Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
Page 8
these nations did expend vast resources to invest in women’s education and training and to promote them in professions previously dominated by men. Understanding the demands of reproductive biology, they also attempted to socialize domestic work and child care by building a network of public crèches, kindergartens, laundries, and cafeterias. Extended, job-protected maternity leaves and child benefits allowed women to find at least a modicum of work/family balance. Moreover, twentieth-century state socialism did improve the material conditions of millions of women’s lives; maternal and infant mortality declined, life expectancy increased, and illiteracy all but disappeared.
✏️ What state socialist nations prioritized in terms of women liberation 📖 (Page 8)
Page 8
Franco-Russian revolutionary Inessa Armand famously declaring: “If women’s liberation is unthinkable without communism, then communism is unthinkable without women’s liberation.”
✏️ quote 📖 (Page 8)
Page 8
the majority of Albanian women were illiterate before the imposition of socialism in 1945. Just ten years later, the entire population under forty could read and write, and by the 1980s half of Albania’s university students were women.
✏️ One example of progress 📖 (Page 8)
Page 9
These policies helped to decouple love and intimacy from economic considerations. When women enjoy their own sources of income, and the state guarantees social security in old age, illness, and disability, women have no economic reason to stay in abusive, unfulfilling, or otherwise unhealthy relationships. In countries such as Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and East Germany, women’s economic independence translated into a culture in which personal relationships could be freed from market influences. Women didn’t have to marry for money.
✏️ The end result is that women aren’t dependent anymore.. Economic independence is a powerful position to be in. 📖 (Page 9)
Page 9
Women’s rights in the Eastern Bloc failed to include a concern for same-sex couples and gender nonconformity. Abortion served as a primary form of birth control in the countries where it was available on demand. Most East European states strongly encouraged women to become mothers, with Romania, Albania, and the USSR under Stalin forcing women to have children they didn’t want. State socialist governments suppressed discussions of sexual harassment, domestic violence, and rape. And although they tried to get men involved in housework and child care, men largely resisted challenges to traditional gender roles. Many women suffered under a double burden of mandatory formal employment and domestic work. Finally, in no country were women’s rights promoted as a project to support women’s individualism or self-actualization. Instead, the state supported women as workers and mothers so they could participate more fully in the collective life of the nation.
✏️ Downsides of the state socialist nations in the 20th century 📖 (Page 9)
Page 10
renowned historian of sexuality Dagmar Herzog shared a conversation with several East German men in their late forties in 2006. They told her that “it was really annoying that East German women had so much sexual selfconfidence and economic independence. Money was useless, they complained. The few extra Eastern Marks that a doctor could make in contrast with, say, someone who worked in the theater, did absolutely no good, they explained, in luring or retaining women the way a doctor’s salary could and did in the West. You had to be interesting.’ What pressure. And as one revealed: ‘I have much more power now as a man in unified Germany than I ever did in communist days.‘”
✏️ Talking to men about women’s independence back in the day 📖 (Page 10)
Page 11
The rejection of the one-party state and the embrace of political freedoms came bundled with economic neoliberalism. New democratic governments privatized public enterprises to make room for new competitive labor markets where productivity would determine wages. Gone were the long lines for toilet paper and the black markets for jeans. Coming soon was a glorious consumer paradise free from shortages, famines, the secret police, and the labor camp. But after almost three decades, many Eastern Europeans still wait for a bright capitalist future. Others have abandoned all hope.¹
✏️ The tradeoff in the 90s, from socialism to capitalism 📖 (Page 11)
Page 12
porno shops, porno magazines, peepshows, stripteases, unemployment, and galloping poverty. In the press they call Budapest ‘the city of love, the Bangkok of Eastern Europe. Romanian women are prostituting themselves for a single dollar at the Romanian-Yugoslav border. In the midst of all this, our anti-choice nationalist governments are threatening our right to abortion and telling us to multiply, to give birth to more Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Croats, Slovaks.” Today, Russian mail-order brides, Ukrainian sex workers, Moldovan nannies, and Polish maids flood Western Europe. Unscrupulous middle men harvest blond hair from poor Belorussian teenagers for New York wig makers. In St. Petersburg, women attend academies for aspiring gold diggers. Prague is an epicenter of the European porn industry. Human traffickers prowl the streets of Sofia, Bucharest, and Chişinău for hapless girls dreaming of a more prosperous life in the West
✏️ Under capitalism, sex sells… Period 📖 (Page 12)
Page 13
A joke, told in East European languages, illustrates this sentiment: In the middle of the night a woman screams and jumps out of bed, eyes filled with terror. Her startled husband watches her rush into the bathroom and open the medicine cabinet. She then dashes to the kitchen and inspects the inside of the refrigerator. Finally, she flings open a window and gazes out onto the street below their apartment. She takes a deep breath and returns to bed. “What’s wrong with you?” her husband says. “What happened?” “I had a terrible nightmare,” she says. “I dreamed that we had the medicine we needed, that our refrigerator was full of food, and that the streets outside were safe and clean.” “How is that a nightmare?” The woman shakes her head and shudders. “I thought the Communists were back in power.”
✏️ Complicated feelings over the past.. One needs to figure out socialism without authoritarianism 📖 (Page 13)
Page 14
Great Society ideas about how to regulate our economy and redistribute wealth to maximize the wellbeing of all citizens, including women, fell out of favor. The rise of what was called the Washington Consensus (born of Reaganomics) meant marketization, privatization, and the shredding of social safety nets in the name of efficiency. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, citizens witnessed increasing deregulation of the financial, transportation, and utility sectors and the growing commodification of everyday life. We conflated freedom with free markets. After the global financial crisis in 2008, economic elites targeted already lean state budgets, slashing deeper into social programs while using taxpayer monies to bail out the bankers who created much of the mess in the first place.
✏️ The fall of socialism emboldened so much terrible experimentation with neoliberalism 📖 (Page 14)
Page 17
In the 1990s, while Russia, Hungary, and Poland liquidated state assets and dismantled their social safety nets, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland maintained generous public spending financed by government-owned industries and progressive taxation despite the global fashion for neoliberalism. The democratic socialist societies of Northern Europe show that it’s possible to find a humane alternative to neoliberal capitalism. And although they aren’t perfect or easy to replicate— they are ethnically homogenous and increasingly hostile to immigrants-they have found ways to combine the political freedoms of the West with the social securities of the East.
✏️ It’s possible to have socialism without authoritarianism.. Even if there are other flaws still embedded. 📖 (Page 17)
Page 22
Those experiments failed under the weight of their own contradictions: the vast chasm between their stated ideals and the actual practices of authoritarian leaders. You shouldn’t have to sacrifice toilet paper for medical care. Basic political freedoms don’t need to be traded for guaranteed employment. But there were other paths not taken, such as those envisioned by early socialist theorists like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. And no socialist experiment was ever allowed to flourish without facing the overt or covert opposition of the United States, whether direct confrontations like those in Korea and Vietnam or secret operations in places such as Cuba, Chile, or Nicaragua. Did somebody say, affair”?
✏️ A reminder that it’s not black and white. Those past experiments failed for various reasons, including external forces.. But there are plenty of other theories and experiments that haven’t been tried either. 📖 (Page 22)
Page 37
Consumer shortages plagued the economy.
✏️ Why? Why is this the common failing? followup 📖 (Page 37)
Page 37
as workers, women contributed to their own pensions and developed their own skill sets. They benefitted from free health care, public education, and a generous social safety net that subsidized shelter, utilities, public transportation, and basic foodstuffs. In some countries, women could retire from formal employment up to five years earlier than men.
✏️ All that on the plus side, versus the common issue of gender pay gaps, as well as the double duty of formal employment and housework. 📖 (Page 37)
Page 39
Governments can ensure women are paid equal wages for equal work and support women in their work and family responsibilities.
✏️ Knowing capitalism will always favor profit, and cutting as many corners as possible (not paying fairly as much as possible), only the public sector can provide ample opportunities for women, as is the case in socialist countriesv vs neoliberal ones. 📖 (Page 39)
Page 58
The year 1919 saw the creation of an organization called the Zhenodtel, the Women’s Section, which would oversee the work of implementing the radical program of social reform that would lead to women’s full emancipation.
✏️ Soviets committed at the start, looking to even build funds to develop kindergartens, crèched, and public cafeterias and laundries.. All to provide state support towards unburdening women from household chores. Ostensibly, this would’ve been the best way to go about things. It takes a community, etc. 📖 (Page 58)
Page 58
After the country was devastated by the brutal years of the First World War, followed by the Civil War and the horrendous famine of 1921 and 1922, Lenin and the Bolsheviks did not have the funds to support Kollontai’s plan. Hundreds of thousands of war orphans roamed the major cities, plaguing residents with petty crime and theft. The state lacked the resources to care for them; children’s homes were overburdened and understaffed. Liberalization of divorce laws meant that fathers abandoned their pregnant wives, and poor enforcement of child support and alimony laws meant that those men who had survived the First World War, the Civil War, and the famine routinely skipped out on their responsibilities. Working women couldn’t look after their children and hoped the state would step in and help, as Kollontai and the other women’s activists had promised. In 1920, the Soviet Union had also become the first country in Europe to legalize abortion on demand during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. Birthrates plummeted as women sought to limit the size of their families.
✏️ The plan was great, but it was just so many tragedies and crises that completely derailed any hopes of it taking off. 📖 (Page 58)
Page 59
Stalin disbanded the Zhenotdel, declaring that the “woman question” had been solved. In 1936, he reversed most liberal policies, banned abortion, and reinstated the traditional family, on top of his sustained program of state terror and arbitrary purges. The rapidly industrializing Soviet state needed women to work, have babies, and do all of the care work the world’s first socialist,state could not yet afford to pay for
✏️ The end result of the failed experiment 📖 (Page 59)
Page 59
The Danes introduced a two-week leave for working women as early as 1901, and by 1960 a universal, state-funded paid maternity leave was extended to all working women. In 1919, Finland passed maternity leave provisions for factory workers and professional women, and added job protections in 1922. Sweden introduced an unpaid maternity leave of four weeks as early as 1901, and by 1963, the government guaranteed women 180 days of job-protected maternity leave at 80 percent of their salaries.
✏️ This is just a sampling of successes. Eastern European countries implemented paid maternity leave early on (but most especially after WWII). 📖 (Page 59)
Page 60
The Bulgarians covered for those on parental leave with the labor of new university graduates. (In Bulgaria, postsecondary education was free for students who agreed to complete a period of mandatory national service after earning their degrees. These internships allowed young people to get work experience and ensured that a parent’s job would be waiting when he or she returned from leave.)
✏️ I’m loving the synchronicity of state programs at play here. Paternity/maternity leave existed, teens could get free college if they agreed to work in national service after, and jobs would be safe for parents to come back to after their leave. 📖 (Page 60)
Page 62
the quality of these child care facilities was uneven across the region and often left much to be desired; children got sick with more communicable diseases, and caregivers were often overwhelmed by the demands of too many children (problems common in day care centers today). But as with so many things in the command economy, planners allocated resources inefficiently, and demand always exceeded supply. In my research in the archives of the Bulgarian Women’s Committee, for instance, I discovered many letters to the relevant ministries complaining about the lack of funds allocated for the crèches and kindergartens. Here again, the northern European countries of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland did much better. They invested state funds to build child care facilities to promote women’s full employment
✏️ It’s all about proper funding.. That’s what makes or breaks it 📖 (Page 62)
Page 68
These policies conspired to force women back into the home. Without state-funded child care or well-paid maternity leave, and in a new economic climate where employers had a large army of the unemployed from which to choose, many women were pushed out of the labor market. From a macroeconomic perspective, this proved a boon to transitioning states. Unemployment rates dropped (and thus the need for social benefits), and women now performed for free the care work the state had once subsidized in order to promote gender equality. Later, when deeper budget cuts hit pensioners and the health care system, women already at home looking after their children could now care for the sick and the old-at great savings to the state budget.
✏️ During the shift from socialism to capitalism, state enterprises dropped, unemployment rose, women were relegated to the home, and the state could save funds by forcing women to take care of home, child, elder duties for free. 📖 (Page 68)
Page 72
The United States once came close to having a nationwide child care system: the Comprehensive Child Development Act passed by a bipartisan vote of Democrats and Republicans in 1971. The act would have funded a national network of child care centers providing high-quality educational, medical, and nutritional services, a crucial first step for universal child care.
✏️ Nixon vetoed the act, criticizing how this would force the government to finance communal child rearing over family-centered approach. Why should the government pay for something we can get women to do for free? 📖 (Page 72)
Page 82
while there were official quotas for women in parliaments and in the Central Committees of the Communist Parties of most states, the composition of the elite Political Bureau (Politburo), where the real power lay, remained overwhelmingly male. Second, even when women’s political participation increased at the local and municipal level, their participation was limited by the centralized nature of the one-party state. In terms of managerial positions within the staterun economy, the picture was also mixed. Decision-making power rested in the hands of the central planners, who were largely (though not exclusively) male
✏️ As much as they practiced gender equity, they still kept them out of the center of government. Men couldn’t bear to have women at the top decision making level. 📖 (Page 82)
Page 83
Social inequality is considered an inevitable by-product of the private ownership of the means of production: the factories, machines, technologies, intellectual property, and so forth. Capitalist economies create an ever-growing wealth gap between those who own the means of production and those who must sell their labor for less than the value it creates in order to meet their basic needs. Ongoing exploitation of those who work for a living increases the wealth of those at the top; the rich get richer at a faster and faster rate, which allows them to control more and more of the means of production. Socialist policies interrupt this trend toward growing inequality through a number of mechanisms, including the creation of public or collectively owned enterprises (co-ops) and/or redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation and the creation of publicly funded social safety nets to prevent destitution.
✏️ Quick summary of what socialism is trying to do when it comes to capitalistic tendencies. 📖 (Page 83)
Page 84
In the 1820s and 1830s, the utopian socialist SaintSimonians organized themselves into small religious communities in Paris, pooling their incomes and living collectively. An early leader, Prosper Enfantin, served as the community’s “pope”; he proposed to share his position of authority with a woman who would serve as a “popesse.” Unlike Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill, who based their arguments for sexual equality on men’s and women’s innate rationality, the Saint-Simonians believed that men and women had different but complementary natures and that both spiritual and political authority required representation from each half of humanity. After internal debates, Enfantin’s views prevailed, and the larger Saint-Simonian community was to be ruled by a couple-pope who served as the living representatives of God’s masculine and feminine attributes. All positions of power were to be shared by a representative from each sex: each smaller community was headed by a male-female couple, their collective homes were led by a “brother” and “sister” pair, and each of their work syndicates was governed by a “director” and a “directress.”
✏️ What an awesome concept of a faction that has shared leadership between men and women 👓 swn ttrpg 📖 (Page 84)
Page 87
The February revolution that toppled Tsar Nicholas II began on International Women’s Day, precipitated by women strikers. As a provisional government tried to stabilize Russia in the following months, these women demanded full suffrage. In July 1917, they won the right to vote and stand for public office. After the October Revolution, Lenin and the Bolsheviks allowed women to vote and run in the elections for the Constituent Assembly. Most people don’t realize that the Soviet Union did not become a one-party authoritarian state overnight. Because Lenin hoped to win a popular mandate, he allowed “the freest elections ever held in Russia until after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,” according to historian, Rochelle Ruthchild. Voting began in November 1917 and lasted for about a month. Voter participation in the Constituent Assembly elections was incredible given the chaos of the time, and women’s electoral turnout exceeded all expectations. However, Lenin dissolved the democratically elected Constituent Assembly once it became clear that his Bolshevik party would not have a majority. Soviet women’s right to vote became largely superfluous in the dictatorship of the proletariat.
✏️ History lesson about the 1917 revolutions 📖 (Page 87)
Page 93
Elena Lagadinova, the president of Bulgaria’s national women’s organization. Lagadinova admitted that the socialist states did not achieve as much as she had hoped. I once asked her why more women did not rise up to the highest positions of power given the general commitment to women’s rights. Lagadinova acknowledged that this had been an ongoing challenge for the Bulgarian women’s committee and claimed that East European countries did not have enough time to overcome the centuries-old idea that leaders should be men. It wasn’t just that men disliked women in power, Lagadinova argued; it was that women also felt uncomfortable with women’s leadership. As a result, they were less likely to support their female comrades and more reticent to pursue positions of authority. They preferred to work behind the scenes, she said. High politics in Eastern Europe, just like high politics elsewhere, was a treacherous place, infused with intrigues and betrayals. Lagadinova suggested that women were less inclined to engage in the necessary subterfuges. On the other hand, she believed that political life might have been more civilized if there had been more women at the top. Her organization tried to promote qualified candidates when they could, but the patriarchal culture of the Balkans, combined with the authoritarian nature of the state (ruled by the same man for thirtyfive years), discouraged women from getting involved.
✏️ Many women rose to power during the 20th century, not not at many as people wanted or expected. 📖 (Page 93)
Page 115
sexual economics theorists basically embrace a long-standing socialist critique of capitalism: that it commodifies all human interactions and reduces women to chattel.
📖 (Page 115)
Page 116
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels observed that capitalism “has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom-Free Trade… The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.” Since then, socialist theorists have also blamed capitalism for the commodification of women’s sexuality, and argued that women’s economic independence from men and the collective ownership of the means of production would liberate personal relations from economic calculation. In their view, a more egalitarian society with men and women living and working together as equals would lead to a new kind of relationship based on love and mutual affection, unsullied by questions of worth, value, and exchange
📖 (Page 116)
Page 117
Friedrich Engels also argued, in 1884, that women’s subjugation resulted from the male desire for legitimate heirs to inherit his wealth. To ensure that his children were really his, the man needed to control women’s sexuality through the institution of monogamous marriage. Women’s fidelity and reproductive capacity thereby became commodities to be exchanged between men for the purpose of projecting their accumulated wealth and power onto future generations of their descendants.
✏️ One of the reasons for control of women began as a need to ensure how to project wealth to their heirs. 📖 (Page 117)
Page 118
Monogamy was primarily monogamy for the woman, since men could have sexual relations outside of marriage with impunity, and the marriage contract deprived most women not only of control of their bodies but also of their fundamental rights as individuals. Marriage reduced women to the status of property of their husbands.
✏️ Keep in mind that, as always, this control and rationale was one way. Man could fuck anyone as desired. 📖 (Page 118)
Page 131
“Commercialization of different spheres of social life, gender polarization and inequality as well as the lack of resources legitimate the instrumental script of sexuality,” write Temkina and Zdravomyslova. “This script presupposed that sexualized femininity (as well as young age) could be profitably exchanged for material and other benefits. In this script marriage is represented as a calculation.”
✏️ More on Instrument script 📖 (Page 131)
Page 132
the two Germany - the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Until the end of World War II, Germany was one nation, but after the defeat of the Nazis, the victorious Allies divided Germany amongst themselves. As the Cold War began, the alliance between Stalin and the Western powers fractured. East Germany fell on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain under the one-party rule of the Socialist Unity Party (SED). The division of Germany presents an interesting natural experiment in women’s rights and sexuality. The populations of the two countries were close to identical in all respects save for the divergence in their political and economic systems. For four decades, the two Germanys followed different paths, particularly with regard to the construction of ideal masculinities and femininities.
✏️ The two Germanys presents a cool case of socialism and women’s emancipation vs capitalism and traditional gender roles. 📖 (Page 132)
Page 133
If West German girlfriends and wives were unhappy with the sexual performance of their male partners, they had few options open to them. Because women relied on men to support them financially, at best they could gently try to nudge their partners into being more attentive to their needs. In the East, men who desired sexual relations with women could not rely on money to buy them access, and had incentives to improve their behavior.
✏️ That last sentence is interesting, because it contradicts the capitalist sexual economics theory that, if women are free and independent, they sell their sex for cheap and men aren’t incentivized to be productive and make a lot in order to get sex. They argue that when women are dependent, sex is expensive, and men have to really hustle. But here in east Germany, in reality, you see the opposite is true. 📖 (Page 133)
Page 135
They found that the East German women said they enjoyed sex more and reported a higher rate of orgasm than their Western counterparts. In 1990, another study comparing the sexual attitudes of youth in the two Germanys found that GDR men’s and women’s preferences were more in sync with each other than those of young men and women in the West. For example, one survey found that 73 percent of East German women and 74 percent of East German men wanted to get married. In contrast, 71 percent of women in the West desired marriage, but only 57 percent of Western men did, a fourteen-point difference. A different survey about sexual experiences uncovered much higher levels of self-reported sensual enjoyment among East German women. When asked if their last tryst had left them feeling satisfied, 75 percent of GDR women and 74 percent of GDR men said yes, compared to 84 percent of FRG men and a mere 46 percent of FRG women.
✏️ A bunch of statistics to show that women were in parity with men regarding sex, love and satisfaction under socialism. Under capitalism, women desired marriage more than men (contradicting the sexual economics thought process again, that men would be incentivized). Also, in capitalism, way more men said they were satisfied with last tryst than women (84% vs 46%). 📖 (Page 135)
Page 137
Two Russian sociologists, Anna Temkina and Elena Zdravomyslova, conducted indepth, biographical interviews with two sets of middleclass Russian women in 1997 and 2005. They examined the generational changes in the way women described their amorous lives both during and after the Soviet Union.
✏️ They looked at sexual politics early, late and post-collapse of the Soviet Union. In the Stalin era, sex followed primarily a pro-natalist script. Sex was endured for reproduction only. After Stalin, two new ways emerged: friendship and romance scripts. There was a stronger emphasis on spiritual unity, mutual interests and true love. Also, friendship wasn’t an uncommitted friends with benefits model, but rather a meaningful relationship where sex was the method of showing respect and affection. After collapse, free market introduced the hedonistic and the instrumental scripts.hedonistic was for pure individual pleasure, and instrument was the commodification of sex. 📖 (Page 137)
None
Under state socialism, the central planners ignored women’s desires, and there were persistent shortages of the feminine accoutrements women take for granted in the West, including basic hygiene products… There are no deodorants, perfumes, sometimes even no soap or toothpaste. There is no fine underwear, no pantyhose, no nice lingerie. Worst of all, there are no sanitary napkins. What can one say except that it is humiliating?"" While women in Eastern Europe may have had far more career paths open to them, they certainly lacked the consumer products available to women in the West.
✏️ The issue of choice (lack thereof) goes back to who’s making the decisions.. The central planners, etc. They ignored women’s desires and wants, just as they ignored many of what people wanted. Yes, they provided basic necessities, but they didn’t take feedback on human wants as well, which plays a big part in living.