An amazing review in the New Yorker! →

Heartfelt gratitude to Rebecca Mead! She really understood what I was trying to do with this book. I couldn’t be more thrilled with this engages and rigorous review.

“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.”

Read the full review here

A Roundup of Reviews so far...

“[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 provocative and deftly argued text.”―Broadly

“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

“Ghodsee’s book could not have been published at a better moment … 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” – Emily Witt, Guardian

“Convincing, provocative and useful” –Times Higher Education

“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

“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

“[F]ascinating, thought-provoking and often jarring reading.” The Herald Scotland

“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

“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

Book of the Week in the Times Higher Education Supplement

So this actually happened on Thursday last, but because the review was behind a paywall, I was only now able to figure out how to download it using Factiva. I am so grateful to Lynne Segal for her thoughtful and generous review. I am thrilled that people understand the value of revisiting the state socialist past.

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