Dr. Diana Cucuz

Review by Kristin L. Matthews in Reception

“Diana Cucuz’s Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds: Selling Cold War Culture and Consumerism through the “Ladies Home Journal” and “Amerika” (2023) is an exciting study about the intersection of gender, geopolitics, and print culture. Focused on the ways in which magazines were used both in the U.S. and in the U.S.S.R. to sell a particular idea of American womanhood, and by extension, democracy, the book convincingly argues that gender was a key front on which the Cold War was waged in the post-Stalin era. This book adds to the University of Toronto Press’s impressive catalogue of Cold War scholarship and puts archival research into conversation with key concepts from Cold War, gender, and print culture studies.”