Women’s Rights Under 20th Century Socialist Regimes

One method for defending socialist governments like the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea, is to argue that they championed women’s rights. A commenter on Instagram, for example, lauds the Soviet Union for being “the FIRST country in recorded history to make marital rape illegal and legalized no fault divorce immediately after the revolution…” Others have praised North Korea and China for passing legislation that encourages greater gender equality. Socialist dictators are portrayed as progressives whose hearts were in the right place, even if their economic policies resulted in less than ideal outcomes.

Here are some reasons why I think women living in 20th century socialist regimes had fewer rights than their counterparts in capitalist nations:

In the Soviet Union, women were denied the right to own property and the right to live where they choose. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson write that Joseph Stalin’s government forced women and men in rural areas to work in collective farms so he could exploit their labor and produce to fund the industrial sector. This horrific system of collectivization stifled production and starved farmers, and Acemoglu and Robinson estimate that “probably six million people died of famine” from 1928 to 1933 and “hundreds of thousands of others were murdered or banished to Siberia…” (p. 126).

In North Korea, women are denied the right to wear what clothes and accessories they wish. Eunhee Park, a North Korean refugee, writes that “In 2008, Kim Jong Il issued an order that ‘women’s hair must not be longer than a fist below the ears…’” (p. 89) because any other style would be perceived as too capitalistic. Inspectors were assigned throughout the country to examine women and punish those who did not comply. Park writes that she was slapped by an inspector and forced to stand on the street for hours to punish her “for wearing earrings and flared jeans” (p. 90).  

In North Korea, women are denied the right to have political opinions that oppose the government. Andrei Lankov writes that under the reign of Kim Il-Sung, “…some 0.6 to 0.7 percent of the country’s population were political prisoners” (p. 46) and that there were an estimated 154,000 female and male political prisoners in 2011. Imagine if Donald Trump or Joe Biden had the power to throw you in prison for having a negative conversation about them with a family member.

In many socialist nations in Africa, women were denied the right to buy and sell commodities at voluntarily negotiated prices. Magatte Wade describes how the postcolonial government in Ghana instituted price controls making it illegal for people to sell various products above a certain price. Women in Ghana were those who predominantly bought and sold in the market, and the socialist President Jerry Rawlings blamed them for not conforming to his and his predecessor’s socialist vision. Bureaucrats in charge of enforcing price controls would beat, fine, and imprison women who violated the price controls. Wade writes that the economist George Ayittey had a female member of his family “jailed for three years of hard labor for making an illegal profit of $1.50 on a loaf of bread” (p. 65).

In China, women were denied the right to read the books that they wanted. Frank Dikotter writes that in China under Mao Zedong, books that were not approved by the Communist Party of China were banned and destroyed. Many books that portray the Communist Party of China in a negative light are still banned to this day. Dikotter notes that in one example: “In Shanghai, a total of 237 tonnes of books were destroyed or sold as scrap paper between January and December of 1951” (p. 190). Imagine how large a bookstore would be if it were dedicated to only selling books that have been banned in China. In China, women were also denied the right to choose the size of their families. Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley, citing the work of Chelsea Follett, write that China sought to reduce the size of its population, believing that an increasing population would exacerbate poverty. China’s one-child policy resulted in hundreds of millions of women from 1980 to 2014 who were sterilized or given IUDs modified to be impossible to remove without surgery. In addition, people who violated the policy faced punishing fees, “usually around 5 to 10 times a person’s annual disposable income” (p. 63). Not surprisingly, this discriminated against poor women, since rich women could pay the fines but “the poor were often bankrupted, spending years of their lives paying the fees off” (p. 63).

This is just a small sampling of the many restrictions that were placed on men and women living in socialist nations around the world. Women and men should be wary of political movements which seek to restrict economic freedom and empower government to redistribute resources in the name of “social justice”.

— Colin Braman

References

Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson (2012). Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. Currency.

Frank Dikotter (2013). The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957. Bloomsbury.

Chelsea Follett (2020). “Neo-Malthusianism and Coercive Population Control in China and India: Overpopulation Concerns Often Result in Coercion.” Cato Institute. Retrieved from: https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/neo-malthusianism-coercive-population-control-china-india-overpopulation-concerns .

Andrei Lankov (2013). The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia. Oxford University Press.

Eunhee Park (2025). The Courage to Die: A North Korean Woman’s Escape and Rebirth in Freedom. Self-Published.

Marian Tupy & Gale Pooley (2023). Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet. Cato Institute.

Magatte Wade (2023). The Heart of a Cheetah: How We Have Been Lied to about African Poverty—and What That Means for Human Flourishing. Cheetah Press.