One of the most positive features of state socialism, Ghodsee argues, is that it gave women economic independence from men. In the former Soviet countries, women may not have been able to take part in free elections or find a diversity of consumer goods, but they were guaranteed public education, jobs, housing, health care, maternity leave, child allowances, child care, and more. Not only did this arrangement liberate women and men alike from the anxieties and pressures of sink-or-swim capitalism; it also meant that women were much less likely to rely on male partners for the fulfillment of basic needs. This in turn meant that heterosexual women’s romantic relationships with men were more optional, less constrained by economic considerations, and often more egalitarian. As Ghodsee writes in her book: [...]
State socialist feminists — and I should put the term “feminist” in quotes, because really they were women’s activists — understood women to have different needs from men, and sought to implement policies to meet those needs. We’re not talking about gender or sexual equality in exactly the way that it was articulated by Western feminists in the second wave. The idea was instead that men and women were both making valuable contributions to society, but doing so in different ways. Women’s role as mothers was often assumed. To that end, there were many state policies put in place to deal with the work-family balance issues that women are still dealing with today in the West. [...]
There were brilliant socialist feminists in the seventies, people like Silvia Federici and others, who were making the case that large structural changes would reorganize relationships between men and women. What happened is that, as Nancy Fraser has written about, feminism was largely co-opted by neoliberal capitalism. So we ended up getting a kind of Sheryl Sandberg-style “lean in” feminism, which is all about individual success and creating conditions for a handful of women to be as filthy rich as a handful of men are. [...]
The countries in the world with the fastest-shrinking populations are in Eastern Europe, partially because women aren’t having children — because there’s no economy to support a family — and partially because of out-migration. In the absence of economic security, women are using the tools they have to make a better life, including commodifying their relationships with men. That’s why when you type in “Ukrainian women” on Google the first thing that comes up is ads for mail-order brides.
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