Women and Socialism

Speech given at the Women's Equality Conference

When our topic is "women and socialism," should we speak about the past or the future? We Communists look to the future-socialism. And we have theory (Marxism) as well as our own experiences in political work, to draw on as we plan and one day bring about our socialism, our own socialist society.

Yet we also have a past, something the founders of the first socialist societies did not have; we have their experience. We must study it and learn from it. "Early socialism" existed-in the Soviet Union for seventy-five years, and for over forty years in the European socialist countries of Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, and especially (for me) the German Democratic Republic. (I'll speak only of the European socialist countries here; other lessons remain to be learned from attempts elsewhere). Each built its socialism on its own culture. Since the history of women's roles in each of these cultures was unique, the policies these new socialist societies developed toward women differed, and the lives of women within them differed even more, but there were important common features.

These first socialist societies accomplished much for women, and we can be proud. None, however, was a utopia. Why and why not? My own experience suggests to me some answers. My personal experience has been: living and teaching in the German Democratic Republic for a total of two years, in 1978-79, 1981, and 1987; a summer at Moscow State University; and other visits to the Soviet Union, Poland, and the GDR. I also spent thirty years teaching women's studies at the University of Minnesota, studying women's issues and feminist theory.

My conclusion is that I would like my grandchildren and great grandchildren to grow up in a socialist society-even in the "early socialism" I saw in Europe, and even more in a later socialism we can build, our socialism. But they will still have work to do-especially the women. They will have work to do in society, in their political parties, in their unions, in their families. These socialist women will have to continue their own liberation.

Now let me summarize some past achievements in which we can take pride as socialists, and suggest some areas where we as socialists can do better in the future.

The German Democratic Republic was founded in 1949 (by German Communists and Social Democrats with Soviet support) and for forty years provided an ongoing contrast with the other Germany. After the West German takeover, when the first German socialist state was terminated by the so-called reunification, women were in the forefront of the widespread and rapidly growing, but sadly belated, awareness of what had been lost.

The lives of GDR women included career-92% held jobs outside their homes. Child care was state run and funded, a full part of the public education system, and unique even among socialist countries. In 1989, over 80% of children under 3, and 95% of 3 to 6-year olds, were in modern, well-staffed day-care facilities located conveniently in residential complexes or work sites. Equal pay for equal work was guaranteed. An Equal Rights Amendment was not needed: from the beginning the GDR Constitution (I quote from the 1974 version) read: "Men and women have equal rights and have the same legal status in all spheres of social, state and personal life. The promotion of women, particularly with regard to vocational qualification, is a task of society and the state." Besides legal equality, the GDR was advanced in some other aspects of theory: it was the first of the socialist countries to eliminate the designation of homosexuality as a psychological disorder. Gays and lesbians had full civil rights (although social acceptance lagged.) Contraception and abortion were included as part of universal free health care.

In the GDR the term welfare did not exist, but social responsibility did. What in the United States are seen as at best "entitlements" and at worst as wasteful, character-destroying handouts were provisions by the society as a whole for the general good. Family allowances, days off at full pay for household tasks, the prized "baby year" (the option for a mother of spending a year or more at home caring for an infant while receiving 3/4 or even all of her usual paycheck), even special privileges for large ("children-rich") families-all were taken for granted and were a real material boon for women.

In 1990 virtually all of these benefits disappeared. Reunification is acknowledged, across almost the entire political spectrum, to have been a setback for German women. Sudden unemployment in the former GDR hit women hardest; discrimination was blatant-East German women were simply fired. A forced stampede, since reunification, back to traditional childrearing within the family with traditional maternal responsibility met wide acceptance, even (reflecting a clear consciousness problem) among women. Many articles in U.S. academic journals and feminist publications have detailed this loss. This has been a breath of reason in the almost universal celebration in U.S. media of how wonderful it is that the West won the Cold War. (Socialists have potential allies here.)

The practice was better than the theory, however, the deeds better than the understanding, and gaps in consciousness had some unfortunate and unforeseen results. Social policies had the one-sided goal of enabling women to combine motherhood with employment, rather than offering incentives for responsible parenthood that would encourage men to take an active role in parenting. It was seen as self-evident and "natural" that women not only had a unique role in reproduction but also bore primary (and almost exclusive hands-on) responsibility for children, housework, and family. Surveys and time-budget studies showed that women were in fact washing the dishes and changing the diapers.

A gender-wage gap existed in the GDR: women's pay averaged 75% to 80% of men's, largely because of gender-specific career choices. (This gap is far less marked than it was in West Germany and is actually less than that in the United States today-but by socialist standards it is imperfect). Several jobs, all with low pay, were held almost exclusively by women: stenotypist, textile worker, caregiver of young children, certain retail salesworkers. Some jobs were all male: plumber, fitter, control panel operative. Companies preferred male applicants for apprentices in technical occupations, giving as reasons: high dropout rate among women, physical demands of jobs, no technical motivation and interest among women. The important role of tradition was underestimated, such as attitudes toward family roles and appropriate jobs for women. Half of the academic staff in GDR universities were women, but the administrative pyramid was gender-skewed; few women held the highest-level positions such as presidents, deans, and department heads.

Socialist Germany inherited a paternalistic and patriarchal equal-rights policy rooted in social democratic and Communist labor movements that resulted in continuing social inequality between men and women. Father State made moms happy. Gender equality was official policy and loudly proclaimed. Even Communist men could ignore social inequality and the power relations resulting from division of labor. Men were almost entirely relieved of responsibilities as fathers and husbands.

No independent women's movement existed in the GDR. The official women's organization was a peace and solidarity group (often an effective one), mobilizing women to support broad political and social goals, not a women's rights organization. East German women had no experience organizing for their own gender-specific rights. No theoretical discussions in their own organizations had prepared them to define their own "family values." Vulnerable to propaganda, lured by Western consumer goods, socialist women were unprepared to fight for what they had. Their lives constricted to the domestic sphere with no social support, disentitlement, unemployment, stunned at their social losses-women of the former socialist Germany are left with regret and recrimination.

I shall cite one further testimony to the mixed achievements and legacy of socialist societies. Margaret Randall is a friend of socialism and a fierce anticapitalist and anti-imperialist. She lived for years in Cuba and Nicaragua (when she returned to the United States, the George Bush administration tried to deny her U.S. citizenship, and she became a historic immigration case). Her verdict is that twentieth-century revolutions failed to "develop a feminist agenda." Why? She recognizes that they all produced a better life for women. She remembers living in Cuba with four children and her relief at an assured job, health care, education, recreation, culture-all free-and her delight at a society without a culture of violence and drugs. She evokes the joy of Nicaraguan women at the government decree forbidding degrading images of the female body in advertising. Yet she believes socialists failed to understand the importance of feminism, some aspects of race relations, cultural diversity, sexual difference, critical thought, and certain individual freedoms. These failures risk leaving people unwilling to defend revolutions they do not feel a part of. (And Cuba, alone among the socialist countries, takes just pride in its Family Code!)

In summary, it seems to me that the past-early socialist societies-shows us that it is possible to integrate women into economic and public life, to give women material and social support, and in general make women's lives better, happier, and more secure. Two important shortcomings in these societies prevented women's achievement of full social equality:
(1) underestimation of the importance of consciousness, the necessity for both women and men to develop new understandings of gender roles.
(2) failure to permit and encourage independent women's organizations.

What have we learned? Women's equality is not automatic, not an inevitable by-product of any other form of social progress. We know this now, not only theoretically, but from experience. Perhaps that knowledge is the most valuable legacy of the early socialist societies for our topic-"women and socialism."