Vol 2 – Issue 2 by Catalyst

Author:Catalyst
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-08-25T20:39:41+00:00

Of course, not every child would report such a rosy memory of their kindergarten experience, but that is probably true everywhere in the world. What is key here is that the socialist state committed itself to providing universal, subsidized childcare for all working women and that it was normal for children to attend. Women felt no social pressure to stay home.

State-socialist governments also actively encouraged women and girls to study science and engineering. The Soviets were so successful at identifying and training their brightest women in technical fields that the United States felt compelled to do the same. After the 1957 launch of Sputnik, the United States Congress passed the 1958 National Defense Education Act (NDEA), which specifically included funds for the encouragement of women’s education in math and science. In 1961, John F. Kennedy established the first Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, citing national security concerns; American leaders feared that the Reds were winning the space race because they had double the brain power.40 By 1970, 43 percent of Romanian students enrolled in engineering institutes were women, as were 39 percent of all engineering students in the USSR and 27 percent of students in Bulgaria. About one in five engineering students in Yugoslavia and Hungary were women in that same year.41 In 1976, women earned only 3.4 percent of bachelor’s degrees in engineering in the United States.42 Because of their command economies, state-socialist countries could guarantee full employment to all graduates in their fields of expertise (although not always in the most desirable location). Nevertheless, it is probably safe to say that there were more women employed in engineering in the Eastern Bloc countries in 1975 than there are in the United States in 2018. After her research trips to study women’s issues around the Eastern Bloc in the mid-1970s, Jancar reported: “The Communists’ achievements in providing education for women were among the benefits of the system most frequently mentioned by the women I interviewed. One of the most frequently expressed beliefs was that only under ‘socialism’ were women able to work or be educated in significant proportions. Even those who had lived and worked for a while in the West were of the conviction that socialism alone had liberated women.”43

The difference of American and Soviet women’s attitudes toward professional life was best captured in a quote reported by the economist Norton Dodge, who visited the USSR in 1955, 1962, and 1965 to examine the role of women in the Soviet economy. At a conference on women in the Soviet Union at Bryn Mawr College in May 1968, Dodge shared his recollections of a meeting in Moscow with Olympiada Kozlova, the director of the Engineering-Economic Institute. She had attended a conference on peace at Bryn Mawr several years earlier, and was shocked to find that during the breaks, the American attendees chatted about their husbands and their husbands’ various jobs. “Here in the Soviet Union,” Kozlova had told Dodge, “when we women get together, we talk about

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