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Interview by Meagan Day

In her new book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, ethnographer Kristen Ghodsee recounts a popular joke that’s told in many East European languages:

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.”

Hundreds of millions of living Eastern Europeans, including many who abhorred the political reality behind the Iron Curtain, report that their basic standard of living was higher under authoritarian socialism than under contemporary free-market capitalism. Taking a cue from them, Ghodsee’s book starts from the premise that some aspects of life were better under twentieth-century state socialism than they are today, even as others were worse. Appreciating the bad parts doesn’t require ignoring the good parts, her thinking goes. One can acknowledge simultaneously the horrors of the secret police and the comforts of a strong social safety net.

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:

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.

Jacobin staff writer Meagan Day spoke with Ghodsee about women’s prospects under socialism and capitalism.