The Shocking Sexism of Socialism

Communist factories failed to manufacture even the most basic items for women. You should ask why.

by Chelsea Follett
July 11, 2018

The 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution has brought with it much whitewashing of history. Perhaps the most absurd example of this whitewashing is a New York Times piece claiming that women in the Communist bloc “enjoyed many rights and privileges unknown in liberal democracies at the time.”

The reality of centrally planned economics is shockingly sexist, no matter how much lip service was paid to gender equality. When there is no market incentive to fulfill human needs, it is women’s needs that are forgotten first.

Communist factories failed to manufacture even the most basic items for women. “In all these years, communism has not been able to produce a simple sanitary napkin, a bare necessity for women,” writes Slavenka Draculić. In How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, she chronicles the everyday indignities suffered by women in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, East Germany and her native Yugoslavia. Ordinary women’s sanitary prod…