Kristen R. Ghodsee has her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and is professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has written six books on gender, socialism, and post-socialism in Eastern Europe, examining the everyday experiences of upheaval and displacement that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Ghodsee also writes on women's issues for the Chronicle of Higher Education and is the co-author of Professor Mommy: Finding Work-Family Balance in Academia. Her articles and essays have appeared in publications such as Eurozine, Dissent, Foreign Affairs, Jacobin, and the New York Times.
"[A] short, crisp and wonderfully engaging polemic [that] couldn't
be more urgent.... A tonic for a badly ailing discourse....
Ghodsee's book shows that for women, socialism can at least improve
the conditions for pleasure, and perhaps inextricably, love."--Liza
Featherstone, Jacobin
"A passionate but reasoned feminist socialist manifesto for the
21st century... Ghodsee's treatise will be of interest to women
becoming disillusioned with the capitalism under which they were
raised."--Publishers Weekly
"A pointed examination of the Soviet experiment... Using her years
living in Bulgaria as fodder for the narrative, along with decades
of research, [Ghodsee] makes the case that there are lessons
capitalist countries can and should learn from socialism... At the
same time, the author isn't blind to the failures of socialist
regimes... While the title is the literary version of click-bait,
the book is chock-full of hard-hitting real talk."--Kirkus
Reviews
"A provocative and deftly argued text."--Broadly
"A quietly damning indictment of the Lean In approach to women's
empowerment through the corporate boardroom. Ghodsee makes a
compelling case for a more expansive understanding of feminism,
where remaking the economy is central. A necessary reminder that
today's socialism should be as much about pleasure as it is about
power and production."--Kate Aronoff, coeditor of Democratic
Socialism, American Style
"A straightforward account of how capitalism harms women-including,
yes, in our intimate lives... It made me want to do much more than
vote."--Jewish Currents
"Brilliant ... engaging ... Ghodsee is not naive [and] brings the
necessary scepticism to her thesis [which] comes into sharp focus
when she looks at what happened after the Wall fell ... [a]
valuable record of how things were and how they could be."--Rosie
Boycott, Financial Times
"Capitalism has fundamentally shaped and warped the ways we relate
to each other, sexually and otherwise...leading us to view intimacy
and love as things that only exist in finite quantities, and that
are only worth investing in worthy relationships. Ghodsee's book
offers an alternative to this model, looking back at the
state-socialist regimes in the 20th century, under which the state
liberalized divorce laws, legalized abortion, invested in
collective laundries and nurseries, and enabled women to attain
more economic freedom-and in turn, better sex."--The Cut
"Convincing, provocative and useful."--Times Higher Education
"Ghodsee's focus...on sex and sexual relations emerges elegantly
from the argument she has developed: that a feminist politics is
central to socialism because it cannot avoid its foundation in
economic principles. So long as women are economically dependent on
men, there can be no equality; without such equality, she argues,
heterosexual relations will suffer and so will the experience of
sex itself."--In These Times
"Reliant on the commodification of everything, capitalism's triumph
is a calamity for most women. Their hard slog as mothers and
careers can never be remunerated within market societies which, by
design, are compelled to commodify their sexuality, robbing them in
the process of their autonomy, even of the opportunity to enjoy sex
for-themselves. Without romanticizing formerly communist regimes,
Ghodsee's new book retrieves brilliantly the plight of hundreds of
millions of women in those countries as they were being stripped of
state support and thrust into brutal, unfettered markets. Employing
personal anecdotes, forays into the history of the women's movement
and an incisive mind, Ghodsee is enabling us to overcome the
unnecessary tension between identity and class politics on the road
towards the inclusive, progressive movement for societal change we
so desperately need."--Yanis Varoufakis, author of Adults in
the Room
"The virtue of Ghodsee's smart, accessible book is that it
illustrates how it might be possible for a woman-or, for that
matter, a man-to have an entirely different structural relationship
to something as fundamental as sex, or health...
Ghodsee approvingly notes the growing appeal of socialist ideas
among young people in the United States and Western Europe, and her
book is a useful reminder that the spread of these ideas would not
just advantage the Bernie bros but might also better women's lives
in significant ways. More orgasms alone might be a fine thing. But
a change in the structural conditions under which more orgasms
might be possible is another level of turn-on entirely."--Rebecca
Mead, The New Yorker
"There are many reasons to revisit socialist policies in a time of
widening inequality, but a feminist perspective offers some of the
most powerful incentives."--The Guardian
"This book is funny, angry, and urgent-it's going to make readers
think very differently about how they work, and how they live.
Ghodsee is going to start a revolution. I'm already making a
placard."--Daisy Buchanan, author of How To Be a
Grown-Up
"What if all it takes to get laid more is to embrace democratic
socialism?... Ghodsee demonstrates how, historically, women have
reported greater sexual satisfaction under democratic socialist
(and even communist) governments."--Sophia Benoit, GQ Magazine
"With acumen and wit, [Ghodsee] lays bare the inequities women face
under capitalism and the desirability of decoupling 'love and
intimacy from economic considerations.'"--O Magazine
"Wonderful ... Kristen Ghodsee doesn't wear rose-tinted spectacles
... but she seeks with great brio and nuance to lay out what some
socialist states achieved for women ... That Ghodsee also makes
this a joyous read is the cherry on the cake."--Suzanne Moore,
Observer
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