Simone de Beauvoir, Like the Vast Majority of Feminists, Admires Marxist-Leninism and the Soviet Union Because They Promise a World Where Men and Women Would Be Equal

Simone de Beauvoir, like the vast majority of feminists, regards the radical alteration of parenting as more than a utopian fantasy. She finds it "easy to visualize" a world "where men and women would be equal,"

for that is precisely what the Soviet Union promised: women trained and raised exactly like men. . . . [M]arriage was to be based on a free agreement that the spouses could break at will; maternity was to be voluntary; pregnancy leaves were to be paid for by the State, which would assume charge of the children, signifying not that they would be taken away from their parents, but that they would not be abandoned to them. 

De Beauvoir is so far from alone among feminists in admiring Marxist-Leninism that this admiration, together with hostility to "capitalism," can be considered virtually a further distinguishing mark of feminism. The main criticism offered of the Soviet Union is that it has not gone far enough. Kate Millett sides with Trotsky against Lenin because "there was no realization [on Lenin's part] that while every practical effort should be made to implement a sexual revolution, the real test would be in changing attitudes." To be sure, feminists are attracted primarily to the ideas that the Soviet state proclaims itself as embodying, rather than to the Soviet regime itself, but with that understood, a great many well-known feminists, including de Beauvoir, Millett, Firestone, Bleier, Mitchell, Chodorow, MacKinnon, Steinem, Sheila Rowbotham, Margaret Benston, Angela Davis, Eli Zaretsky, Evelyn Reed, Barbara Ehrenreich, Vivian Howe, and Rayna Rapp identify themselves as socialists or Marxists of some sort. According to Germaine Greer, "the forcing-house of most of the younger women's liberation groups was the university left wing."

--Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988), 26.