, a typical 1950s issue of Amerika had 15–23 articles spread across roughly 60 glossy pages. No editorials were included, and hard politics were deliberately avoided in the articles. Instead, coverage focused on four themes when it came to women: fashion and femininity; marriage, motherhood, and family; domesticity; and consumption. By contrast, the Soviet government's stance—as presented in the pages of USSR—emphasized the ways in which people were willing to sacrifice for a more equitable society and argued that women (who had support from the state in the form of maternity leave...