{"id":13081,"date":"2019-07-26T18:22:45","date_gmt":"2019-07-26T18:22:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/?p=13081"},"modified":"2021-02-19T15:11:27","modified_gmt":"2021-02-19T15:11:27","slug":"why-women-have-better-sex-under-socialism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/2019\/07\/26\/why-women-have-better-sex-under-socialism\/","title":{"rendered":"WHY WOMEN HAVE BETTER SEX UNDER SOCIALISM"},"content":{"rendered":"

Murdo Ritchie reviews the book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism\u00a0and other Arguments for Economic Independence<\/em> <\/strong>by Dr Kristen R. Ghodsee.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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WHY WOMEN HAVE BETTER SEX UNDER SOCIALISM<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Inessa Armand\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u201cIf women\u2019s liberation is unthinkable without communism, then communism is unthinkable without women\u2019s liberation.\u201d\u00a0 Inessa Armand<\/strong><\/p>\n

The collapse of \u201csocialism\u201d in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union may have changed borders but it didn\u2019t make the Earth move \u2013at least for many women.\u00a0 The economic, personal and sexual changes that occurred, changed many women\u2019s lives but not to their benefit according to this new book.\u00a0The provocative cover title has two parts the first in large type joined by a conjunction to the second in smaller lettering.\u00a0 But the writer makes the case for understanding both in their inter-linked entirety.\u00a0 She is quite clear \u201cunregulated capitalism is bad for women.\u201d (p1)\u00a0 Most importantly, she makes clear that not all countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were alike, despite the claims of hostile propaganda.\u00a0 The grimness of the Eastern bloc as portrayed by hostile forces often concealed many real gains for women.\u00a0 However it is still difficult to \u201cgeneralize about the experiences of all state socialist countries in \u2026 before 1989.\u00a0 They all approached the woman question uniquely, even if they all started from a similar theoretical basis in the works of Bebel, Engels, or Kollontai.\u201d (p.145)\u00a0Many of these gains came into existence, partly as a continuation of the momentum of early Bolshevik leaders especially women, but out of economic necessity and war required women\u2019s mobilisation to win.\u00a0This progressively strengthened women\u2019s leverage both during and after the Second World War. Yet, in no country at any time were they ever consciously promoted to advance women\u2019s liberation or advancement.\u00a0 Indeed, the evidence suggests that they occurred more as unplanned, secondary effects than promoted as conscious policy.<\/p>\n

Despite the pro-natalist policies that were eagerly pursued by elite groups, especially in the former Soviet Union, that attempted to make women produce more children, where women were rewarded by absurd medals for bearing more children, \u00a0women still managed to make significant advances. Nevertheless, increased educational and employment opportunities, as well as rights to divorce for women, ran counter to these schemes.\u00a0 \u201cDespite the shortcomings of the command economy, the socialist system promoted a culture in which women\u2019s formal labour force participation was accepted and even celebrated.\u00a0 Before World War II, Eastern Bloc countries were deeply patriarchal, peasant societies with conservative gender relations emerging from religion and traditional culture.\u201d (pp. 37-38)\u00a0 In a number of these countries women received little to no education and in some it was absurdly discriminatory.\u00a0 One of the first educational tasks of the Bolsheviks was to abolish the laws that required boys and girls to attend separate schools.<\/p>\n

A PERFECT LABORATORY<\/p>\n

Dr Ghodsee\u2019s text attempts set Eastern Europe before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before and after the fall of Mikhail Gorbachov as \u201ca perfect laboratory to investigate the effects of capitalism on women\u2019s lives.\u201d (p. 11)\u00a0 As an academic specialising in the transition to capitalism having lived for three years in Bulgaria and both sides of Germany she has enormous expertise in understanding the changes.\u00a0 Consequently, the book examines several themes not just the differences between each individual country either side of this temporal meridian, but \u00a0also makes comparisons with the United States and countries of Western and Northern Europe as well as her own personal observations.\u00a0 Some reviewers have felt this a highly useful approach.1<\/sup>\u00a0Moreover, she also examines a number of important socialist thinkers on women\u2019s issues including photographs with short summaries of their lives.\u00a0 The thinkers she outlines are Frederick Engels, August Bebel, George Bernard Shaw, French utopian Flora Tristan, German Social Democrats, Lily Braun, Clara Zetkin, and Rosa Luxemburg as well as Bolsheviks such as Nadezhda Krupskaya, Alexandra Kollontai, and Inessa Armand.\u00a0 Included also are Rumanian politician Ana Pauker, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, as well as Angela Davis and Bulgarian partisan Ejena Lagadinova.<\/p>\n

Important to her analysis is how many policies facilitated the economic strengthening of women\u2019s positions.\u00a0 The early Soviet republic was the first country in Europe to legalise abortion, it also ended the legal disabilities created by legitimacy and illegitimacy at birth, established civil marriage, made homosexuality legal, made divorce easier, criminalised rape within marriage as well as promoting female suffrage permitting women to stand for the Constituent Assembly. Furthermore, various attempts at cr\u00e8ches, nursery schools, adult education, methods of birth control and sex education, as well as different collective methods of living and child care, especially for orphans were attempted.\u00a0 Socialising domestic work by creating public laundries and cafeterias were all tried too.\u00a0 This is powerfully stated in the 1919 of the Programme Communist Party.\u00a0 Sadly these were often harmed by the need to divert resources to counter external military interventions, famines, people displacement and economic sanctions that were intended to strangle the worker\u2019s state.<\/p>\n

Ghodsee\u2019s book, like many others, concentrates on the personality and writings of Alexandra Kollontai especially on linking her beliefs on a new sexual morality to the reform programme.\u00a0 By focussing on \u201ccelebrities,\u201d common in many writings, tends to underplay the organised, institutional importance of Zhenotdel, the Women\u2019s department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, in creating these changes.\u00a0 It was these institutional structures that mobilised many thousands of women to promote their own economic and social emancipation.\u00a0 There is no mention of the importance of the All-Russia Congress of Working Women in 1918 attended by over a thousand women.\u00a0 Or Inessa Armand\u2019s editorship of Communist Woman<\/em> (Kommunitska<\/em>).\u00a0 As probably the prime driver of the changes, the massive resource difficulties it experienced deserve more mention.\u00a0 It ignores the propaganda trains and ships sent across Russia and the Soviet Union and that it was a major force in creating 125,000 literacy schools.<\/p>\n

The material forces that weakened Soviet aspirations for women\u2019s liberation were the main inhibiting pressure against women\u2019s emancipation.\u00a0 But attempts at conciliating with hostile external forces as well as attempts to emulate bourgeois and petty bourgeois lifestyles within the ruling stratum also helped undermine the revolution\u2019s achievements from within.\u00a0 As Trotsky observed, \u201cguided by its conservative instinct, the bureaucracy has taken alarm at the \u2018disintegration\u2019 of the family.\u00a0 It began singing panegyrics to the family supper and the family laundry, that is, the household slavery of woman.\u00a0 To cap it all, the bureaucracy has restored criminal punishment for abortions, officially returning women to the status of pack animals.\u00a0In complete contradiction with ABC of communism, the ruling caste has thus restored the most reactionary and benighted nucleus of the class system, i.e. the petty bourgeois family.\u201d2<\/sup><\/p>\n

ZHENOTDEL<\/p>\n

Zhenotdel was abolished in 1930, abortion rights were removed in 1936, though they were restored in 1955.\u00a0 In a critical response to the view in the re-organisation of Zhenotdel into the main party structures, A. Artiukhina, \u201cDuring recent years, a large group of activists has grown in the city and countryside.\u00a0 In soviets alone 300,000 women are working.\u00a0 This army of activists has not developed spontaneously.\u00a0Every woman in the soviets passed through the preparatory school of delegates\u2019 meetings, through the school of special work among peasant and working class women.\u00a0 We now have in excess of 200,000 women in the party i.e. nearly 13\u00bdper cent of the party as a whole.\u00a0 \u2026 [T]hey were also involved in the Zhenotdel and delegates\u2019 meetings. This can also be said of women activists in the trade-union, any notion that Zhenotdel somehow interfered in \u2018serious\u2019 work must be nipped in the bud.\u201d3<\/sup><\/p>\n

The onset of the Second Five Year Plan (1932-1933), massively increased women\u2019s participation in labour.\u00a0It became ever more necessary to introduce cr\u00e8ches, kindergartens child care facilities as well as laundries and much else.\u00a0 After 1945, across eastern Europe, it is debatable how widely these facilities extended and how many women were affected.\u00a0 Ghodsee does tend to generalise these services\u2019 availability; though it is doubtful that they reached the majority of the female population in some countries, especially in rural areas.\u00a0 But with growing urbanisation the pressures for these facilities increased.\u00a0 In East Germany with an historical legacy of a women\u2019s movement they began to be recognised as essential rights.\u00a0 \u201cBecause the state required girls\u2019 education and compelled women into the labour force, their fathers and husbands couldn\u2019t force them to stay home.\u00a0 Women seized these opportunities for education and employment.\u201d (p.38) Countries like Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, East Germany and Yugoslavia invested state funds to increase nursery schools and kindergartens. This was also allied to expanded maternity leave.<\/p>\n

\u201cCAREWORK SHOULD BE SOCIALISED\u201d<\/p>\n

Capitalism, with its competitive labour market, always puts at a disadvantage anyone who has care responsibilities especially for children, elderly relatives or disabled family members.\u00a0This is because it is assumed to undermine economic availability due to its unpredictable nature in the personal or private sphere.\u00a0 It is mainly women who care.\u00a0 \u201cThe reason I think the book is controversial, \u201c says Dr Ghodsee, \u201cis the idea that carework should be socialised.\u201d4<\/sup>\u00a0\u00a0 This is an abomination to the capitalist class who see their wealth being eroded by such necessary costs while they can get women\u2019s labour for free by the bourgeois family.\u00a0 Ghodsee cites former US President Richard Nixon\u2019s reason for vetoing the Comprehensive Child Development Act in 1971, \u201cFor the Federal government to plunge headlong financially into supporting child development would commit the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family centred approach.\u201d(pp. 71-72)\u00a0 Interestingly, the family centred approach disappears for whole chunks of the US middle class who send their children to that peculiar US institution the Summer Camp.\u00a0 In the UK the public school system i.e. private elite schools exist with many children only seeing their parents between term, and many others even more rarely than that.<\/p>\n

One of the strangest arguments made against comprehensive childcare is that it is a government conspiracy to indoctrinate children.\u00a0 Shortly after the Cuban revolution children were flown out of the island because their parents were told their children were going to be nationalised.\u00a0 The Catholic Church was one of the organisers of what was known as Operation Pedro Pan.\u00a0 Similar style panics can be found to have occurred after the Bolshevik revolution and after the Second World War in Eastern Europe.\u00a0 Trotsky answered this question in a theoretical manner, \u201cThe education of children has always and everywhere been connected with propaganda. \u2026 The only difference is that in bourgeois countries it is a question of injecting into the child respect for old institutions and ideas which are taken for granted.\u00a0 In the USSR it is a question of new ideas, and therefore the propaganda leaps to the eye.\u00a0\u2018Propaganda,\u2019 in the evil sense of the word, is the name that people give to the defence and spread of such ideas as do not please them.\u201d5<\/sup>\u00a0 But, for most children, public childcare is where they will play, sing, dance and cry like the other children have done everywhere throughout history.<\/p>\n

Although various attempts were made across Eastern Europe to encourage men to take greater responsibility in housework, these mainly influenced the young.\u00a0 But they were not entirely ineffective. Women\u2019s strengthened economic position within the labour force produced a number of surprising \u00a0results. The labour market still had gender segregated areas of employment.\u00a0 Women were in the majority in many professional careers such as medicine, teaching and law, but these became \u201cdevalued\u201d sectors where a doctor would only receive two-thirds of the wages of a skilled factory or engineering worker.\u00a0Nevertheless, more women went into traditionally male jobs like engineering and construction than could be found in the USA or Western Europe.<\/p>\n

The institutional protections that many women had achieved such as education, greater employment opportunities, social support as carers and much else did increase the economic independence for women.\u00a0 This increased their power in the social sphere also.\u00a0 Women were in some countries more able to establish new households free from abusive or failed relationships.\u00a0 Professor Ingrid Sharp, an East German sexologist, is quoted observing that, \u201cThe fact that women instigated the majority of divorce proceedings was heralded as a sign of their emancipation.\u00a0 Unlike in the West, women were not forced by economic dependence to remain in marriages they no longer enjoyed.\u201d (pp. 133-134)\u00a0 Ghodsee points out that West German women required their husband\u2019s consent to work outside the home until 1957 and that family law stated their work outside the home should not interfere with their domestic responsibilities until 1977. (p. 66)<\/p>\n

THE GREAT ORGASM WAR<\/p>\n

These economic gains changed behaviour in the sexual arena too.\u00a0 Sharp called the differences in sexual responses between East and West German women The Great Orgasm War.\u00a0 \u201cHard statistics apparently confirmed the greater sexual responsiveness of Eastern women.\u00a0A survey \u2026 reported that eighty per cent of Eastern women always experienced orgasm, compared to sixty three per cent of women in the West.\u201d(p136)\u00a0 Similar or analogous studies across much of Eastern Europe returned like findings.\u00a0 The freeing of sexual relations from financial calculation appears to have allowed a more spontaneous enjoyment for both men and women.<\/p>\n

Ghodsee occasionally writes about greater birth control in countries such as Bulgaria and East Germany.\u00a0However, it is unclear exactly what she is writing about.\u00a0 In the Soviet Union, women never had oral contraception, instead condoms for men could be found but for women abortion served as the primary method.\u00a0 Women could frequently have had half-a-dozen terminations with each operation increasing the risk of infertility.\u00a0 I am unaware if other methods of contraception were available in the Soviet Union or overall availability across other Eastern European countries.<\/p>\n

There was limited sex education in the east, though it may be fair to add this was also true for the west where it was regularly subjected to religiously based obstruction.\u00a0 There was no attempt to promote it as a self-actualising part of life.\u00a0 Homosexuality, was begrudgingly legal, but was frowned upon.\u00a0 There was no attempt to appreciate or celebrate a gay lifestyle.\u00a0Shortages always dominated Soviet and Eastern European lifestyles.\u00a0 Initially essential items were restricted but as the fifties and sixties passed, it was various \u201cluxuries\u201d and life\u2019s pleasures that were difficult to obtain.\u00a0Little thought was often given to popular wishes for fashionable, sexy clothing, sex toys, films and literature. \u00a0It was hardly surprising that some commentators placed the responsibility for the fall of the Berlin Wall on the US TV show Baywatch!\u00a0 Yet the \u201cexperiences of some of the state socialist countries in Eastern Europe suggests that there was something different about sexual relations under socialism, and that at least one significant factor is the social supports put in place to promote women\u2019s economic independence. \u2026 In addition, to varying degrees, socialist states promoted the idea that sexuality should be disentangled from economic exchange.\u201d (p. 148)<\/p>\n

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THE BUYING AND SELLING OF CARESSES<\/p>\n

The aspirational motives of socialist thinkers created an enticing framework for the future of women, with their relationships with men and children.\u00a0 \u201cThe woman of the future society is socially and economically independent, she is free and on par with man and mistress of her destiny,\u201d wrote August Bebel in Women and Socialism\u00a0<\/em>in 1910 expressing the aspirations of all communists.\u00a0 Further adding, \u201cThe sexual act must not be seen as something shameful or sinful but as something which natural as the other needs of [a] healthy organism such as hunger or thirst.\u00a0 Such phenomena cannot be judged as moral or immoral.\u201d\u00a0 Or as Alexandra Kollontai phrased it, \u201cAs regards sexual relations, communist morality demands first of all an end to all relations based on a financial or other economic considerations.\u00a0 The buying and selling of caresses destroys the sense of equality between the sexes and thus undermines the basis of solidarity without which communist society cannot exist.\u201d (p. 118)<\/p>\n

Despite the media driven claims of enormous improvements in the quality of life for inhabitants of the former Eastern Bloc, Ghodesee reports differently.\u00a0 At a book event she pointed out that, \u201c[in a] project called Social Impacts of Transition \u2026 we actually see quite clearly when we look at a variety of indicators of not only economic but also demographic and in terms of poverty rates, a lot of countries in Eastern Europe have not achieved the standards of living in 2018 that they had in 1990 when communism collapsed.\u00a0 This is a pretty well-kept secret but it\u2019s pretty clear if you look at the data.\u201d6<\/sup><\/p>\n

However, the changes have brought lots of unintended consequences.\u00a0 East German women were put out of work in massive numbers.\u00a0 Many, however, when they travelled to the West they brought with them heightened expectations.\u00a0 They thought it was normal to leave their children in cr\u00e8ches and kindergartens.\u00a0 The effect on women from the former west was impressive as one interviewee records in the book, \u201cThank God for those east German women. \u2026 [W]hen the east German women came over they were used to having cr\u00e8ches and kindergartens, and they demanded them.\u201d (p70)<\/p>\n

Although the writer\u2019s aspirations are that policies beneficial to women can and should be adopted regardless of their origins in eastern or northern Europe, she fails to adequately explain why the level of hostility to basic childcare, ending sex discrimination, women\u2019s liberation and much else is so vitriolic in capitalism.\u00a0Is a stable synthesis of acceptable policies ever possible under capitalism?\u00a0 While it is unlikely that eastern Europe will ever return to modern day versions of the murderous regime of Joseph Stalin, it will be necessary for their new capitalist classes to find ever more reactionary ideologies and institutions to keep them in the privileges for which they feel now entitled by stifling women\u2019s push for economic independence.\u00a0 Yet these, as well as demands for better sexual expression, have an unstoppable momentum that will increasingly conflict with attempts at imposing reaction as seen recently by women\u2019s protests at restricting abortion rights in Poland.\u00a0 The same is also true for the US and western and northern Europe.<\/p>\n

This book is a successful attempt at bringing together the political the economic, the social and the sexual as well as chronicling the resilience of women in fighting for their emancipation across the last century.<\/p>\n

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Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism\u00a0and other Arguments for Economic Independence<\/em> <\/strong>by Dr Kristen R. Ghodsee ( Vintage Books, paperback, June, 2019)<\/strong><\/p>\n

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References<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Get Bookish, Dual Review: Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism<\/em> with https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=_5rf9SO12LA<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. \u201cDoes the Soviet Government Still Follow the Principles Adopted Twenty Years Ago\u201d in The Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937-38)<\/em> p. 129.<\/li>\n
  3. Arktiukhina, To The Highest Level, January 18th<\/sup>, 1930, Seventeen Moments in Soviet History. Abolition of Zhenotdel<\/em>. http:\/\/soviethistory.msu.edu\/1929-2\/new-way-of-life\/new-way-of-life-texts\/9210-2\/<\/a><\/li>\n
  4. Kristen R. Ghodsee discusses her book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism<\/em>, at Politics and Prose on 11\/15\/2018 on Youtube, https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=WrdisOZdsTo<\/a><\/li>\n
  5. \u201cIs Soviet Russia Fit to Recognise? Liberty Magazine, January 14th<\/sup>, 1933, cited in Women and the Family, Leon Trotsky Pathfinder Press, 1970.<\/li>\n
  6. Kristen R. Ghodsee discusses her book, “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism”, at Politics and Prose on 11\/15\/2018 on Youtube, https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=WrdisOZdsTo<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

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    also see:-<\/p>\n

    http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/2012\/08\/05\/is-communism-possible\/<\/p>\n

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    DEBATING THE POSSIBILITY OF COMMUNISM<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n