Why Women Have Better Sex under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence by Kristen R. Ghodsee

Abstract

Reviewed by: Why Women Have Better Sex under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence by Kristen R. Ghodsee Evelyn Preuss Kristen R. Ghodsee. Why Women Have Better Sex under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. Nation, 2018. 221 pp. Cloth, $22.00. With the democratic edifice under assault, researchers descend from the ivory tower. Call it scholarly activism. Joseph Stiglitz puts The Price of Inequality (2012) into succinct sentences for those who pay it. Timothy Snyder, with his On Tyranny (2017), instructs a broader, younger audience how to resist authoritarianism. But despite the Women’s March and the #MeToo movement, as well as various “Milestones in Misogyny,” to use Rebecca Solnit’s words for recent political developments, public-facing scholarship remains scarce where tyranny and inequality affect the most intimate sense of identity and being: gender. [End Page 113] Kristen R. Ghodsee fills the gap. Her 2017 New York Times op-ed on gender equality invited debate and resulted in a book offer. Why Women Have Better Sex under Socialism compares the situation of women in former Eastern Bloc countries with that of women in Western Europe and the United States. Very well received, the book has been translated into several languages, including German. Surely, Ghodsee’s title provokes. It proposes that socialism, a political system reviled since the harsh frosts of the Cold War, might have served— and still might serve— women better. Yet, while Ghodsee’s title makes a splash, her argument is modest. She aims to make capitalism more tolerable for women by mixing in a few social policies grabbed from the toolbox of history that she claims have been successfully put to work in Northern Europe. The central thesis of the book is that women need economic independence in order to determine their own lives; alleviating women’s domestic responsibilities would enable them to participate in the economy on a footing equal to men. Ghodsee suggests that policies such as workplace guarantees, an increase of public-sector jobs, special education programs, universal health care, and comprehensive childcare could bring about the sort of status, life perspective, and matter-of-course dignity women enjoyed in Eastern Bloc countries. Looking for “a humane alternative to neoliberal capitalism,” she sees that the “democratic socialist societies of Northern Europe [ . . . ] have found ways to combine the political freedoms of the West with the social securities of the East” (17). Eastern European women’s autonomy in life and love, she surmises, derived from their economic independence. Yet, with that hop and skip from North to East and from love to money, Ghodsee lands in a mess. Muddled assignations and disjointed cause and effect are the drawbacks of an otherwise compelling line of thought. First of all, Nordic countries hardly have a large enough public sector to qualify them as socialist. At best, they are market economies buffered by progressive social policies. Second, Nordic countries cannot take credit for Eastern European women’s rights and pursuit of happiness. Such a foreshortening of historical and social perspective casts aside dimensions of politics and culture that greatly contributed to women’s standing in the former Eastern Bloc. The valorization of the private sphere, the importance of informal networks, and the topsy-turvy character of these societies gave women clout. Economic independence alone cannot explain the prestige they enjoyed. And, third, the economics that disadvantage [End Page 114] women to such an enormous degree in the contemporary West cannot be described as capitalist either. The care work pushed onto women in the domestic sphere only remains uncompensated because it is not part of the market. Women’s unpaid labor as a factor of capital accumulation derives from a practice that reaches further back in time than capitalism. Yet, despite— or perhaps because of— such disjunctive reasoning, Ghodsee’s book will continue to prompt debate. It is a most timely reminder that there is a way other than capitalism and to show it to the next generation. And it is a call for feminist German scholars to come down from the ivory tower and make the world their classroom. Evelyn Preuss Yale University Copyright © 2020 University of Nebraska Press