Essay Sample: Sexual Tolerance in Eastern Europe During the Early Cold War
To evaluate whether Eastern Europe was sexually tolerant during the early Cold War, it is important to consider the methods of defining and categorizing social bodies, particularly in terms of gender. There is a widely held belief that Eastern European women’s rights were superior to those of Western Europe in the post-World War II period, but is that so? How did the gender politics of Eastern Europe affect the role of women? The socialist regimes in the Eastern Bloc following World War II sought to instate a social contract based upon the fundamentality of the equality of all people, regardless of class, and, to a lesser extent, gender. The political powers in the Eastern Bloc subscribed to the idea of “women’s liberation through work”, a phrase coined by Friedrich Engels, (Massino and Penn 2). This reasoning assumed that women’s participation in the paid labor force would lead to their economic autonomy and equal standing in the workforce, which would, in turn, lead to the eradication of the patriarchy in other aspects of life, particularly in the home. However, despite introducing equality between sexes from a legislative standpoint (such as universal education and healthcare), the true motivations behind granting women’s rights a decade earlier than in Western Europe were less focused on the true liberation of women and more concerned about serving the needs of the state; these states understood that one way to remedy falling birth rates and encourage economic productivity was to allow for women to feel as if they are equal to men. From an economic standpoint, although women were encouraged to get jobs, they were often placed in low-skilled and low-paid positions and were often paid less than their male counterparts. Women’s liberation at a legislative level also functioned as propaganda; the Eastern Bloc was able to contrast these policies with Western Europe, highlighting the West’s backward treatment of women, labeling it as undemocratic and unable to deliver on the promise of equality. Despite the seemingly equal status of women in Eastern Europe, it was generally the case that women acted not only as a worker, but she was also responsible for the upkeep of the home. In this, we see a “worker-mother” duality, (Marcus 121). On one hand, women were expected to contribute to the family financially; on the other, she was also expected to do the majority of household chores, in addition to serving the needs of their husband, which was considered a “women’s business” (Marcus 122). Albeit the concept of the wife serving the husband had previously been justified through the role of women in Christianity (i.e. Eve, Mary), Marcus asserts that, with religion stripped from State Socialist Eastern Europe, the practice of a wife enduring whatever treatment her husband deemed appropriate was attributed to a biological explanation–that women were biologically and psychologically well-suited to withstand suffering (122). The cruel practice of wife-beating was not lost to the liberation of women in Eastern Europe, it remained “cloaked in a culturally endorsed silence,” (Marcus 122). Despite an increase in accessibility to divorce (in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, laws allowing for divorce when both spouses did not agree were put in place in 1949 for the former and 1952 for the latter, with women most often being the ones seeking a divorce,) women often had to face roadblocks that prevented them from escaping domestic abuse, including a manipulated divorce process with additional legal steps as hindrances. These hindrances were instated in response to a rapidly rising divorce rate without a parallel high remarriage rate or declining birth rate. Abortion was another right granted to Eastern European women far before their Western counterparts, beginning with Hungary legalizing abortion in 1953, leading other Eastern European countries to follow suit, including the USSR in 1955, and Czechoslovakia in 1957. Notwithstanding these three states granting women more autonomy over their bodies, it should be noted that not every Socialist Eastern European State decriminalized abortion; Romania remained rather conservative in comparison to her Eastern Bloc counterparts.
As gender and sexuality are most certainly intertwined, it is essential to address how women’s sexuality was controlled in the Eastern Bloc. Granted that some scholars held that socialist states were “puritanical when it came to sex”, others argued that state socialism “brought about a fuller blossoming of heterosexuality, especially in comparison with the Western countries,” (Lišková 23). Lišková goes as far as to say that factors such as higher self-esteem and financial independence made “better sex for communists” possible, (24). As governing bodies sought to resolve issues of falling birth rates, dead marriages became a concern. In an act that exemplifies Foucault’s power-knowledge paradigm, Eastern European states began to examine sexuality to fulfill their own political goals. In this sense, increasing discussions regarding women’s sexuality was simply a roundabout method to assert political power and control over the people. Sexologists began writing marriage treatises emphasizing “loving bonds between spouses that were based on deep friendship, physical attraction and satisfying sex,” (Lišková 51). Further, the communist years in Czechoslovakia saw an increase in concern over women’s pleasure. As early as 1952, sexologists began looking into what was broadly defined as sexual dissatisfaction. The research on women’s sexual pleasure changed over the decade; at the beginning of the 1950s, sexual dissatisfaction was thought to be a result of insufficient love between spouses–explanations shifted to inequality within marriage by the end of the decade. One method of preventing sexual dissatisfaction, according to sexologists, was the availability and effectiveness of contraceptives. Spermicides began to enter the scene around the early 1950s, which, when combined with a pessary, resulted in a 96 percent success rate in avoiding conception. This contraceptive combination was monumental; the pessary-gel combination not only increased the desire for intercourse in more than one-third of the women surveyed but also improved feelings during intercourse for over forty percent of women and multiplied the frequency of orgasms for over half of women. All of the aforementioned facets culminated in a changing attitude towards women’s sexuality, specifically women’s sexual pleasure: reaching orgasm during sex was deemed as important, confuting the conception that communist and socialist states were prudish in regards to matters of sexuality.
In the matter of homosexuality, Eastern European states were by no means accepting of same-sex relations. In the Soviet Union, Igor Kon, a scholar of Soviet and Russian sexuality, went as far as to say that “...homosexuality was simply never mentioned,” (Alexander 1). This is not entirely true, as there was a concern regarding homosexuality, especially within GULAGs, prison infirmaries, and Soviet clinic consultation rooms. The medicalization of homosexuality occurred concurrently with the de-Stalinization period; this once again exemplifies Foucault’s medical-sexual paradigm. Rather than regarding homosexuality as a moral fault, defining it in medical terms engendered a method of targeting homosexual individuals. In a country concerned with falling birth rates and refurbishing the economy, any form of unproductive sex (i.e. masturbation and homosexual sex) became undesirable, as it did not directly serve the desires of the country. While in the early 1950s, measures against homosexuals and lesbians in the GULAG were drafted due to anxieties about homosexuality spreading into wider society, the late 1950s saw an increase in ‘privatization’, and Brezhnev-era legal scholars began to assert that sexual practices were a private matter, and no business of the state. Furthermore, throughout the 1950s, the Soviet state launched a sex education campaign, releasing many sex education manuals. This was a departure from the Stalin-era silence on all things sexual–by creating a seemingly liberal attitude towards sexuality by providing information on sex in manuals, Khrushchev was able to control the stream of information coming out about sex; thereby influencing the sexual lives of the Soviet youth. Again, we see an example of the Foucaultian ‘medical-sexual regime’ as well as the ‘pedagogisation of children’s sex’–Foucault argued that by taking charge of sex in medical and pedagogical discourse, states were able to take advantage of the sexual lives of citizens to serve political and economic goals. The themes of these manuals changed conjointly with the political desires of the Soviet Union; it began with an attempt to eliminate “the vestiges of the capitalist past” and shifted to attacking the “ideological diversions of the West,” (Alexander 52). This change can be attributed to the growing tension between the Soviet Union and the United States; by attacking the sexual practices of the West, the Soviet Union was taking measures to preserve the Eastern sexual ideology of the Soviet youth.
