GHODSEE: Starting as early as the mid-nineteenth century with people like Charles Fourier,
and Flora Tristan in France and Henri de Saint-Simon, who really talked about the ways in which
socialism, utopian socialism in their formulation, could not really come to fruition without
also a concomitant commitment to women's emancipation.
And if you go back and look at some of these early socialist theories, in fact they were
very much concerned with the women's question as well as with the emancipation of workers
and freedom from the proletariat and the end of exploitation.
That the end of exploitation in the family was. as important of a goal as the end of
exploitation of workers.
And then you have later theorists like August Bebel and Friedrich Engels, and Clara Zetkin
and Alexandra Kollontai in the Soviet Union and before the Soviet Union, really talking
about sexuality and women's economic independence and the ways in which the commodification
of women's sexuality is part of capitalism.
And that once you overthrew capitalism you would have a sort of new kind of woman, the
"woman of the future" Bebel talks about in his book "Woman and Socialism."
So these were theoretical claims and I'm a social scientist and so one of the things
that I thought was really interesting was what happened to women in Eastern Europe after
1989 (or 1991 if you were in the Soviet Union) when you introduced capitalism.
So, as a social scientist I was thinking if I wanted to test these theories on the impact
of economic systems on women's lives- You could imagine a kind of double blind study
where you took a group of women and raise them under capitalism and you took a group
of women and you raised them under some kind of ideal form of socialism, and then you came
up with some kind of rubric and you measured they self-reported life satisfaction or sexual
satisfaction, what happiness- however you wanted to measure it.
But of course you can't do that study because it's unethical.
An RB board wouldn't let you have babies to grow up in this way.
So what we look for as social scientists is a natural experiment.
And what I think is really fascinating about Eastern Europe after 1989 or 1991 is that
is provided a natural empirical experiment, especially in a place like Germany which was
divided during the Cold War, where you had one population of Germans on one side of the
wall, and another population of Germans on the other side of the wall, growing up under
two economic systems.
And low and behold in 1990 they come back together.
And social scientists just had a field day on this.
They asked them all sorts of questions about how the economic system changed their lives
in a variety of different ways.
And so the claim of [my] book is actually quite simple.
It's that, in fact, socialism (and people are going to debate about what that word actually
means, because some people call it state socialism, others call is state capitalism, whatever
it was they had in Eastern Europe, communism) was in fact better for women's lives on a
variety of different rubrics than capitalism in the West.
And I even take that argument a step further and I say that because of the commitment to
women's emancipation that these state socialist countries in Eastern Europe had during the
Cold War (between 1917-1009 in the Soviet Union and between 1945-1989 in Eastern Europe)
their commitment to women's rights actually ended up putting pressure on Western countries
to kind of step up their game when it came to women's rights.
So it's a very empirically based argument.
A lot of people who pick up the book are actually (it kind of has this titillating title which,
of course, the publisher chose) but in fact it is a very seriously empirically rich an
grounded book that really tries to grapple with the data that is available to us.
And again, I understand that there are some methodological questions, but there is data
that is available to us that shows us that not only were women's lives in some respects
much better behind the "iron curtain" during the cold war, but that after 1989 and 1991
their lives rapidly deteriorated with the introduction of free markets.