Just Watch Us: RCMP Surveillance of the Women's Liberation Movement in Cold War Canada

by Christabelle Sethna, Steve Hewitt

From the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, in the midst of the Cold War and second-wave feminism, the RCMP security service – prompted by fears of left-wing and communist subversion – monitored and infiltrated the women’s liberation movement in Canada and Quebec. Just Watch Us investigates why and how this movement was targeted, weighing carefully the presumed threat its left-wing ties presented to the Canadian government against the defiant challenge its campaign for gender equality posed to Canadian society. Based on a close reading of thousands of pages of RCMP documents declassified under Canada’s Access to Information Act and the corresponding Privacy Act, Just Watch Us demonstrates that the security service’s longstanding anti-Communist focus distorted its threat assessment of feminist organizing. Combining gender analysis and critical approaches to state surveillance, Christabelle Sethna and Steve Hewitt consider the machinations of the RCMP, including its bureaucratic evolution, intelligence-gathering operations, and impact, as well as the evolution of the women’s liberation movement from its broad transnational influences to its elusive quest for unity among women across lines of ideology and identity. Significantly, the authors also grapple with the historiographical, methodological, and ethical difficulties of working with declassified security documents and sensitive information. A sharp-eyed inquiry into spy policies and tactics in Cold War Canada, Just Watch Us speaks to the serious political implications of state surveillance for social justice activism in liberal democracies.

Genres: Canada, Nonfiction

318 pages, Hardcover

Published March 21, 2018

Reviews

[Dasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.”

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Comprehensive in scope with great pacing and writing, the book gives both a historical overview of the surveillance by the rcmp of the Canadian feminist & women’s liberation movement and the work the group’s themselves did throughout the 60’s and 70’s. They really dig into the files they found, give well thought out analysis of the implications of the surveillance as well as provide criticism of the process to do this research and how the Canadian State continues to put roadblocks up when it comes to access to information, learning who was surveyed or if there was any dirty business done to groups or individuals.