This post is not about lions, but I think you’ll see the reason for the reference.
Do / did women live better lives under socialism?
Yes, at least in some ways, according to this article.
It makes a few interesting points.
[W]hen women have economic independence from men, they don’t stick around in bad relationships.
I’m sure that’s true. When women feel they need the income and protection of a man, they’re more likely to put up with a man they might not put up with if they got the income and protection from the government. That may be better for women in some ways, but does that mean it’s better?
So if a man is heterosexual and he wants to be in a relationship with a woman, it’s not that easy to get a woman by providing her economic security she doesn’t have, or buying her something that she needs. He has to be kind, thoughtful, attractive in other ways. And it turns out that when men have to be “interesting” in order to attract women, they are. They actually end up being better men. It’s not that difficult a concept. I don’t know why people are so shocked by this.
No, it’s a rather obvious concept, and I don’t believe people are shocked by it. This is a common red herring — to pretend that people disagree with things they don’t disagree with.
In the former Soviet countries, women may not have been able to take part in free elections or find a diversity of consumer goods, but they were guaranteed public education, jobs, housing, health care, maternity leave, child allowances, child care, and more.
And if for some reason they had to make a choice between the two, which would they choose?
State socialist feminists … understood women to have different needs from men, and sought to implement policies to meet those needs. We’re not talking about gender or sexual equality in exactly the way that it was articulated by Western feminists in the second wave. The idea was instead that men and women were both making valuable contributions to society, but doing so in different ways. Women’s role as mothers was often assumed. To that end, there were many state policies put in place to deal with the work-family balance issues that women are still dealing with today in the West.
That’s remarkably refreshing.
The western idea that women and men are exactly the same (except when that’s inconvenient) is lunacy of the first order. Recognizing that women and men make different but valuable contributions to society is so unbelievably obvious that it’s a wonder anyone has ever doubted it. But at least it’s nice to know that some people kept their sanity in the face of that nonsense.
Alexandra Kollontai, who was the commissar of social welfare … tried to put into place the socialization of child care in the creation of children’s homes. She wanted to create public canteens where people could eat. She wanted to create public laundries.
That reminds me of the scenes in 1984 where the poor dolts had to eat in the state-sponsored cafeteria.
It reminds me a bit of some of the homeschooling debates. Sharon Battles argued that the state had a right to require her to feed her children. It did not have a right to dictate the menu. In the same way, the state could require her to educate her children without having to approve the curriculum.
There’s a long way between wanting to keep the population from starving and setting up public canteens.
In any event, the article has a perspective that’s worth understanding.