Wasnt there an article that said this and was basically like: "The evil commies FORCED women to be highly educated!"?
Of course it's The Economist :wolff-shining:
"Some of this is a legacy of Soviet times, when communist regimes pressed both men and women into scientific careers and did not always give them a choice about it. "
https://web.archive.org/web/20210201010330if_/https://www.economist.com/europe/2019/07/18/why-half-the-scientists-in-some-eastern-european-countries-are-women
Unlike capitalism, in which nobody is ever forced to take a job they don't want.
Sorry, but when you think the socialism does good, it's actually bad :galaxy-brain:
and did not always give them a choice about it
Yeah, give me sources about such things. But please include how capitalism doesn't, else it is a moot point for societies.
My grandma grew up literally dirt poor and couldn't read until she was in her teens, but then red fascism came and robbed her of that freedom by forcing her to get an advanced education, to the point that she could get a high-paying job as an economist. Where's the Victims of Communism Foundation when you need em :sadness:
Remember when some PMC tweeted that her illiterate grandfather was the most rabid anticommunist she knew, and that Castro only build schools so people read his propaganda. Lmao
hmmmmm, a direct correlational between being uneducated and being anti-communist.... wonder why that is?
In like the 60s woman made up either 40 or 60% I can't remember exactly of chemical engineering graduates in the USSR and in the US it was like 5.7% or something.
Edit: Just checked and today it's 30-35% in the US.
Shit, the reigning Queen of the Neolibs herself, Merkel, has a PhD in quantum chemistry courtesy of the DDR.
Let's get a campaign going to get the university it came from to rescind it
Don't worry. Reunification (or colonialisation if we're being honest) beat you to the punch. The German Academy of Sciences at Berlin doesn't exist anymore.
In the late 80s there was a program starting in East Germany for free transition therapies. East Germany decriminalized homosexualit
a decadeturns out it was a couple of years before West Germany. There was an official Party approved gay club in East Berlin.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_German_Democratic_Republic
We did that too, the first openly gay cabinet level official in Europe served under Lenin and Stalin as Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Gregory Chicherin officially represented the USSR abroad throughout the 1920s conducting high level negotiations.
On the other hand, it didnt do nearly enough to abolish patriarchal relations. So women had two things to deal with - be fully emancipated and participate in work and the like, but at the same time still do the usual domestic work, take care of the kids and so on. So while it did very good on the education and professional front, it really didn't handle the domestic front that well. Do remember to not glorify the USSR, acknowledge the things it did good, but also recognize that in many ways it did little to dismantle many reactionary views in society and sexism was just as rampant as elsewhere.
do the usual domestic work, take care of the kids and so on.
There were significant attempts to socialize domestic labor and counter the patriarchal nature of house work. Creches were plentiful and accessible. Divorce was much easier in the East Block than the west and didn't incur social or material costs. The high level employment of women and accessibility of divorce and single parenting had an effect on the division of domestic labor. Women of the Eastern Block report that pre collapse men were more egalitarian and participatory in house work.
sexism was just as rampant as elsewhere.
Anthropological research shows that this is simply untrue. The communist block performed appreciably better than the west.
I was just watching some thing about Polish people who were sent to Siberia by the USSR during WWII and they said the Soviets had woman do non-household work even as they tried to maintain their "domestic" roles to "hold on to their culture" lol.
It was this: http://polishatheart.com/the-wwii-polish-deportations-still-an-untold-story
Idk in my home country there definitely were very big social costs from divorce. That effect must have been small and limited to a few places, at least based on all the stuff I have grown up hearing about and talking from the older women around me and from engaging with literature and art from the soviet era, as well as with the attitudes of people who have grown up under communism.
In the soviet times, women's souls would be crushed, and they would be forced to be a doctor, a scientist, or a politician. Thank god Gorbachev and Yeltsin came and gave them the freedom to choose between prostitution and unemployment
