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There are plenty of irrational reasons to be nostalgic for the middle of the twentieth century: who doesn’t love the furniture, the hairdos, the cars with vulva-shaped grilles? But there are plenty of practical reasons, too; it was a time of significant social change, thanks in part to the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. Obviously, the Cold War caused plenty of human misery. Repression marred political life while millions died in neocolonial proxy wars and gulags. And the stress of potential nuclear Armageddon wasn’t trivial. But the contest between two superpowers over which system delivered more comfort, freedom, and happiness to its citizens greatly improved the human condition worldwide. University of Pennsylvania ethnographer Kristen Ghodsee writes, “the general scholarly consensus is that ordinary people — whether in the capitalist, Communist, or developing worlds — benefitted from superpower competition. An unintended consequence of American and Soviet grandstanding was often real progress.” Here are a few benefits that the working class in the West reaped from these tensions.

Civil Rights As many historians have pointed out, political leaders across the ideological spectrum persistently argued that racial segregation undermined the United States’ position in the Cold War, making capitalism look bad at home and abroad. Civil rights activists often advanced such arguments, and the political class embraced them. In Brown v. Board of Education , the historic Supreme Court case that made racial segregation illegal, integrating schools all over the nation, the Truman Administration filed an amicus brief arguing that the color line was detrimental to US foreign policy interests: “The United States is trying to prove to the people of the world of every nationality, race, and color, that a free democracy is the most civilized and secure form of government ever devised by man.” The condition of African Americans posed an obstacle to this ambitious scheme, the administration wrote, as “racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills.”

Feminism As Ghodsee has chronicled, the superior situation of women in the East Bloc was a constant and effective source of communist propaganda, which often drew interest from women in the capitalist world. (East German sexologists even found — and their government proudly boasted — that communist women had more orgasms than their luckless West German counterparts.) Women in Western countries did not get the vote until after the 1917 Russian Revolution, which gave women and men equal political rights. The savvy feminist use of Cold War tensions led to paid maternity leave in all but four countries (one of which was the United States, natch). Jenny Brown, abortion rights activist and author of Without Apology , recently pointed out in an interview with Jacobin that American women won legal abortion partly because women in most Communist countries enjoyed this fundamental right. It became, she noted, an embarrassment that women in the “free world” had no legal remedies for unwanted pregnancies at home, but could travel to Poland and get an abortion for $10.