On March 9, 2018, the Financial Times — not exactly a bastion of pro-socialist sentiment — had some nice things to say about Communism. In a special report on “Women in Technology,” FT discussed the reasons for large percentages of women in the tech sectors of Bulgaria and Romania.¹ When examining the European data, it turned out that eight of the ten countries with the highest percentages of women working in technology were former state-socialist countries where “the Soviet legacy” of promoting women in math, science, and engineering had created a social environment conducive to women’s success in these fields, even three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Back in 2015, an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) health report revealed that six of the top ten countries with the highest percentage of female doctors were also on the other side of the former Iron Curtain.² An astounding three-fourths of all doctors in Estonia were women, compared to only one-third of the doctors in the United States. Yet another report from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) found that, as compared to Western Europe, Eastern European countries had much higher percentages of women working in the fields of scientific research and development.³ As recently as 2012, two-thirds of judges in Russia were women.⁴ In all cases, the explanation for the disparity was the long history of state-socialist commitments to women’s education and employment. Despite decades of feminist activism in the West, women in the former socialist countries still enjoy greater access to jobs in prestigious economic sectors.

Despite the data, it’s still hard to have a conversation about what socialism might have gotten right. Two 2017 New York Times op-eds suggesting that twentieth-century Communism had done some good things for women were met with howls of outrage from Fox News and the troll armies of the alt-right.⁵ The historical memory of twentieth-century state socialism is so contested that many leftists — anarchists and democratic socialists alike — try to run from it, lest they look like apologists for Soviet horrors.⁶ Feminists, too, dismiss the achievements of women in the former Eastern Bloc because they were imposed from the top down and within a context of political autocracy.⁷ More importantly, state-socialist women rejected the basic premise of Western liberal feminism: men and women should be treated the same. Socialists always believed that men and women were equal, but different, and that the state had a strong role to play in ensuring that women’s reproductive biology did not disadvantage them.