WHAT HAS SOCIALISM EVER
DONE FOR WOMEN?
KRISTEN R. GHODSEE & JULIA MEAD

On March 9, 2018, the Financial Times — not exactly a bastion of
pro-socialist sentiment — had some nice things to say about
Communism. In a special report on “Women in Technology,” FT discussed the reasons for large percentages of women in the tech sectors of
Bulgaria and Romania.¹ When examining the European data, it turned
out that eight of the ten countries with the highest percentages ofwomen working in technology were former state-socialist countries
where “the Soviet legacy” of promoting women in math, science, andengineering had created a social environment conducive to women’s
success in these fields, even three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Back in 2015, an Organisation for Economic Co-operation andDevelopment (OECD ) health report revealed that six of the top ten
countries with the highest percentage of female doctors were also on
the other side of the former Iron Curtain.² An astounding three-fourths
1 Kerin Hope, “Bulgaria builds on legacy of female engineering elite,” Financial Times,
March 9, 2018.
2

OECD , Health at a Glance 2015: oecd Indicators (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2015), 83,

101

CATALYST • VOL 2 • №2

of all doctors in Estonia were women, compared to only one-third of
the doctors in the United States. Yet another report from The United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO )found that, as compared to Western Europe, Eastern European countries had much higher percentages of women working in the fields ofscientific research and development.³ As recently as 2012, two-thirdsof judges in Russia were women.⁴ In all cases, the explanation for the
disparity was the long history of state-socialist commitments to women’s education and employment. Despite decades of feminist activism
in the West, women in the former socialist countries still enjoy greater

GHODSEE & MEAD

access to jobs in prestigious economic sectors.
Despite the data, it’s still hard to have a conversation about whatsocialism might have gotten right. Two 2017 New York Times op-eds suggesting that twentieth-century Communism had done some good things
for women were met with howls of outrage from Fox News and the troll
armies of the alt-right.⁵ The historical memory of twentieth-century
state socialism is so contested that many leftists — anarchists and democratic socialists alike — try to run from it, lest they look like apologists
for Soviet horrors.⁶ Feminists, too, dismiss the achievements of womenin the former Eastern Bloc because they were imposed from the top
down and within a context of political autocracy.⁷ More importantly,
state-socialist women rejected the basic premise of Western liberal
http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/health_glance-2015-en.
3 UNESCO , “Women in Science,” UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Fact Sheet No. 43,
March, 2017.
4 Ekaterina Ivanova, “Gender Imbalance in Russian Judiciary: Feminization of Profession,” Journal of Social Policy Studies 13 (2015): 579-594.
5 Kristen Ghodsee, “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism,” New YorkTimes, August 12, 2017; Helen Gao, “How Did Women Fare in China’s Communist
Revolution?” New York Times, September 25, 2017.
6 Kristen Ghodsee and Scott Sehon, “Anti-anti-communism,” Aeon, March 22, 2018.
7 Nanette Funk, “A very tangled knot: Official state socialist women’s organizations,
women’s agency and feminism in Eastern European state socialism,” European
Journal of Women’s Studies 21 no. 4 (November 2014): 344-360; Kristen Ghodsee, “Untangling the knot: A response to Nanette Funk,” European Journal of Women’s Studies
22 no. 2 (May 2015): 248-252.
102

WHAT HAS SOCIALISM EVER DONE FOR WOMEN?

feminism: men and women should be treated the same. Socialists always
believed that men and women were equal, but different, and that thestate had a strong role to play in ensuring that women’s reproductive
biology did not disadvantage them.
During the early years of the Cold War, American leaders considered state-socialist promotion of women into the formal labor force
evidence of Communism’s mutation of God-given gender roles andits “unnatural” (and therefore evil) designs on the destruction of thefamily. American women might have been mobilized into production during World War II, but as the historian Elaine Tyler May has
shown, they were shoved back into the kitchen as soon as the soldiers
returned.⁸ In contrast, Russia lost nearly 2 percent of its population in

and infrastructure. They couldn’t afford to push women back into the
kitchen.¹⁰ War deaths produced labor shortages that created opportunities for women, which did not disappear after the demographic
imbalances were corrected. The preservation of women’s formal labor
force participation — even in the face of precipitous declines in thebirth rate — stemmed partially from an ideological commitment towomen’s emancipation rooted in the core theories of socialism andto women’s own growing demands for economic independence frommen. For example, in the late 1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet
leaders considered ways to reduce women’s double burden of formal
employment and family responsibilities. Researchers asked women
8 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (NewYork: Basic Books, 1988).
9 Nadège Mougel, “World War I Casualties,” REPERES, 2011; Elizabeth Brainerd,“Uncounted Costs of World War II: The Effects of Changing Sex Ratios on Marriage
and Fertility of Russian Women,” National Council for Eurasian and East European
Research, 2007.
10 “World War II Casualties,” REPERES, 2011, trans. Julie Gratz.
103

GHODSEE & MEAD

World War I and the Soviet Union lost a whopping 14 percent in WorldWar II.⁹ The other countries of Eastern Europe also lost hundreds ofthousands of their citizens in the Second World War (Poland topped
five million casualties) and sustained massive destruction to property

CATALYST • VOL 2 • №2

in the USSR if they would stay home if their husbands could afford to
support them; a full 80 percent said they preferred to work.¹¹
The diverging policies of the two Germanys after 1949 also demonstrates how the East and West treated their women differently after
the war. The West Germans returned to the traditional breadwinner/housewife model of the nuclear family (despite male labor shortages)
whereas the East Germans required the formal employment of womento undermine the persistence of the patriarchal family.¹² This commitment to women’s education and professional development characterized
all socialist regimes to varying degrees. They also attempted to socialize

GHODSEE & MEAD

women’s domestic work through the building of communal cafeterias,
laundries, mending cooperatives, and childcare facilities. Moreover,Communist parties introduced radical revisions to family law: ensuring
the equality of men and women, liberalizing divorce, equalizing thetreatment of legitimate and illegitimate children, and (in most, but notall, countries) guaranteeing women’s reproductive rights.¹³
Did the state-socialist countries live up to their promises regarding
women’s emancipation? Did women in Eastern Europe enjoy greaterlevels of emancipation compared to their counterparts in the West?
These are the questions we discuss in this brief overview of the situation of women in the state-socialist countries of Eastern Europe before
1989. Despite the authoritarian nature of these regimes, we believethat those concerned with promoting gender equity can learn fromthe experiences of Eastern Europe, because their top-down solutions(while never living up to all of their promises) did promote social andcultural changes that allowed women to better balance their personal

11 Francine Du Plessix Gray, Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope (New York: Anchor
Books, 1990), 38.
12 Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Donna Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
13 Kristen Ghodsee, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (New York: Nation Books, 2018).
104

WHAT HAS SOCIALISM EVER DONE FOR WOMEN?

and professional lives compared to their counterparts in the advanced
capitalist West.
HOW DO W E KNOW WH AT WE KNOW?

Across Eastern Europe today, a growing cohort of historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and gender-studies scholars are exploring how
state socialism liberated women, trying to nuance the monolithic
bleak image Westerners have of life behind the Iron Curtain.¹⁴ Few ofthese scholars question that the socialist countries had some “women-friendly” policies that improved the material conditions of ordinary
people’s lives. Instead, the debate focuses on the regimes’ failure to chal-the long run, detrimental because they undermined the emergence ofgrassroots women’s movements. In her 2015 article “How We Survived
Post-Communism (and Didn’t Laugh),” Slavenka Drakulić explains:
Emancipation from above — as I call it — was the main difference
between the lives of women under communism and those of women inwestern democracies. Emancipatory law was built into the communist
legal system, guaranteeing to women all the basic rights — from voting
to property ownership, from education to divorce, from equal pay for
equal work to the right to control their bodies …. The formal equality ofwomen in the communist world was observed mostly in public life andin institutions. The private sphere, on the other hand, was dominatedby male chauvinism. This meant a lot of unreported domestic violence,
14 “Forum: Is ‘Communist Feminism’ a Contradictio in Terminus?), Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender
History 1, no. 1 (2007); and “Ten Years After: Communism and Feminism Revisited”
Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History 10, no. 11 (2016).
105

GHODSEE & MEAD

lenge patriarchal authority in the home and the lack of state support for
women’s autonomy outside of their roles as mothers. Western scholars
and some Eastern European feminists have also criticized these policies
as a kind of “emancipation from above” that proved ineffective and, inCATALYST • VOL 2 • №2

for example. It also meant that men usually had no obligations at home,which left women with less time for themselves. It was not only the lackof freedom — and time — that prevented women fighting for changes
but, more importantly, a lack of belief that change was necessary.
Someone else up there was in charge of thinking about that for you.
And because change came from the powers that be, women were madeto believe there was no need for change or room for improvement.¹⁵

Socialist states may not have fully delivered on their promises to women,
and Eastern European women struggled under the double burden of

GHODSEE & MEAD

formal employment and domestic labor. But there were real gains. The
problem is how to document them in a measured way.
We can start by comparing legal codes. On paper, state-socialist
countries look much better than Western countries on women’s issues
and family entitlements for much of the Cold War. The Soviet Union
established full legal equality for women in 1917 whereas the UnitedStates still has not ratified the Equal Rights Amendment to the constitution.¹⁶ Similarly, almost every other country in the world has ratified
the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms ofDiscrimination Against Women (CEDAW ), often called the women’sbill of rights. The United States joins Iran, Palau, Somalia, Sudan, andTonga as a member of the handful of nations that have not yet ratified
a treaty that took effect in 1981.¹⁷ The Bulgarian constitution actually
guaranteed Bulgarian mothers the right to maternity leaves. Of course,
there is often a vast chasm between de jure and de facto equality. Laws
mean little if they are not enforced.
As a second tactic, we can examine the archival records of state-socialist women’s committees — organs of the state responsible for

15 Slavenka Drakulić, “How We Survived Post-Communism (and Didn’t Laugh),” Eurozine.com, June 5, 2015/
16 Editorial Board, “Illinois should ratify the Equal Rights Amendment,” Chicago Tribune, April 13, 2018.
17 Lisa Baldez, “U.S. drops the ball on women’s rights,” CNN.com, March 8, 2013.
106

WHAT HAS SOCIALISM EVER DONE FOR WOMEN?

women’s political issues — and the minutes of Politburo meetings tosearch for evidence that women’s rights were being promoted in thehighest levels of government. This is the tactic taken by the historian
Wang Zheng in her excellent study of the All-China Women’s Federation.¹⁸ But even if one can get access to all of the relevant archives, there
remains the problem of intention: Did Communist leaders really careabout women’s lives? Or did they merely want to use women to further
state interests like increasing the birth rate or making the workforce moreproductive? Transcripts of mere words cannot tell us about intentions.
Interviews with women who grew up under state socialism in Eastern
Europe have also provided complex accounts of the past. Of course, oral
history has many known methodological problems including nostalgiaof the past, they often make their assessment in direct comparison with
their situation in the present. In Ghodsee’s extensive research in post-socialist Bulgaria, she has found that those who would count themselves
as among the “losers” of the political and economic changes (thosesocially marginalized due to ethnicity, age, class, or gender) are most
likely to provide positive reports of the social security and economic
stability of the pre-1989 era.¹⁹ Alternatively, those who have benefitted
the most from the changes, especially the new urban elites, are most
likely to share their memories of the horrors of Communism. Indeed, as
Liviu Chelcea and Oana Druţa have argued, post-socialist elites deploy
a type of “zombie socialism” to prevent popular resistance to the violence and misery of contemporary klepto-capitalism:

18 Wang Zheng, Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1964 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).
19 Kristen Ghodsee, “Red Nostalgia? Communism, Women’s Emancipation, andEconomic Transformation in Bulgaria,” L’Homme: Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 15, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 23-36.
107

GHODSEE & MEAD

for lost youth and personal (and often subconscious) assumptions of what
interview subjects think their interviewers want to hear. An Americaninterviewer might get a different answer than a local interlocutor, forinstance. And when Eastern European women describe positive aspects

CATALYST • VOL 2 • №2

The obsessive references to the socialist past have had constitutive
powers, creating a particularly strong version of neoliberalism. Zombie
socialism arguments have become a convenient and strategic ideological device for furthering social dumping, increasing inequalities, andreducing support for redistributive policies. In this sense, in its post1989 negation, socialism continues to be extremely relevant: the usageof spectral and mythological representations of socialism has, for thewinners of transition, the capacity to preempt social justice claims andto structure political relations in the allocation of wealth.²⁰

GHODSEE & MEAD

In other words, negative tales of life before 1989 are used to justify
current economic outcomes, which the “winners” of transition areloathe to change, lest they lose their newfound wealth and privilege.
A similar methodological problem haunts public-opinion surveys
about the past. For example, a 2013 poll of 1,055 adult Romanians foundthat only a third reported that their lives were worse before 1989: 44
percent said their lives were better, and 16 percent said there was nochange. These results were gendered in fascinating ways: 47 percent
of women believed that state socialism was better for their country,
but only 42 percent of men reported the same. Similarly, whereas 36
percent of men claimed that their lives were worse before 1989, only
31 percent of women believed that their personal life was worse off
under Communism than under democracy.²¹ Romania, ruled by the
dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, was once one of the most brutal regimes
in Eastern Europe, but, today, it is one of the poorest countries in the
EU . It is difficult to tease out whether respondents remember their lives
under socialism in a more positive light because their lives are so hard
now. At the end of the day, oral histories and public-opinion surveys
about the past — whether positive or negative — are difficult to use as
20 Liviu Chelcea and Oana Druţa, “Zombie socialism and the rise of neoliberalism inpost-socialist Central and Eastern Europe,” Eurasian Geography and Economics 57, no.
4-5, (2016): 521-544.
21 INSCOP Research, “Barometrul,” November 2013, http://www.inscop.ro/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/INSCOP-noiembrie-IS TORIE.pdf.
108WHAT HAS SOCIALISM EVER DONE FOR WOMEN?

definitive sources of truth on their own.
One final strategy is to review the scholarship that was produced
before 1989 — both by researchers in the Eastern Bloc countries andby Western academics interested in learning from (or discrediting)the purported achievements of women under state socialism. Both ofthese possible avenues have their own drawbacks; the Eastern Bloc
countries were more likely to exaggerate their achievements and playdown their shortcomings whereas the Western scholars probably did
the reverse. But reading between the lines of these sources might allow
us a glimpse of the truth, particularly if we combine a critical reading of
this scholarship with other evidence gleaned from legal codes, archival
sources, oral histories, and public-opinion surveys.

All women lived under authoritarian regimes and, to a greater or lesser
extent depending on the year and the country, faced the realities ofconsumer shortages, travel restrictions, curtailed political freedoms,
and the caprices of the domestic secret police. But despite these very
real downsides, state-socialist governments supported women’s rights
in ways that dramatically improved the material conditions of hundredsof millions of women’s lives, giving them opportunities for personaladvancement and economic independence from men long before theWest caught up.
HISTOR ICAL RO OTS OF TH E WOMAN QUEST ION

Twentieth-century state-socialist regimes formulated their policies
on women’s emancipation based on three key texts: August Bebel’s
Woman and Socialism (1879), Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family,
Private Property, and the State (1884), and Lily Braun’s Die Frauenfrage(The Woman Question [1901]). From these texts, state socialists drew

109

GHODSEE & MEAD

Taking into account all of these thorny methodological issues, what
can we say about the realities of women’s lives under Communism?
Some things were good, some things were bad, and a lot of things
depended on who you were, when you grew up, and where you lived.

CATALYST • VOL 2 • №2

three core ideas: first, the institution of bourgeois monogamous marriage existed to preserve private property (men needed faithful wives
to produce legitimate heirs). This reduced women to chattel. Second,
women would only truly be free if they worked beside men in a socialist
society in which all workers shared the fruits of their labor throughcollective ownership of the means of production. Third, the state had
to support women as mothers, providing resources to help them combine their work and family lives. Although there was a vibrant feminist
movement across Europe and in the United States at this time, socialists
distinguished themselves from what they called “bourgeois feminists”

GHODSEE & MEAD

by insisting that mere legal equality was not enough. Rather than justtrying to win the right to vote, attend university, and enter certain professions, the socialists wanted the state to actively intervene on behalfof women. They feared “bourgeois” feminism would not help working
women and preferred to organize alongside men to radically reshapesociety for all workers, not just for upper-class women.
In theory, socialism would free women from patriarchal domination
by educating them and fully incorporating them into the paid labor force.
With their own professions, women would no longer have to marry formoney and rely on men for their every need. Braun built on the ideas
of Bebel and Engels by attending to women’s special needs as mothers.
She argued that since motherhood was a service to society as a whole,
the state should compensate women for their child-rearing labors.
Ideally, this would enable women to be both mothers and workers.
Much of the state-socialist program for women’s emancipation was set
down in Copenhagen at the second International Socialist Women’s
Conference in August 1910.
The Bolsheviks tried to enact some of the ideas of these socialist
theorists. In December 1917, the new Soviet government passed two
sweeping decrees replacing church marriage with civil marriage andliberalizing divorce. In October 1918, the Soviets passed a new family
law that undid millennia of patriarchal and ecclesiastical authority over
women’s lives. The new “Code of Laws concerning the Civil Registration

110

WHAT HAS SOCIALISM EVER DONE FOR WOMEN?

of Deaths, Births and Marriages” rejected legal and traditional practices
that made women the property and dependents of their fathers or husbands. The Church lost its control over marriage and divorce. This codeelevated women to the juridical equals of men, allowing married women
to gain complete control over their own wages and property. The Soviet
Union also abolished the legal category of illegitimacy so that all children
were considered equal.²² In those heady days after the Revolution, theBolsheviks believed that they could instigate the withering away of the
traditional family with a handful of radical administrative decrees.²³
But Soviet leaders, especially Alexandra Kollontai, the Commissarof Social Welfare, understood that even if women worked outside of
the home, their domestic duties did not disappear. To support women’s

terms with men, pursuing their education, careers, and personal relationships as they wished. The Eighth Congress of the Communist Party
adopted a resolution to increase its work among women in 1919.²⁴ Thatsame year, Kollontai helped to establish the Zhenotdel, a special women’s section within the Central Committee of the Communist Party.²⁵
Then, in 1920, the Soviet Union became the first European country tolegalize abortion on demand during the first trimester.²⁶22 “Code of Laws concerning the Civil Registration of Deaths, Births and Marriages – October 17, 1918,” (English translation), http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/thenew-woman/the-new-woman-texts/code-of-laws-concerning-the-civil-registrationof-deaths-births-and-marriages/.
23 Wendy Goldman, Women, The State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy & Social
Life, 1917-1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
24 Beatrice Brodsky Farnsworth, “Bolshevism, The Woman Question, and Aleksandra Kollontai.” The American Historical Review 81 no. 2 (April 1976): 292-316, 296.
25 Elizabeth Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary
Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
26 Alexandre Avdeev, Alain Blum, and Irina Troitskaya, “The History of Abortion
Statistics in Russia and the USSR from 1990 to 1991” Population 7 (1995): 452.
111

GHODSEE & MEAD

emancipation, the state began to build a vast network of communally
run laundries, cafeterias, clothes-mending cooperatives, and children’s homes. The idea was that once liberated from the soul-crushing
drudgery of housework, women would enter the public sphere on equal

CATALYST • VOL 2 • №2

Looking back from our perch in the twenty-first century, it is hard tounderstand how radical these legislative reforms were in the late 1910s
and 1920s. In terms of women’s rights, they were unprecedented; nocountry in the world had such emancipatory policies toward women.
Unfortunately, this early utopian vision of abolishing the family andliberating women proved unrealistic. The fledgling Soviet state — trying
to cope with years of war, internal conflict, and famine — lacked theresources to pay for the socialization of all of the work women used
to do in the home for free. Public laundries, canteens, and childcare
facilities proved too expensive for the floundering Soviet economy. But

GHODSEE & MEAD

more importantly, the provisions of the 1918 family law hurt, rather
than helped, many Russian women.
Working women did not earn enough to support their families
without a male breadwinner. Liberalized divorce laws meant many
men abandoned women when they got pregnant, and the alimony laws
proved difficult to enforce. Sex outside of marriage led to hundreds ofthousands of unwanted children. The state lacked resources to care forthese red orphans, which produced armies of homeless street urchinsin the major cities. The 1920 liberalization of abortion allowed women tocontrol their fertility, but then precipitated a massive plunge in the birthrate. As was well documented by the historian Wendy Goldman, the hasty
attempt to abolish the family ultimately caused the suffering of millions.
By 1926, many women, especially those in rural areas, clamored for the
return of the old laws. The provisions of the original 1918 family code
were slowly reversed. Stalin abolished most of them altogether in 1936.²⁷
BEH IN D TH E I RON C URTA I N

The early failures of Soviet women’s emancipation and Stalin’s return to
the traditional nuclear family have colored many accounts of women’s
rights under state socialism in Eastern Europe. But labor shortages and

27 Goldman, Women, The State and Revolution.
112

WHAT HAS SOCIALISM EVER DONE FOR WOMEN?

the infamous Five-Year Plans necessitated women’s participation in the
USSR’s workforce, so Stalin remained committed to women’s education and employment even as he outlawed abortion and discouraged
divorce. The historian Anna Krylova has traced the slow integration ofSoviet women into the military and the emergence of new egalitarian
ideals of femininity throughout the 1930s.²⁸ For the most part, however,the Soviet government never lived up to its commitment to socialize
domestic work. Even after Stalin’s death when the government re-liberalized abortion, Soviet women were still being encouraged to havechildren and labored under a heavy double burden, best captured by
Natalya Baranskaya in her controversial novella A Week Like Any Other.²⁹
The situation was slightly better in the countries of Eastern Europe,

relative development meant that postwar Eastern Bloc countries had
more resources to enforce their first laws establishing equality of thesexes and the means to promote women’s education and employment.
Of course, there was a lot of variety among these countries —Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland were more urban and developed thanthe mostly rural nations of Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia — butthey all instituted some version of the socialist program for women’semancipation laid out in Copenhagen back in 1910 and tested in theearly years of the Soviet Union.
These policies led to a rapid increase in the percentage of women
working outside of the home across the socialist bloc. In 1950, thefemale share of the total labor force was 51.8 percent in the Soviet
Union and 40.9 percent in Eastern Europe compared to 28.3 percent
28 Anna Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front,(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
29 Natalya Baranskaya and Emily Lehrman, “Week Like Any Other,” Massachusetts
Review 15, no. 4 (Autumn 1974): 657-703.
113

GHODSEE & MEAD

which started on their paths to state socialism after World War II.
Although devastated by war, most of the countries of Eastern Europe
were more industrialized in 1945 than Russia had been in 1917, when
it had a largely feudal economy composed of illiterate peasants. TheirCATALYST • VOL 2 • №2

in North America and 29.6 percent in Western Europe. A quarter ofa century later, women made up 49.7 percent of the Soviet Union’s
workforce and 43.7 percent of that in Eastern Europe compared to 37.4
percent in North America and 32.7 percent in Western Europe.³⁰ More
importantly, despite the many hardships, women in the Soviet Union
reported that they enjoyed their work. In a 1968 study of 421 Soviet
women, 58 percent of those surveyed reported that they were “veryhappy” with their work. When asked why they worked, most said thatthey wanted the extra income for their families, but they also reported
that they enjoyed the sociality and collectivity of working because it

GHODSEE & MEAD

gave them an opportunity to get out of the home and meet other people
on a daily basis. One-third of women found their work “interesting,”and 35 percent claimed that they wanted “to feel useful to society.”³¹
Doubters may suggest that Soviet citizens felt political pressure
to report that they loved their jobs under Communism, so it is worth
noting that this finding was replicated in a survey of former Soviet
citizens who willingly immigrated to the United States. In the study,“Politics, Work, and Daily Life in the USSR: A Survey of Former Soviet
Citizens,” James R. Millar and his team interviewed a random sample
of 2,793 men and women between the ages of twenty-one and seventy
who had emigrated to the United States between January 1, 1979 andApril 30, 1983 (from a total population of 33,618). The interviews (fundedwith monies from the Department of Defense, the CIA , and the State
Department) asked respondents a wide variety of questions to help
the US government better understand the quotidian experiences of
average Soviet citizens. The Americans were shocked by the high rates
of job satisfaction claimed by people who were otherwise dissatisfied
enough with their lives to flee their homeland. “Jobs were reported as
the most satisfying aspect of life in the Soviet Union,” Millar writes in
30 International Labor Organization, “Women in Economic Activity: A Global Statistical Survey (1950-2000),” A Joint Publication of the International Labor Organization
and INSTRAW, 1985.
31 Barbara Wolfe Jancar, Women Under Communism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 182.
114

WHAT HAS SOCIALISM EVER DONE FOR WOMEN?

1987, reflecting on the fact that 25.5 percent of his sample reported being“very satisfied” with their jobs and an additional 37.7 percent claimed
they were “somewhat satisfied.”³² This means that more than 63 percent
of former Soviets felt satisfaction with their previous working lives, afinding which was gendered in striking ways: “Most interesting of allis the very strong degree of women’s satisfaction with their jobs, andthis in the face of high male job satisfaction, too. Whatever the reason,
wage discrimination and job segregation, which have been shown toprevail in the USSR as elsewhere in the industrialized world, do notseem to have taken the satisfaction out of women’s jobs in the USSR.”³³
In her 1978 book, Women Under Communism, political scientist
Barbara Wolfe Jancar found evidence of similarly high levels of job

can stay home with the children the whole day. It’s so boring. And all
you have to talk to are your neighbors. If they work, there is no one.
Your friends are at work.”³⁴
Indeed, other surveys conducted across the region before 1989
confirmed the idea that even if their husbands could support them,
women wanted to work at least part time. The problem was that in many
countries, women were forced to work full time, and women’s income
was necessary to meet a family’s needs. Women were also concentrated
in sectors of the economy that weren’t paid as well as those dominatedby men. Men and women did receive equal wages if they held the same
positions, but women were often funneled into agriculture and lightindustry or concentrated in white-collar and service professions such

32 James R. Millar, ed. Politics, Work, and Daily Life: A Survey of Former Soviet Citizens(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 33, 45.
33 Millar, Politics, Work, and Daily Life, 51-52.
34 Barbara Wolfe Jancar, Women Under Communism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 182.
115

GHODSEE & MEAD

satisfaction in Eastern Europe. Jancar reported this comment from a
conversation she had with a teacher in Yugoslavia: “If you have a job,
you have security, your pension, your future. Then, if you get a divorce,
you know you will have something on which to live. Besides, no one

CATALYST • VOL 2 • №2

as law, medicine, accounting, and teaching. Men went into mining,
construction, engineering, and other physical or technical jobs more
highly esteemed in the planned economy. Finally, the state-socialist
policy of granting women extended maternity leaves — and the factthat mothers were almost always the ones to stay home when children
were too sick to attend school — meant that men were more likely to bepromoted into higher managerial and executive positions. Men were
only imagined as workers, not parents, but women were always seen
as both workers and mothers.³⁵
The circumstances of women’s employment varied from country to

GHODSEE & MEAD

country. And it is important to remember that wage disparities meantless in countries where basic needs were subsidized and there was little
to buy with disposable income. Although women were concentrated inless well-paid sectors of the economy, their jobs guaranteed them accessto housing, education, health care, paid vacations, kindergartens, andtheir own independent pension funds. Furthermore, in some countries
women could retire five years earlier than men in recognition of women’s
domestic labors. State-socialist leaders conducted countless surveys
showing the uneven distribution of housework and tried to convince
men to lend a hand. As early as the 1950s, the East German government
began encouraging men to take a more active role in the home,³⁶ and the
Bulgarian women’s committee attempted to reeducate men and bringup a younger generation of boys willing to help with domestic tasks.³⁷
But Politburo decisions and magazine articles couldn’t easily undo
entrenched gender roles, and women were so burdened by the dual
tasks of formal employment and housework that they began having
fewer children. Faced with the prospect of population decline (and35 Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender After Socialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
36 Herzog, Sex After Fascism.
37 Kristen Ghodsee, “Pressuring the Politburo: The Committee of the Bulgarian
Women’s Movement and State Socialist Feminism,” Slavic Review 73 no. 3, (Fall 2014):
538-562; Kristen Ghodsee, “Rethinking State Socialist Mass Women’s Organizations:
The Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement and the United Nations Decade116

WHAT HAS SOCIALISM EVER DONE FOR WOMEN?

accompanying labor shortage), most women’s committees pushed forthe expansion of socialized childcare, laundries, and cafeterias. The
idea was that if the state relieved women of some of their housework,
women would have the time and energy to raise more children (Romania
was an outlier here in that it also reversed a previously liberal abortionlaw). The success of socialization varied widely across Eastern Europe.
Urban dwellers were more likely to use public laundries and kindergartens than people who lived in the country, and all populations weresuspicious of the quality of the food served in public cafeterias. Then
there was the social expectation that mothers should cook for theirfamilies, an expectation that many women embraced. Even if groceries
were difficult to procure — one might have to go to four different shops

at home (contrary to Western stereotypes about the lack of household
appliances, 77 percent of homes in the Soviet cities of Leningrad andKostroma had washing machines in 1966).³⁸
Finally, there was the issue of childcare. State-socialist governments endeavored to create a kindergarten spot for every child, andsome countries got close to this goal. Crèches were available for babies
from ages one to three, but these were less popular. Fearing their children would receive inadequate attention in the crèche, many women
preferred to stay home while their children were so young. The timespent on maternity leave came with a job guarantee and counted aslabor service toward the accumulation of the woman’s pension (unlikein the United States where a woman who leaves the labor force to carefor children makes no contributions to her Social Security). The qualityof the state-provided childcare varied, but it was subsidized, widely
available, and utterly accepted as normal for mothers to leave theirfor Women, 1975–1985,” Journal of Women’s History 24 no. 4, (Winter 2012): 49-73.
38 Jancar, Women Under Communism, 50.
117

GHODSEE & MEAD

to get everything for a meal — women still enjoyed cooking and foundpride in the preparation of a fine dinner. Across the bloc, women also
complained about the service in the public laundries, and would only
bring their bedding in for washing, preferring to do their family clothes

CATALYST • VOL 2 • №2

children at kindergarten. One Romanian woman recalled:
My mother was not particularly interested in children and relied onstate provided daycare, which I attended starting at the age of two.
I remember zero indoctrination of any kind.
I remember excellent snacks and meals.
I remember dedicated staff and a very safe environment.
I remember a day long play environment, with arts & crafts &stories & outside play.
I remember naps in cribs/beds with fresh sheets and blankets …
(rather than US plastic mats on the floor).
I remember practicing folk dances and learning poems for biannual assemblies, etc. Then I went to elementary school where I also

GHODSEE & MEAD

remember zero indoctrination. True, I left at 9 just short of becoming apioneer, which I was really looking forward to. Then I came to freedom
in the United States, where I was required to stand up and recite thepledge of allegiance every day.39

Of course, not every child would report such a rosy memory of their kindergarten experience, but that is probably true everywhere in the world.
What is key here is that the socialist state committed itself to providing
universal, subsidized childcare for all working women and that it was
normal for children to attend. Women felt no social pressure to stay home.
State-socialist governments also actively encouraged women andgirls to study science and engineering. The Soviets were so successful
at identifying and training their brightest women in technical fields that
the United States felt compelled to do the same. After the 1957 launch of
Sputnik, the United States Congress passed the 1958 National Defense
Education Act (NDEA ), which specifically included funds for the encouragement of women’s education in math and science. In 1961, John F.
Kennedy established the first Presidential Commission on the Status
39 Personal communication from a listener of Doug Henwood’s radio show, “Behind
the News.” Email from Doug Henwood, August 20, 2017.
118

WHAT HAS SOCIALISM EVER DONE FOR WOMEN?

of Women, citing national security concerns; American leaders fearedthat the Reds were winning the space race because they had double
the brain power.⁴⁰ By 1970, 43 percent of Romanian students enrolled
in engineering institutes were women, as were 39 percent of all engineering students in the USSR and 27 percent of students in Bulgaria.
About one in five engineering students in Yugoslavia and Hungary were
women in that same year.⁴¹ In 1976, women earned only 3.4 percent ofbachelor’s degrees in engineering in the United States.⁴² Because of
their command economies, state-socialist countries could guarantee
full employment to all graduates in their fields of expertise (although
not always in the most desirable location). Nevertheless, it is probably
safe to say that there were more women employed in engineering in themost frequently mentioned by the women I interviewed. One of themost frequently expressed beliefs was that only under ‘socialism’ were
women able to work or be educated in significant proportions. Even
those who had lived and worked for a while in the West were of theconviction that socialism alone had liberated women.”⁴³The difference of American and Soviet women’s attitudes toward
professional life was best captured in a quote reported by the economist
Norton Dodge, who visited the USSR in 1955, 1962, and 1965 to examine
the role of women in the Soviet economy. At a conference on womenin the Soviet Union at Bryn Mawr College in May 1968, Dodge shared
40 John F. Kennedy, Executive Order 10980—Establishing the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, December 14, 1961, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/
ws/?pid=58918.
41 Jancar, Women Under Communism, 20.
42 Catherine Hill, Christianne Corbett, Andresse St. Rose, Why So Few? Women in
Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, (Washington: American Associationof University Women, 2010), 9.
43 Jancar, Women Under Communism, 195.
119

GHODSEE & MEAD

Eastern Bloc countries in 1975 than there are in the United States in 2018.
After her research trips to study women’s issues around the Eastern Blocin the mid-1970s, Jancar reported: “The Communists’ achievements inproviding education for women were among the benefits of the system

CATALYST • VOL 2 • №2

his recollections of a meeting in Moscow with Olympiada Kozlova, thedirector of the Engineering-Economic Institute. She had attended a
conference on peace at Bryn Mawr several years earlier, and was shocked
to find that during the breaks, the American attendees chatted about
their husbands and their husbands’ various jobs. “Here in the Soviet
Union,” Kozlova had told Dodge, “when we women get together, wetalk about what we are doing, not what our husbands are doing!”⁴⁴
Dodge’s report is typical of many of the Cold War comparisons oflife under Communism and life under capitalism in that it contrasts
the Soviet Union and the United States as shorthand for entire eco-

GHODSEE & MEAD

nomic systems. So far, we have been implicitly doing the same. But thispresents a few sticky issues. Firstly, there are cultural differences. The
United States and the USSR did not have a shared history, language, or
dominant religion. In fact, Cold War leaders used these dissimilarities tostoke mistrust of the Other on either side of the Iron Curtain. Perhaps
even more significantly, the United States and the Soviet Union had
vastly different levels of wealth: the US was rich, the USSR was poor.
Some scholars have even argued that it was the difference in wealth that
accounted for most of the differences between the twentieth-century
superpowers, rather than their differently organized economies or ideologies.⁴⁵ To get a better sense of what socialist states did for womencompared to their democratic capitalist contemporaries, we will lookat Austria and Hungary. Not only are they geographic neighbors, they
had a shared history for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This meant similar trade regimes, legal codes, and cultural norms. After
World War II, Austria and Hungary found themselves on either side of
the East-West divide, but their historical and cultural variables remained
constant. This brings us as close as possible to isolating the effect ofsocialist policies on women’s rights and participation in public life.

44 Donald R. Brown, ed., The Role and Status of Women in the Soviet Union, (New York:
Teachers College Press, 1968), 58, endnote L.
45 Kate Brown, Plutopia, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
120

WHAT HAS SOCIALISM EVER DONE FOR WOMEN?

AUST R I A A ND HU NGARY: A COMPARISON

There’s an episode in the seventh season (from winter 2018) of the popular BBC drama Call the Midwife, set in 1963, in which the Turners — aneast London doctor, his ex-nun-turned-secretary wife, and their threechildren — hire an au pair from Hungary. They expect her to be a dourwoman, beat down by the dull oppression of Communism. She shows
up in a miniskirt. She is not what they expect, but she radiates confidence and they love her. As is wont to happen in a television show about
midwifery, the au pair becomes pregnant. When she finds out, she asks
a doctor “How can I get an abortion?” She is told that she can’t. “But in
Hungary, abortion is legal up to twelve weeks,” she protests, perplexed.

This is a rare representation of a woman from an Eastern Bloc country
in popular culture — not as mannish and defeated, but rather as more
independent and accustomed to more rights than her “free” Western
peers. But how would things have gone if she had stayed closer tohome, perhaps working as an au pair for an Austrian family? The twostates have a shared history as the seats of the Dual Monarchy prior
to the First World War. They shared a similar legal code until WorldWar I, but even in the interbellum period as Austria and Hungary wereconsolidated as nation states, Hungarian law borrowed much language
from its Austrian neighbor.⁴⁷ During the Second World War, Hungary
was nominally an axis power, while Austria was annexed by Germanyin the infamous Anschluss. Both countries lost about 5 percent of their
1939 population in the war, and both Vienna and Budapest were bombed
to rubble. But as Cold War divides calcified, Austria had the aid of the
46 Heidi Thomas, Call the Midwife, directed by Claire Winyardem, Series 7, Episode3 (February 4, 2018; London: BBC ), television program.
47 Lajos Vékás, “The Codification of Private Law in Hungary in Historical Perspec121

GHODSEE & MEAD

“This isn’t a Communist country,” says the doctor. “We don’t just giveout abortions.” And that’s that. The au pair attempts a self-induced
abortion and nearly dies in a vegetable garden. She is found, rushed
to the hospital, and, once recovered, shipped back to the continent.⁴⁶

CATALYST • VOL 2 • №2Marshall Plan to rebuild. Hungary did not, and they needed all hands
on deck to rebuild, including women’s.⁴⁸ As sociologist Éva Fodor has
written, in Hungary “the male worker and stay-at-home housewife family
was neither economically nor politically feasible after World War II.”⁴⁹
Emerging from the war in the second half of the twentieth century,
Austria and Hungary were separated by the Iron Curtain (although,unlike between East and West Germany, the border became increasingly permeable over time)⁵⁰ and the major difference between thestates was a difference in their political economies: Communism versus
capitalism. Hungary, like its Eastern neighbors, implemented a socialist

GHODSEE & MEAD

gender regime in which women gained legal equality and entered
the workforce en masse. According to Fodor, “Gender, or precisely‘masculinity,’ served as a more useful resource for access to authority
in capitalist Austria than in state socialist Hungary: women experienced a higher degree of exclusion from the dominant class in Austria
than in Hungary.”⁵¹ In other words, femininity was less of a liability inpublic life in Hungary than in Austria. The Hungarian socialist state
invested in women’s emancipation, offering education and employment
training, public childcare, cafeterias in the workplace, maternity leave,
and abortion access.
In neighboring Austria, however, women remained in the home forthe first three postwar decades. The emergence of a grassroots feminist
movement happened in a similar fashion to the United States. The 1970s
brought second-wave feminism to Austria, or, as it was called there
tive,” 51 Annales U. Sci. Budapestinensis Rolando Eotvos Nominatae 51 (2010).
48 Nigel Swain, Hungary: The Rise and Fall of Feasible Socialism, (New York and London: Verso), 49.
49 Éva Fodor, Working Difference: Women’s Working Lives in Hungary and Austria,
1945-1995, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 33.
50 Michael Gehler and Maximilian Graf, “Austria, German Unification, and European Integration: A Brief Historical Background,” Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars no. 86 (March, 2018): 4, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/austria-german-unification-and-european-integration-brief-historical-background.
51 Fodor, Working Difference, 25.
122WHAT HAS SOCIALISM EVER DONE FOR WOMEN?

the “New Feminist Movement.” In 1975, a new family law was passed:
women no longer needed their husband’s permission to work outside
the home.⁵² This was a full generation after women’s participation in theworkforce was normalized — in fact, required — in Hungary, regardlessof how husbands felt about it. The 1975 Austrian family law also statedboth parents were to have equal legal possession of their children.⁵³
Prior to 1975, fathers were solely responsible for decisions affecting
children and women were legally obligated to follow their husband if hemoved, effectively making the wife another of her husband’s children.
Even on the most symbolic level, the Hungarian state granted women
emancipation far before Austria: the 1952 Hungarian family law gave
women the right to keep their birth name upon marriage. Austrian

one for “general women’s issues.”⁵⁵ The year 1979 also saw the creationof the Austrian Equal Treatment Act, which prohibited gender-based
discrimination in the labor market. Because state-socialist Hungary
had a command economy rather than a free market economy, labormarket discrimination was not a central issue. The Hungarian socialist
state was more concerned with ensuring that women’s biological andsocial differences from men (pregnancy and child-rearing) could beaccommodated in the workplace, rather than acting as if they did notexist. State-socialist leaders recognized that women have different roles
from men. This may raise the hackles of a liberal feminist observer;
however, as Fodor argues, party leaders used the difference principle

52 Fodor, Working Difference, 168.
53 Fodor, Working Difference, 113.
54 Fodor, Working Difference, 170.
55 Birgit Sauer, “What Happened to the Model Student? Austrian State Feminism
since the 1990s” in Changing State Feminism, eds. Joyce Outshoorn and Johanna Kantola (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 41.
123

GHODSEE & MEAD

women could not do the same until 1995.⁵⁴
Three years after the 1975 family law, the governing Austriansocial-democratic party created two new positions for state secretaries in charge of women’s concerns, one for “working women” andCATALYST • VOL 2 • №2

to include women rather than exclude them.⁵⁶ Without acknowledging
that women faced a set of challenges in formal employment that men
did not, how could they ever be fully incorporated?
The statistics bear out this difference. With a bump from a 1953 law
requiring that women make up 30–50 percent of newly trained workers,
the percentage of women in the labor force skyrocketed. In 1949, 35
percent of Hungarian women were employed outside the home. By
1970, 65 percent were, and two out of every five workers were women.⁵⁷
In the immediate postwar moment, Austrian women worked outside
the home at about the same rate as their Hungarian sisters: in 1951, 35

GHODSEE & MEAD

percent of Austrian women were engaged in paid work. Two decades
later, however, only 31 percent of Austrian women worked for wages.⁵⁸
Hungarian women also enjoyed increasingly lengthy maternity leaves
throughout the regime. By the late 1960s, women could take up to three
years of paid maternity leave.⁵⁹ Austrian women, meanwhile, could
only take one year, unpaid, although some women received unemployment benefits during this time.⁶⁰ Without a state-socialist regime ofworkplace quotas, investment in women’s education, and legal genderequality, Austrian women’s participation in public life, at least insofar
as it can be indicated by formal employment rates, actually regressedin the 1950s and 1960s.
Of course, working Hungarian women had the same domestic
responsibilities as Austrian women who did not work for wages. There
were still dirty clothes to wash, meals to cook, and children to lookafter, and deeply ingrained ideas about gendered work could not be
rewritten as quickly as the family code. In response, the Hungarianstate undertook a massive expansion of public childcare facilities. From
56 Fodor, Working Difference, 35.
57 Lynne Haney, Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary(Oakland: University of California Press, 2002), 33.
58 Fodor, Working Difference, 112.
59 Fodor, Working Difference, 171.
60 Fodor, Working Difference, 167.
124

WHAT HAS SOCIALISM EVER DONE FOR WOMEN?

1953 to 1965, the number of state-run crèches nearly quintupled. New
kindergartens were also built, but at a slower pace (throughout the
1950s, the number of kindergartens increased by 40 percent). There
were crèches and kindergartens in residential neighborhoods and in
workplaces, so women could choose if it would be more convenient todrop off their children before or after the commute.⁶¹
As discussed in the previous section, sending children to kindergarten was extremely common. In fact, Hungarian state kindergartens
were in such high demand that by 1965 there were only spaces for half
the children whose families wanted them to attend.⁶² In an attempt tofurther alleviate the double burden, many workplaces operated canteens
where workers could eat during the day and shops where they could

until the 1980s. This was not because there was an abundance, but rather,because few Austrian women were in the workforce. In fact, Éva Fodor
argues that the Austrian state was invested in keeping women out of
the workforce in this time period.⁶⁴
Given the vastly different attitudes toward women’s labor force
participation, it should not come as a shock that there were more
women in positions of authority in Hungary than in Austria. In 1972
in Hungary, working men were between two and three times as likely
to be managers as working women. The same year in Austria, working
men were more than five times as likely as working women to be managers — and many fewer women were in the workforce at all. Taken
together, Hungarian women were much more likely than their Austrian peers to hold positions of authority in working life. Perhaps even
61 Haney, Inventing the Needy, 38.
62 Ibid.
63 Haney, Inventing the Needy, 42.
64 Fodor, Working Difference, 112.
125

GHODSEE & MEAD

purchase subsidized groceries. Large workplaces (those with more thanfour thousand employees) operated clinics where workers could see a
doctor, get medicine, and even obtain baby food and milk for nursing
mothers.⁶³ In Austria, on the other hand, day care was largely a nonissue

CATALYST • VOL 2 • №2

more importantly, given the nature of the centrally planned economy,
Hungarian women were also more likely to hold positions of authority
in state administration than Austrian women. In 1972, Hungarian men
were about twice as likely as women to hold position in state administration. At the same time, Austrian men were four times as likely tohave positions in state administration as women. In fact, by the endof state socialism, in 1988, Hungarian women were more likely thanmen to work in the state bureaucracy.⁶⁵ Of course, women were largely
excluded from the most inner circles of party leadership, but they did
have some authority among the rank and file.

GHODSEE & MEAD

And, finally, Austria and Hungary differed greatly in terms of accessto abortion. In short, Call the Midwife’s au pair wouldn’t have faredmuch better in Austria than she did in Britain. In Hungary, as in moststate-socialist countries, abortion was relatively available. Although
officially medically regulated immediately after the war, in practicethere were few barriers to abortion between 1945 and 1949.⁶⁶ With
the consolidation of Communist power in postwar Hungary, however, abortion was criminalized. Partly under Soviet pressure, partly
as Soviet mimicry, and partly in response to postwar labor shortages,
Hungary imposed Stalinist restrictions on abortion until 1956. Liberalized access to abortion was a demand of the ‘56 revolution, and from
1956–1973 Hungary had one of the most progressive abortion policies
in Europe. But by the late 1960s the birth rate began to decline, as it
did in countries across the bloc. In 1973, over the protests of the Hungarian women’s committee, social scientists, and students, the state
introduced limits on who could get an abortion. Thanks in large partto the efforts of the women’s committee, abortion was not broadly
prohibited as it was in neighboring Romania.⁶⁷ It was now restricted
to certain types of women deemed by the state either unfit or exempt
65 Fodor, Working Difference, 66.
66 Susan Gal, “Gender in the Post-socialist Transition: the Abortion Debate in Hungary,” East European Politics and Societies 8 (1994): 256-286.
67 Fodor, Working Difference, 31.
126

WHAT HAS SOCIALISM EVER DONE FOR WOMEN?

from having children: unmarried women, those who had already done
their reproductive duty and had at least two children, older women,
women in poverty, or those for whom pregnancy would present healthhazards.⁶⁸ Abortion committees were instituted to enforce these restrictions; however, the criteria were lenient enough that most women who
wanted or needed an abortion found a way to get one.
Meanwhile, abortion was not even made legal in Austria until 1974
and, as in the United States, that law governs abortion to this day.⁶⁹ Thatlaw permits abortion in the first three months of pregnancy and requiresthat it must be performed in a public hospital by a physician. As the Callthe Midwife example illustrates, in the mid-twentieth century, many
Western states considered access to abortion indicative of Communist

And ironically, in a society based on the ideal of the collective,
autonomy — or at least independence — is what’s at stake with the otherstate-socialist programs for women as well. As Katherine Verdery hasargued, and other scholars have echoed, state socialism made men andwomen equally dependent on the state.⁷⁰ The state effectively replacedmen as the breadwinner. Once women no longer depended on theirhusbands for their basic needs of food, shelter, and medical care, theygained a measure of control over their own lives, even in regimes where
political rights were curtailed. Is this not one of the foundational goalsof feminism, to provide women with a measure of control over theirown lives? In Austria, the legal reforms instituting women’s rights
were the result of feminist activism, the sort of bottom-up, grassroots
68 Gal, “Gender in the Post-socialist Transition,” 264.
69 “Abortion Legislation in Europe,” The Law Library of Congress, Global Legal
Research Center, January, 2015, https://www.loc.gov/law/help/abortion-legislation/
europe.php#austria.
70 Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
127

GHODSEE & MEAD

immorality even as women in their own countries sought dangerous
illegal procedures. From a contemporary perspective, however, it isclear that state socialism granted women reproductive autonomy muchearlier than capitalism.

CATALYST • VOL 2 • №2

agitation that many have argued is necessary for any real feminist agenda.
They were not codified until thirty years after the equivalent laws in
Hungary, however. And the so-called “top-down” socialist model ofwomen’s emancipation undertook the project of socializing domestic
labor that has yet to be replicated under capitalism.
AFTER 1989

So, what about now, when free markets reign supreme? As we approach
the thirtieth anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall, the former Eastern Bloc

GHODSEE & MEAD

countries remain stubbornly in transition. These days, Hungary is in
the international spotlight for its extreme right-wing government andxenophobia more often than its promotion of women in the workforce.
Between the postwar establishment of canteens in the workplace andthe twenty-first-century headlines decrying Europe’s “little dictator”
and premier “illiberal democracy,” Hungary — along with the rest of
Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union — experienced one of
the most profound economic and social changes in the modern era.⁷¹
Overnight, constitutions were rewritten, major industries were privatized, and lifetimes’ worth of accomplishment lost their meaning. Free
markets, as it turned out, were not just for fossil fuels and cigarettes.
Women’s bodies could also be bought, sold, and used as advertisements to sell consumer goods. Post-socialism ushered in a bustling,and exploitative, sex industry as well as previously absent sexualized
marketing campaigns.⁷²
As markets began to take an interest in women, the state stopped
doing so. As many have argued, the transition period saw women’s

71 Branko Milanovic, “For Whom the Wall Fell? A Balance Sheet of Transition to
Capitalism,” Global Inequality, November 3, 2014, https://glineq.blogspot.de/2014/11/
for-whom-wall-fell-balance-sheet-of.html.
72 Libora Oates-Indruchová, “Transforming and Emerging: Discourses of Gender in
the Czech Culture of the Transition Period” in Advertising: Critical Concepts in Mediaand Cultural Studies 3, ed. Iain MacRury (New York: Routledge, 2012).
128

WHAT HAS SOCIALISM EVER DONE FOR WOMEN?

retreat from the workforce.⁷³ Absent the vigorous initiatives to include
women in the workplace, many returned home. Although, as Ghodsee
has argued, men were also hit hard by the changes, and many women
may have fared better in the post-1989 service-industry labor market
than their husbands because of the specific nature of the educationand experience they had under Communism. Under state socialism,
women tended to pursue university studies and were funneled into
white-collar professions that were paid less than the manual labor andtechnical jobs than attracted men. This pre-1989 occupational segregation in fields like law, banking, medicine, academia, and tourism
actually helped women after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Since capitalism
values white-collar over blue-collar work, women were initially better

force them back into the home. In the countries of Central Europe,for instance, new political leaders embraced policies of what has beencalled “refamilization.” As public enterprises were auctioned off to private investors or simply closed down, the government could no longer
maintain its commitment to guarantee full employment to all citizens.
Since the private sector wasn’t creating jobs fast enough to make up
for the jobs lost in the public sector, unemployment grew dramatically. At the exact same moment, hundreds of day-care centers closed,
and women lost access to affordable childcare. Some states compensated for the closing of crèches and kindergartens by extending formalmaternity leave provisions for up to four years. But these new leaves
paid less than the old ones under Communism, and women were not
73 See for example: Jacqui True, Gender, Globalization, and Postsocialism: The Czech
Republic After Communism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Susan Gal
and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2000); Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next?.
74 Kristen Ghodsee, The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Postsocialism on the BlackSea (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
129

GHODSEE & MEAD

positioned to succeed in newly competitive labor markets because of
the human capital they had acquired under state socialism.⁷⁴
But women’s advantages were quickly eroded by the dismantlingof the once-generous social safety net and government attempts to

CATALYST • VOL 2 • №2

guaranteed their jobs back, essentially forcing mothers back into thehome.⁷⁵ For politicians, these policies helped reduce unemployment
rates and saved money. Eastern European women now freely provided
the care for which the state once paid.
Meanwhile, in Austria, the incorporation of women into the workforce and the institution of women’s rights continued along the pathlaid out in the 1970s, although with slowing momentum. In 1994, these
efforts were given a boost from the European Union’s effort to incorporate a gender analysis into each of its new programs.⁷⁶ This method,
called gender mainstreaming, tends to focus on equality between men

GHODSEE & MEAD

and women, rather than on state accommodations for women’s roles as
mothers. It has also been criticized for diffusing state responsibility forgender equality to such a degree that no organization has appreciable
power to enact policy.⁷⁷
Despite the seeming totality of post-socialist transition — or, as it is
known in the region, “the changes” — some legacies of state socialism’s
investment in women’s emancipation live on. According to statistics
from the European Union’s Eurostat database, the pay gap between
men and women, though still existent, is smaller in Hungary than inAustria.⁷⁸ Hungarian women earn 86 forints for every 100 a man does
while Austrian women earn 79.9 cents to an Austrian man’s euro. The
most striking statistical comparison is in childcare: just over 12 percent of Hungarian babies under three years old are enrolled in formal
75 Steven Saxonberg and Tomas Sirovatka, “Failing Family Policy in Post-Communist
Central Europe,” Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis 8, no. 2 (2006): 185–202.
76 “History of Gender Mainstreaming at international level and EU level,” GenderKompetenzZentrum, Humboldt-Universität Berlin, January 2, 2010, http://www.genderkompetenz.info/eng/gender-competence-2003-2010/Gender%20Mainstreaming/
Bases/history/international/index.html/.
77 Barbara Einhorn, “Citizenship, Civil Society and Gender Mainstreaming: Contested Priorities in an Enlarging Europe” (presentation, Pan-European Conference
on Gendering Democracy in an Enlarged Europe, Prague, Czech Republic, June 20,2005).
78 “Gender pay gap in unadjusted form by NACE Rev. 2 activity – structure of earnings survey methodology (earn_gr_gpgr2)” in “Gender equality,” Database, Eurostat,
accessed May 17, 2018, http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/data/database.
130

WHAT HAS SOCIALISM EVER DONE FOR WOMEN?

childcare while only 5.6 percent of Austrian babies are. This modest
difference becomes extreme when children are slightly older. Nearly
three-quarters of Hungarian children between three years old and theminimum compulsory school age attend formal childcare, while only
one-quarter of Austrian children do.⁷⁹ One likely explanation for thisdiscrepancy is the state-socialist culture of socialized crèches and kindergartens. Because kindergartens were subsidized and widely available,
it became normal for parents to send their kids there while they worked.
Now, those children who grew up attending crèches and kindergartensrun by the socialist state have their own children. Their experience did
not leave them scarred; rather, these parents raised going to day careare choosing the same for their children.
C ONCLUSION

socialism in Eastern Europe, and why even bother? Europe’s twentieth-century experiment in socialism is receding quickly into therearview mirror of history, but we’d be wrong to let it disappear entirely.
Although the socialist state never fully eradicated patriarchy in thehome, or explicitly dealt with issues of sexual harassment or domestic
violence, it did strive to provide (to a greater or lesser extent dependingon the era and country) some semblance of social security, economic
stability, and work-life balance for its citizens. The radical lesson is thatthe state intervened and did some good things on behalf of women,
things that markedly changed their lives — day cares, abortion, canteens, etc. Feminist activism, the way it looks in the West with painted
signs and rallying cries, did not achieve these things. Bureaucrats did.
This may feel like a bleak lesson: how can we rally for state feminism

79 “Children in formal childcare or education by age group and duration - % over the
population of each age group - EU -SILC survey (ilc_caindformal)” in “Gender equality,” Database, Eurostat, accessed May 17, 2018, http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/data/
database.
131

GHODSEE & MEAD

What are the stakes of studying women’s emancipation under state

CATALYST • VOL 2 • №2

when our states are headed by the likes of Viktor Orbán and Donald
Trump? But maybe, just maybe, it could feel like a bright lesson. As
feminists frequently at our wits’ end, we must realize that there are
more, and better, options. Consciousness raising, pamphlets, performance art, marches, and hashtag campaigns will not bring about thekind of permanent progress that most women need. Changing minds
and hearts is not our only goal; we must also change the role of the state.
The feminist demands we make can be radical in the true sense of theword: they can get to the root of the problem. It has become increasingly clear that the barriers to women’s full participation in public life

GHODSEE & MEAD

are not failures of individual willpower. We have leaned in, stepped up,
and hung on, but our grit has amounted to very little. Without state
support and an ambitious program of wealth redistribution — whether
this is through increased taxation or from the profits generated throughsocial ownership of public enterprises — women will continue to perform the unremunerated care work for capitalist societies, which will
only increase as the baby-boomer generation enters old age.⁸⁰
Few would argue that life under socialism in Eastern Europe wasgood, generally. Consumer shortages and travel restrictions circumscribed many lives. At various times, in various places, political violencecut lives short and fractured families. And yet, by most every measure,
women had a degree of education, economic independence, and legal
standing that their Western peers would not have until much later and,once won, always seem on the verge of losing. Reviewing the limited
successes of the state-socialist past is in no way a call to recreate thefailed experiments of the twentieth-century Eastern European regimes.
But we must be able to take stock of their accomplishments for what
they were, to learn from them, and to move forward.
The historiography of women’s lives under state socialism — andthe historiography of state socialism generally — is deeply political. As
80 Malcom Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials,(New York: Little Brown, 2017); Gabriel Winant, “Not Every Kid-Bond Matures,” n+1
30 (Winter 2018).
132

WHAT HAS SOCIALISM EVER DONE FOR WOMEN?

we have each argued elsewhere, those who oppose any project of collective action or redistribution of wealth dredge up the boogeyman ofzombie socialism to preempt any socialist movement before it begins.⁸¹
This is true, also, of those would keep women from power. Since thenineteenth century and the solidification of the state as we know it,
women have had a particular interest in seeing that the state use its
power on their behalf. This is still true today.
In the United States, women make up the majority of the Democratic Party, and the majority of women lean Democrat.⁸² Although
it’s a far cry from democratic socialism, to many people the Democrats
represent the ideal of government working in the interests of people,of public services, public education, and public safety nets. If Social(who are loathe to part with their billions, and, it must be noted, aremostly men) and the most reactionary (those who spend their days
sending women rape-threats online and their nights marching withtorches in nouveaux-Klan rallies). If journalists at the Financial Timesand screenwriters at the BBC can assert the benefits of state socialism
for women — whether these be in the large percentages of women
working as engineers or in more liberal policies regarding reproductive rights — it is high time that feminists engage with the evidence
and do the same.

81 Julia Mead, “Why Millennials Aren’t Afraid of Socialism,” Nation, January 10, 2017;
Ghodsee and Sehon, “Anti-anti-communism.”
82 “Wide Gender Gap, Growing Educational Divide in Voters’ Party Identification,” Pew Research Center, March, 2018, http://www.people-press.org/2018/03/20/
wide-gender-gap-growing-educational-divide-in-voters-party-identification/.
133

GHODSEE & MEAD

Security is gutted, it will be women who take care of elderly relatives.
In the absence of affordable childcare, it is women who stay home towatch the kids. And this is why, at scale, women’s emancipation andsocialism pose a dual threat to both the wealthiest and most powerful