Dr. John Lott has a new piece at Fox News responding to the claims in the New York Times that communists in the former Soviet Union had better sex. But the policies that the Soviet Union set up to weaken the family have a much darker side. The move to single parent families also fits in with a large academic literature indicating everything from poor school performance to more crime. Lott’s piece starts this way:
In Sunday’s New York Times, Kristen Ghodsee paints a glowing picture of women’s lives in the former Soviet Union. From full voting rights in 1917, liberalized divorce laws, high labor force participation – and yes, reportedly better sex – life was supposedly much better for women. Ghodsee writes, “Although the Communists never fully reformed domestic patriarchy, Communist women enjoyed a degree of self-sufficiency that few Western women could have imagined.”
Of course, full voting rights don’t count for very much when there is always only one candidate allowed on the ballot.
But there is a more fundamental problem with Ghodsee’s argument. Totalitarian governments have gone to great lengths to indoctrinate children, and the biggest obstacles to that goal were parents. The way to overcome this “problem” was to take women away from their children by encouraging or forcing them into the work force. Making divorce easy also weakened the institution of the family.
As former Moscow Bureau Chief for the New York Time David Shipler discovered, during the 1920s and 1950s, the Soviet Union even experimented with raising children in ‘‘communal children’s houses, dining halls, and other institutions that would decrease the importance of the individual household.’’ During the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Soviet government forcibly took tens of thousands of three- and four-year-old Afghanis to the USSR so that they would be raised away from their families. The hope was to later return them to Afghanistan, where they might form the core of a loyal government administration.
The former Soviet Union viewed children as “the property of the state” and they were actively encouraged “to criticize, expose, and reform parents possessing insufficient revolutionary ideals.”
But there are more subtle ways of achieving this without forcibly removing children from their homes. An article of mine in the Journal of Political Economy found that more totalitarian countries, such as the Soviet Union, had higher rates of divorce, female labor force participation, and out-of-wedlock births. They also tend to have children start school at an earlier age. . . .
The rest of the piece is available here.
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Fox Nation, August 14, 2017
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