The end of socialism in the Soviet Union and its satellite states ushered in a new era of choice. Yet the idea that people are really free to live as they choose turns out to be problematic. Personal choice is limited by a range of factors such as a person’s economic situation, class, age, government policies and social expectations, especially regarding gender roles. Furthermore, the notion of free choice is a crucial feature of capitalist ideology, and can be manipulated in the interests of the market. This edited collection explores the complexity of choice in Russia and Ukraine. The contributors explore how the new choices available to people after the collapse of the Soviet Union have interacted with and influenced gender identities and gender, and how choice has become one of the driving forces of class-formation in countries which were, in the Soviet era, supposedly classless. The book will of interest to students and scholars across a range of subjects including gender and sexualities studies, history, sociology and political science.

The striking fact that abortion was among the first issues raised, after 1989, by almost all of the newly formed governments of East Central Europe points to the significance of gender and reproduction in the postsocialist transformations. The fourteen studies in this volume result from a comparative, collaborative research project on the complex relationship between ideas and practices of gender, and political economic change. The book presents detailed evidence about women's and men's new circumstances in eight of the former communist countries, exploring the intersection of politics and the life cycle, the differential effects of economic restructuring, and women's public and political participation. Individual contributions on the former German Democratic Republic, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria provide rich empirical data and interpretive insights on postsocialist transformation analyzed from a gendered perspective. Drawing on multiple methods and disciplines, these original papers advance scholarship in several fields, including anthropology, sociology, women's studies, law, comparative political science, and regional studies. The analyses make clear that practices of gender, and ideas about the differences between men and women, have been crucial in shaping the broad social changes that have followed the collapse of communism. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Eleonora Zieliãska, Eva Maleck-Lewy, Myra Marx Ferree, Sharon Wolchik, Irene Dölling, Daphne Hahn, Sylka Scholz, Mira Marody, Anna Giza-Poleszczuk, Katalin Kovács, Mónika Váradi, Julia Szalai, Adriana Baban, MaÏgorzata Fuszara, Laura Grunberg, Zorica Mrseviâ, Krassimira Daskalova, Joanna Goven, and Jasmina Lukiâ.

This essay anthology explores the intersection of gender, food and culture in post-1960s Soviet life from personal cookbooks to gulag survival. Seasoned Socialism considers the relationship between gender and food in late Soviet daily life, specifically between 1964 and 1985. Political and economic conditions heavily influenced Soviet life and foodways during this period and an exploration of Soviet women’s central role in the daily sustenance for their families as well as the obstacles they faced on this quest offers new insights into intergenerational and inter-gender power dynamics of that time. Seasoned Socialism considers gender construction and performance across a wide array of primary sources, including poetry, fiction, film, women’s journals, oral histories, and interviews. This collection provides fresh insight into how the Soviet government sought to influence both what citizens ate and how they thought about food.

A spirited, deeply researched exploration of why capitalism is bad for women and how, when done right, socialism leads to economic independence, better labor conditions, better work-life balance and, yes, even better sex. In a witty, irreverent op-ed piece that went viral, Kristen Ghodsee argued that women had better sex under socialism. The response was tremendous — clearly she articulated something many women had sensed for years: the problem is with capitalism, not with us. Ghodsee, an acclaimed ethnographer and professor of Russian and East European Studies, spent years researching what happened to women in countries that transitioned from state socialism to capitalism. She argues here that unregulated capitalism disproportionately harms women, and that we should learn from the past. By rejecting the bad and salvaging the good, we can adapt some socialist ideas to the 21st century and improve our lives. She tackles all aspects of a woman's life - work, parenting, sex and relationships, citizenship, and leadership. In a chapter called "Women: Like Men, But Cheaper," she talks about women in the workplace, discussing everything from the wage gap to harassment and discrimination. In "What To Expect When You're Expecting Exploitation," she addresses motherhood and how "having it all" is impossible under capitalism. Women are standing up for themselves like never before, from the increase in the number of women running for office to the women's march to the long-overdue public outcry against sexual harassment. Interest in socialism is also on the rise -- whether it's the popularity of Bernie Sanders or the skyrocketing membership numbers of the Democratic Socialists of America. It's become increasingly clear to women that capitalism isn't working for us, and Ghodsee is the informed, lively guide who can show us the way forward.

“A valuable and uncommon perspective . . . The book covers both theory of women’s oppression and the history and politics of women’s movements.” —Dana L. Cloud, author of Reality Bites More than forty years after the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, women remain without equal rights. If anything, each decade that has passed without a fighting women’s movement has seen a rise in blatant sexism and the further erosion of the gains that were won in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet liberal feminist organizations have followed the Democratic Party even as it has continually tacked rightward since the 1980s. This fully revised edition examines these issues from a Marxist perspective, focusing on the centrality of race and class. It includes chapters on the legacy of Black feminism and other movements of women of color and the importance of the concept of intersectionality. In addition, Women and Socialism: Class, Race, and Capital explores the contributions of socialist feminists and Marxist feminists in further developing a Marxist analysis of women’s oppression amid the stirrings of a new movement today. Praise for Sharon Smith’s Subterranean Fire “Sharon Smith brings that history to life once again, blasting through the myths of the working class that Trump-era narratives cling to in order to connect us once again to the possibility of building broad solidarity.” —Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won’t Love You Back “A veteran worker-intellectual brilliantly addresses the crisis of the labor movement, skewering those who believe that renewal can come from the top down, and encouraging those who are fighting to rebuild it from the bottom up.” —Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums

This book showcases extensive research on gender under state socialism, examining the subject in terms of state policy and law; sexuality and reproduction; the academy; leisure; the private sphere; the work world; opposition activism; and memory and identity.

Though there has been much research on the incomplete emancipation project of state socialism in East and Central Europe, very little has been published on how the state and its institutions conceived of gender as a concept. This book seeks to understand if and how this conceptualization developed in the second half of the twentieth century, and what impact it had on everyday life and on culture. This study moves beyond the dichotomous gender perspectives and towards a nuanced understanding of the diverse discursive negotiations, agendas, actors and agency involved in state-socialist gender practices. Including a detailed case study on Czechoslovakia, contributors explore these issues in a series of independent, but collaboratively developed studies, placing their research in the context of other East Central European countries. The studies collected in the volume bring to light fresh material and consider it from the combined perspective of current gender theory and internal ideological dynamics of state socialism, breaking new ground in gender theory, cultural theory and studies of state socialism. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of gender studies, socialism, Cold-War politics and Eastern European politics and culture.

True examines political and gendered identities in flux in post-communist Czech Republic. She argues that the privatization of a formerly state economy and the adoption of consumer-oriented market practices were shaped by ideas and attitudes about gender roles. This book also offers a provocative general thesis about the inextricable linkages between political and economic changes and gender identities.

Focusing on the relationship between gender and the state in the construction national identity politics in twentieth-century northern Sudan, the author investigates the mechanisms that the state and political and religious interest groups employ for achieving political and cultural hegemony. Hale argues that such a process involves the transformation of culture through the involvement of women in both left-wing and Islamist revolutionary movements. In drawing parallels between the gender ideology of secular and religious organizations in Sudan, Hale analyzes male positioning of women within the culture to serve the movement. Using data from fieldwork conducted between 1961 and 1988, she investigates the conditions under which women’s culture can be active, generating positive expressions of resistance and transformation. Hale argues that in northern Sudan women may be using Islam to construct their own identities and improve their situation. Nevertheless, she raises questions about the barriers that women may face now that the Islamic state is achieving hegemony, and discusses limits of identity politics.

Lost Intimacies: Rethinking Homosexuality under National Socialism uses queer theory as a hermeneutic tool with which to read against the grain of heterotextual narratives of the Holocaust and as a way of locating alternative pathways of meaning in dominant Holocaust research. Specifically addressing the racialization of sexuality, the book asks how the politics of sexuality can be more explicitly and systematically theorized, along with state-sanctioned homophobia under Nazism, with a clear recognition that homophobia seldom operated alone, but worked in conjunction with other axes of power, including race, gender, eugenics, and population politics. In theorizing gender and sexuality as entangled axes of analysis, the book allows the specificity of lesbian difference to emerge and challenges the received wisdom that lesbians were not as systematically persecuted under National Socialism. William J. Spurlin questions the wisdom of received scholarship that reduces Nazi fascism to latent homosexuality, and examines the possible implications of Nazi homophobia, and its imbrication with other deployments of power, for the study of contemporary culture where the homophobic impulse continues to reverberate, thereby challenging understandings of history steeped in notions of progressive modernity.