Anonymous wrote:
1917 - the first no-fault divorce law, the right to vote for women... and the right to do pretty much anything and work anywhere. This is at the time when women in US still couldn’t dine in a nice restaraunt alone.
Yes, on paper, it all looked great.
Women had a right to divorce but divorce was stigmatized enormously. It was impossible to buy an apartment for a single person, so even when couples did divorced they often continued to live in one tiny apartment (like my parents did for years -and they were pretty well off by Soviet standards).
Here comes the 'best' part, hold on to it - If colleagues at work learnt that you have an affair (even emotional) you would be grilled for it in front of all of your coworkers.
The whole culture was extremely prudish so I cannot imagine how women could have better sex than in the West.
It is the innate hypocricy of Soviet ideology that makes it so difficult to explain the truth to outsiders.
People in totalitarian regimes have no rights, be they women or men.
And anyone who will tell you things were not so bad in the USSR is either a clueless outsider or (most probably) does not value freedom and definitely supports Putin.