Book Review: Breaking Barriers, Shaping Worlds: Canadian Women and the Search for Global Order
| Author | Heather Smith |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00207020221099313 |
| Published date | 01 March 2022 |
| Date | 01 March 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
for the Republican party (chapter five). This shift was, in Brenes’eyes, “not an ac-
cident”(239), but rather the culmination of a decades-long trend whereby American
military spending, primarily at the hands of the Republican party, became increasingly
disconnected from true national security imperatives and instead a vehicle for enriching
a select partisan and demographic constituency at the expense of the broader American
public.
For Might and Right leaves at least two questions—one theoretical and the other
empirical—unanswered. Both are worthy of further investigation. First, political
scientists—particularly those in the growing political economy of security subfield—
will be interested in understanding why these factions entered and exited the coalition.
As a historian, Brenes is primarily concerned with documenting how various shifting
factions formed the Cold War coalition that consistently supported high levels of
military spending. His analysis makes clear that politicians, business leaders, workers,
and voters supported high levels of military spending due to a mix of electoral in-
centives, economic benefits, and ideological affinity, amongst other factors. The
question remains, though, as to which motivator, and to what degree, brought different
groups into and out of the Cold War coalition at different times.
Second, given the importance of the historical trends that Brenes illustrates with
qualitative analysis, many are worth cataloguing in greater depth using quantitative
data. These include the geographic shift in military spending from the Midwest and
Northeastern parts of the United States to the “sunbelt”states of the South, the
subsequent shifts in politicians’voting records on military spending and foreign policy,
and the unequal economic benefits enjoyed by racial minority workers in the defence
industry versus white workers, amongst others. Gathering data on these various
phenomena will not be easy, but will be helpful for testing future hypotheses about the
causes and consequences of Cold-War-era military spending. By teeing up these sorts
of research questions, For Might and Right will be of interest to a broad audience of
both historians and political scientists.
Breaking Barriers, Shaping Worlds: Canadian Women and the Search for Global Order.By
Jill Campbell-Miller, Greg Donaghy, and Stacey Barker, eds. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2021.
255 pp. CA$32.95 (paperback) ISBN: 978-0-7748-6640-8
Reviewed by: Heather Smith,University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, BC, Canada.
(heather.smith@unbc.ca)
I’m not a historian by training. I note this by way of positioning myself as a reviewer
because the volume under review is the work of historians who have a disciplinary
expertise different from my own. Moreover, how we position ourselves and the lens
through which we view the world matters because that lens shapes our assessment. To
Book Reviews 157
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