Over the past 25 years, we have seen a proliferation of exciting new perspectives on the Cold War that have both broadened and deepened our understanding of it as a global phenomenon of remarkable complexity. Historian Diana Cucuz's Winning Women's Hearts and Minds, a deeply researched and fascinating discussion of the gendered nature of the U.S. propaganda war in the 1950s and 1960s, is a welcome addition to the revisionist canon. Through her painstaking analysis of the iconic U.S. women's magazine the Ladies’ Home Journal (LHJ), Cucuz demonstrates that LHJ not only aimed to define womanhood for American women but also reinforced the U.S. government's Cold War rhetoric by contrasting the (allegedly) happy lives of American women with those of their (supposedly) exploited and distinctly unfeminine Soviet sisters. Cucuz also demonstrates the extent to which the United States Information Agency (USIA) borrowed liberally from LHJ tropes to...

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