GENDER AND THE LONG POSTWAR: THE UNITED STATES AND THE TWO GERMANYS, 1945-1989 Karen Hagemann and Sonya Michel, Eds. Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] authors provide a well-organized overview of postwar politics by using a transnational, comparative approach that includes not only the but the influence of the U.S. and Russia as well. This perspective lays bare the concerted Cold War effort on both sides to put the brakes on progress by returning to prewar sexual and social norms. Such binaries as the male breadwinner/female homemaker, East/West, black/white and the heteronormative/homosexual subject become complicated upon closer inspection. Hagemann and Michel's choice of essays do well to decouple and challenge peacetime anxieties, to use their term. They do this by organizing the book into sections that gender the aftermath of war, unpack the changing role of postwar masculinity, examine the new nuclear family under the watchful eye of the state, and finally explore new sexual identities. The defeated Germany that the victors encountered in spring 1945 wore a predominantly female face, begins Atina Grossmann, explaining how the gdr (German Democratic Republic) had the Red Army as a rapacious occupying force in the East, while the frg (Federal Republic of Germany) of the West softened their seduction into the slightly more acceptable American G.I. fraternization with the local populace and all of the ambivalent fears and desires inherent in sexual predation, coercion, and prostitution for protection. Several authors also discuss the figure of the Triimmerfrau, or rubble woman, upon whose shoulders the burden of reconstruction often rested in the absence of a male workforce. Women in the two Germanys also worked out of necessity, forced into low-paying and unskilled pink collar jobs when the war was over, their hard work seen as only a temporary stopgap effort, as Rebecca Boehling puts it. Laura McEnaney dismisses the simplistic view of factory girls running off to the comfort of the suburbs by labelling it the Rosie [the Riveter]-to-June [Cleaver] arc, arguing instead that womens military timelines are not tidy, for women do not march away and then home again, the usual demarcation between war and peace, as this collection shows. overriding theme of this book is the tension between women's struggle for equality and men's struggle to recast masculinity, as Hagemann and Michel explain in their introduction. …