Book Review: Cold War Workers: Labour, Family, and Community in a Nuclear State by Isabel Campbell Isabel Campbell.2025. Cold War Workers: Labour, Family, and Community in a Nuclear State . Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press. 319 pp. 39.95 CAD (Paperback/EPub), ISBN 9780228024408.

The typology and variety of sources, the approach that reconciles an excursus through the centuries on women's social and legal status with a focused analysis of cases regarding ordinary people, as well as the time period chosen for the study, make Opposing Patriarchy a truly original and important historiographical work on the Ottocento.While grounding its structure on historiography which studies the connections between family, law, and wealth (Paolo Ungari's and Manlio Bellomo's works are acknowledged by Delmedico as seminal to her book), Opposing Patriarchy rightly claims a "new identity" (8) for its approach.Delmedico's study has the great merit to address the complex, contradictory and yet fascinating dynamic that contributed to the "decline of the patriarchal family" (215) in the nineteenth century, dynamic which has been enhanced by the introduction of new civil codes but also by lawsuits initiated by women.The study successfully depicts the changes characterizing women's legal status during the Ottocento (including the regressions brought about by the Restoration phase and also by the Unification, in some respects) offering "a revised interpretation of the nineteenth-century images of womanhood" (18).The second part of the book in particular, with a selection of case studies to illustrate the complex and changing scenarios of nineteenth-century society regarding social practices and expectations in matter of marriage, represents a precious contribution to gender, social, and legal history of the Ottocento.The significant case studies presented clearly show how the written law was often (and successfully) challenged by the law in action and the protagonists of these challenges were mostly ordinary women.Interestingly enough, sometimes the importance attributed by institutions to family and social order (but also the concern for the concentration of wealth in the hands of few) played in favor of women in court, as Delmedico argues in her conclusion.While reflecting on the significance of social and legal practices and mostly on their protagonists presented in the book, the author concludes that "these women and these men, these anonymous and ordinary people, might not have had a prominent role in their world during their lifetimes […] but, nevertheless, contributed to the making of our present" (218).