Sexual Politics

Acute observers perceived that the rationalization for the repeal of the right to legal abortion as a desire to protect the health of the mother was a hypocrisy which “obviously camouflaged” 43 the desire for a rise in the birth rate as the result of war preparations.

Just as in Nazi Germany, the mood had changed to one which dictated large population growth in an increasingly militarized society.
Abortion was the first wedge, but other reactionary attitudes which had persisted soon began to reassert themselves.

The effect here is to force motherhood on the unwilling as a social obligation, to deny that sexuality may be removed from procreation, and to create a negative attitude toward sexuality itself under the guise of pious concern over women and babies. The last was hardly necessary, so great was the shame and distaste for sexuality in Soviet women, a legacy from prerevolutionary attitudes, that the same congress could affirm that 60–70 per cent of women were incapable of experiencing sexual pleasure.

Despite legalization it had taken ten years to stamp out the underground trade in abortions and the excessive or abusive resort to abortion was the result of so negative an attitude toward sexuality that women felt guilty in using contraception.

The abuses which arose from the government’s own failures and omissions opened the way for the experts and the moralists, the party pundits, and the gradual erosion of the new liberties under the banner of humanistic justification of traditional strictures. The revisionists had arrived on the scene and the radical views of the feminists and revolutionaries Kollontai and Wolffson were publicly censured as unsound.

A population so recently freed did not know how to use its freedom

In practice the new sexual freedom applied largely as a freedom for men. There is considerable evidence that in many ways the conditions of women worsened in the first decades of the revolution and that they were sexually exploited on a large scale. The great mass of women, illiterate, submissive after centuries of subordination, with little realization of their rights, could scarcely take advantage of the new freedoms to the degree which men could.

to implement a sexual revolution, the real test would be in changing attitudes

As Trotsky comments icily, “You cannot ‘abolish’ the family, you have to replace it.”

beyond declaring that the compulsive family must go, Marxist theory had failed to supply a sufficient ideological base for a sexual revolution, and was remarkably naïve as to the historical and psychological strength of patriarchy. Engels had supplied nothing but a history and economy of the patriarchal family, neglecting to investigate the mental habits it inculcates.