this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2026
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Soviet
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This was another really fun chapter. I particularly liked the focus on how progress came slower in agriculture along with collectivization of agriculture, it helps us understand practically how ideas and mindsets change. I also really liked the anecdotes of how women used the Soviet system to defend themselves from malicious husbands, such as the group that took wives only to help them harvest, only for the wives to be able to divorce and take half the gains.
Some of the social views are a bit outdated, as usual, but for the time period this was enormously progressive.
For me, in that part, this line
was particularly notable, for so succinctly stating the materialist conception of the problem. There can be no equality without economic liberation! Under capitalism, or in this case the last remnants of feudalism, true emancipation for women is impossible because their free reproductive labor is required for the system to function - and even in a country controlled by communists, you cannot simply order that women become equal, you have to create the conditions under which that equality is not only possible but required by the intrinsic logic of the economic system.
Exactly! That's the real strength of this work IMO.
She also contrasts this directly with something that wouldn't be out of place if said nowadays. Progressives in capitalist countries can have their struggles erased as the gains they make end up being symbolic or not enough to change the material conditions of those they're fighting for.