Sex and equal rights in Eastern Europe: What socialism did for women

VIENNA — The trouble started with The New York Times. In 2017, the newspaper of record reached out to see if she would be interested in contributing a thousand words to mark the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

"As somebody who has spent more or less my entire academic career studying women's rights in the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe, I wrote what I thought was a basically fairly obvious thing," Kristen R. Ghodsee, a professor of Russian and Eastern European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, recounted at a Dec. 4 talk in the capital of Austria. "If you compare women in Eastern Europe to women in Western Europe, women in the Eastern Bloc countries just had way more rights and privileges than women in the West."

Those rights and privileges, as Ghodsee wrote in 2017, included "major state investments in their education and training, their full incorporation into the labor force, generous maternity leave allowances and guaranteed free child care." Those perks and accompanying reductions in stress, and the other failings of the former Soviet Union aside, translated into real-world satisfaction: a 1990 study of East and West Germany, for instance, "found that Eastern women had twice as many orgasms as Western women."

"Of course," Ghodsee said in Vienna, "The New York Times decided to go with the very sensational, clickbaity title, 'Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.'" Props to the editor, though: it worked.

"Unfortunately, as I'm sure you can imagine, when you publish in a major newspaper, things quickly spiral out of hand. And the reaction to this was swift, vitriolic and utterly incredulous," Ghodsee said. Feminism was a product of the Western, capitalist world, or so many Americans liked to believe, and so was the whole notion of women's sexual liberation. "So there was no possible way that women in totalitarian countries could have better sex or better lives or better anything."

Critics questioned her scholarship and charged her with apologism for tyranny.

"Yes, that's why birth rates plummeted in the USSR and men drank themselves into a stupor, because sex under socialism was so much better!" wrote one poster on Reddit.

"Women in East Germany may have had more orgasms," wrote a contributor to the conservative Washington Examiner, but that's not a good argument "for an all-powerful government," they said. "Because in a free-market economy, women don't have to rely on the state to fulfill their needs."

"It's hard to get in the mood when you're sharing a bedroom with your mother-in-law," crowed Reason magazine after Ghodsee expanded the argument to book form (in the present day, a third of American adults under 35 still live with their parents, by the way).

"I think it's fair to acknowledge these were not perfect societies — obviously," Ghodsee said. "There were a lot of issues that women still continue to face, particularly the persistence of patriarchy, particularly the persistence of the double burden, the responsibility for housework and childcare ... [and] very essentialist binary categories that, from the vantage point of 2025, we recognize as being a little out of date."

"But," she continued, "there is absolutely no doubt in my mind, and to this day, I will very proudly stand and say that a woman in Bulgaria or a woman in Poland, when I was born in 1970, unequivocally had more opportunities in her life than I would have had at the same time in the United States."

A failure with achievements

Even today, though, decades after the fall of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the impact can still be seen.

In 2018, researchers at the Paris School of Economics published a paper arguing that East Germany's "radical experiment in gender equality in the labor market and other instances" has had a lasting impact on gender norms. Specifically, they examined performance in mathematics, showing that the gap between girls and boys is "sharply reduced" in the former German Democratic Republic relative to the rest of Europe.

Conceding the flaws of top-down, state socialism — that the project's final collapse was an indictment of the model — Ghodsee argued that this lasting impact exposes the problems with "what we call 'liberal feminism,'" at least in its more vulgar forms (think: former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg's "Lean In"-style of equality in the boardroom).

"It gave privileges to a certain class of women without actually structurally changing the circumstances under which women could achieve their own economic independence and make decisions for themselves," Ghodsee said.

By contrast, in the former Eastern bloc, "They were very clearly sort of top-down feminist projects, where the state mandated that women had to work; or the state mandated certain kind of policies around parental leave; where the state decided that there would be kindergartens and public cafeterias and canteens and so on and so forth," she said. "It's very clear that these sorts of state policies that changed the playing field in the long run benefited women to a much greater degree than the kind of burning-your-bra liberal feminism that we had in the United States or in Western Europe."

Still, Ghodsee argued there is no going back, nor should the progressive left seek to answer the reactionary nostalgia of the right with sentimentality of its own. Today, the focus should not be so much on a workers' state but a state of leisure — a society that allows men, women and those who reject such binaries to enjoy more time with their friends and family; a 30-hour work week and a universal basic income, perhaps, as part of a vision of a future that's more than just a return to the past.

Ultimately, "state socialism in Eastern Europe in the 20th century was an abject failure," Ghodsee said. "It fell into a capitalist mindset. It fell into a workerist, productivist mindset. It had real structural problems."

But even though the system did not always deliver, there was at least the claim that society, as a collective, was working to build something better. That is something often missing in today's politics.

"The utopian vision — that initial impulse of, 'What if we built a world whereby everybody could flourish, rather than a small elite? That is still a vision that we share, some of us, and that is an inspirational vision."

Contact the author at cdavis@theredoubt.net and follow him on Bluesky.