A provocative article from Juliana Kaplan at Business Insider
More empirical evidence! →
Sex and Socialism 101 on TikTok →
My summer research student, Abby Laform, has been researching cool socialist, communist, and revolutionary women and posting about them TikTok, trying to bring some of these life stories to a Zoomer audience. You can check it out here.
Women’s Unpaid Labor is Worth $10,900,000,000,000
My co-authored Op-Ed in this morning’s New York Times. “f American women earned minimum wage for the unpaid work they do around the house and caring for relatives, they would have made $1.5 trillion last year.”
With Lisa Armstrong and Wang Zheng at the 1st Global Socialist Feminism conference
We pulled it off! After a year of logistics and organizing, we had over 35 women from around the world in Ann Arbor for a meeting on Global Socialist Feminism.
Wang Zheng speaking at the Global Socialist Feminism conference at U Michigan
Discussing her book: Finding Women in the State
Interview in GQ! →
Thanks so much to Sophia Benoit for asking such great questions.
IWD Column Translated into Spanish →
I am so grateful for this Spanish translation of my New York Times column into Spanish.
Happy International Women's Day!
Have you wished your mother a Happy International Women's Day yet? →
My new book!
So so so excited that this one is finally out. I’ve been working on this book for almost a decade.
A review all the way from Bangladesh!
I just found this amazing review all the way from Bangladesh. The book is definitely making it’s way out into the world.
The East German Birth Strike
I found this interesting article about the “womb strike” of the early 1990s in Eastern Germany.
Thanks to Autostraddle.com for including me on the list of the 50 best feminist books of 2018!
I am so delighted to be included among these amazing books!
“Beyond the pithy (but important!) title, this book promises an exploration of the ways capitalism works with sexist power structures to harm women in specific ways — from relationships to family to career, Ghodsee outlines the ways that ‘unregulated capitalism disproportionately harms women, and that we should learn from the past.’”
https://www.autostraddle.com/50-of-the-best-feminist-books-of-2018-442742/
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
New Reviews from Jacobin and the Herald of Scotland
I am thrilled at these three new reviews by Liza Featherstone for Jacobin and Susan Swarbrick for The Herald. I feel so fortunate that the book is getting such generous attention.
New article in the World Policy Journal
The Summer issue of the World Policy Journal just arrived in the post with my new article on the Russian women's activist, Alexandra Kollontai. It is always a thrill to see one's words in print on nice, glossy paper. And I am even more delighted to share an issue with Slavoj Zizek!
Advanced galleys are here!
These arrived in the post yesterday. These are the bound galleys that will go out for long-lead media and potential blurbers. After months of slaving away on this, it's so satisfying to see my words manifest in print.
Mother's Day reading
Just in time for Mother's Day, a first edition of George Bernard Shaw's The Intelligent Women's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism from 1928. Written for his sister-in-law, and including some marginalia from the original owner of the book. This one gets a prominent place on my bookshelf.