Kateřina Lišková. Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style

Kateřina Lišková’s Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 1945–1989 is a compelling book about the critical role that sexuality and sexual policy played in Communist Czechoslovakia. The book does away with the conventional assumption that communist regimes devoted limited attention to intimate lives of their subjects. On the contrary, as in any modern society, sexuality was central to how the state related to its citizens. Lišková demonstrates there was no uniform approach to sexuality in the Eastern bloc, but rather each state developed its own policies and ideas, which did not always emanate from the Soviet center. Indeed, one of the strengths of the book is situating the Czechoslovak case in a comparative perspective. Chapter 1, titled “Sweeping Changes in Sexuality across East Central Europe,” provides the best to date synthetic overview of the history of sexual policy in the Eastern bloc, including those on marriage, divorce, and abortion. While communist regimes followed a general pattern of implementing gender equality after 1945, important differences existed in how those policies were understood and enacted. We learn, for example, that Czechoslovakia was distinct by European standards in its early development of sexology dating back to 1921, when the Institute for the Study of Sexual Pathology was first established (13). This tradition influenced postwar developments despite the change in the political system.

Communism · Communist state · Human sexuality · Political science · Politics · Sexology · Sexual revolution · Sociology · State (computer science) · Style (visual arts) · European history and politics · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law