Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 1945-1989 by Kateřina Lišková (review)

Kateřina Lišková's book offers the first sustained study of sexology in Eastern Europe, and in doing so challenges us, especially in the West, to move beyond a clichéd interpretation of gender relations and communism in Eastern Europe. While westerners often associate the 1950s with a culture of domesticity, and a concentration on family values, the 1960s is better known as a period of liberation from those values, an era of sexual experimentation and freedom that culminates over the long 1960s with the introduction of new birth control technologies, and the decriminalization of abortion and homosexuality. These features have become part of a narrative of progress, fusing elements of democracy with progress and an ideological superiority that justifies these shifts in gender relations. Lišková's focus on the East not only explicitly challenges that narrative, but recalibrates the discussion by exploring gender equality, marriage, and love.

The book is divided in five chapters; the first situates the study geo-politically. Establishing the political context of Eastern Europe, Lišková deftly carves up several myths about the repressive nature of early communism and the monotony of governance throughout the region. She reminds us that under communism, women's equality became a primary focus of state planners. Women gained access to employment, education, and legal rights, including in many cases access to medical abortion, much earlier than women in the west. While the changes were not uniform, Lišková convincingly shows readers that equality for classes also pertained to equality of sexes. During this period, a happy marriage depended on an understanding of men and women as equals. To that end, love-including satisfying sexual relations-meant that men needed to contribute to childrearing and housework as women entered the paid workforce.

The second chapter centres the study on Czechoslovakia. As the country moved through different phases of communism and state socialism, sexologists grew in expertise as they studied and guided men and women in an evolution of gender relations aimed at meeting the political needs of the state. Concerns about declining birth rates in the post-war period occupied state planners, who ultimately agreed that loveless or dead marriages imperiled the birth rate. Liberalizing divorce, and decriminalizing abortion may seem counterintuitive, but as Lišková explains, government planners worked closely with sexologists and determined that better sex and respectful marriages had a better chance of increasing the birthrate. Indeed, in order to change the political and economic structure of the state, planners recognized that they needed to change family values. During the 1950s, Czech women enjoyed many of the freedoms and legal rights that western women would lobby for a decade later.

The female orgasm is the subject of chapter three. As sexologists looked to improve marital relations with the goal of balancing increased fertility with gender equality, the question of whether women required orgasm to conceive occupied their attention. Lišková explains that the study of the female orgasm began as sexologists searched for clues about infertility, but through this work they realized that the lack of orgasm was not just a physiological sign of a dissatisfied marriage. By making women's sexual pleasure an object of study, indeed even discussing it publicly, the relationship between sexual pleasure and gender equality took on new degrees of significance. Along the way, the field of sexology grew in importance as it became tied to state planning and firmly established the family at the center of the economy.

By chapter four, Lišková moves into the 1970s and 1980s, past the failed political uprisings, and the invasion of Soviet military forces in 1968. The high-level politics that attracted international attention as features of cold war conflict were intimately related to family politics. The political period of "Normalization" in the 1970s and 1980s coincided with another shift in family discourse, this time...