Sex under socialism: From emancipation of women to normalized families in Czechoslovakia

Introduction

Two distinct approaches to sexuality and gender existed in communist Czechoslovakia. The first one went like this: Sex should be between equals. Men and women are to be equal and free of bourgeois shackles of property. Before entering marriage, people should get to know each other in the workplace and at collective volunteer work units. The other claimed the following: Men and women are different and marriage only works if men are superior to women. If gender arrangements are different from this, women will suffer a pain similar to sexual dissatisfaction. It is the nuclear family and your spouse that are your only safe social bonds. These statements capture attitudes to sex, gender and family as they changed in time in Czechoslovakia. The first rendition is typical of a period shortly after communists took power in 1948 and throughout the 1950s. The other depiction sums up the attitudes of the 1970s, the period called ‘normalization’ after the failed attempts of the Prague Spring of 1968.

Thinking about the history of sexuality all too often follows a linear narrative of emancipation, marked by the rise of consumerism, invention of the birth control pill, and social movement struggles (Herzog, 2009, 2011). ‘For too long, writing about sex in the second half of the twentieth century has operated within a paradigm that assumed steady liberalization and the gradual overcoming of obstacles to sexual freedom,’ asserts historian Dagmar Herzog and continues: ‘Liberalization, however, is not a straightforward or unambiguous process. The paradigm needs to be challenged on multiple levels’ (Herzog, 2009: 1295). A lesson from an Eastern European country ¹ might provide one such corrective.

In this article, I will focus on sexological writings for the general public in communist Czechoslovakia. The discipline of sexology truly is what Foucault (1980) called scientia sexualis. ² In his famous argument, Foucault identified a form of expert knowledge that shapes, investigates and controls human sexuality. In the process, individuals are conditioned to understand themselves as sexual subjects and incorporate sexual identity to the core of their selves. Contemporary societies are thus governed through subtle and omnipresent technologies of the self; it is only via such self-disciplining technologies that people become modern subjects. Science and expertise, such as sexology as scientia sexualis, play an indispensable role in modern governmentality. Nikolas Rose (1996) has cast ‘psy-ences’ – disciplines of psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy and so on – as a point of intersection for the social organization of modern societies. Psy-ences play a constitutive role in how we understand ourselves, and at the same time imbue power with an ethical edge. Governing is thus not merely a technical exercise of power but an ethical demonstration of truth, ‘one essential to each individual person over whom [power] is exercised’ (Rose, 1996: 92). Rose, however, connected psy-ences exclusively with the liberal West (Rose, 1992, 1996). On the contrary, I will argue that the psy-ence of sexology was present and indispensable for the Czechoslovak regime to navigate the people’s selves according to its changing priorities. I will show that in the 1950s, sexual discourse resembled the western liberatory one of the 1970s in its progressiveness and accents on women’s emancipation, right to work and sexual pleasure while in the 1970s, Czechoslovak sexologists giving sexual advice sounded more like western conservatives of the 1950s protecting the private family unit with its hierarchical gender order.

This article explores the ways in which sex was deployed to (re)constitute the public and private under a non-capitalist political economy. At first glance, sexuality belongs to the intimate realm, conceived as private and hidden from public scrutiny. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (1998) complicate this view and argue that intimacy is in fact publicly mediated. Inherent in the understanding of sexual as belonging to the intimate is a distinction between the public and the private, which displaces sexual matters to the private sphere. Sexuality is domesticated after vacating public spaces and public discourse. As a result, individualism becomes the master narrative of intimacy while community shrinks into familial relations. I will argue that the transition from public to privatized intimacy in Czechoslovakia was facilitated by a shift in psy-entific discourses towards therapeutic imperatives. Therapy as a means to control modern lives steadily gained strength throughout the 20th century, and became widespread after the 1960s, as sociologist Eva Illouz argues (2008). While coming from expert knowledge systems, therapeutic thinking informs public discourse and has spread across national boundaries so that it constitutes ‘a transnational language of selfhood’ (Illouz, 2008: 6).

Sexological advice books at this time shifted the emphasis from public to private realms in intimate matters. I will document these differences as expressed in understandings of the equality of women, perceived gender roles in marriage and beyond, the importance of work, and the connections between sex and gender. I will seek the answers to the following questions: What discourses of sexuality were promulgated by sexologists, and how did they change over time? What gender regimes were in place and how did they map onto the sexualities discussed? What was the understanding of the family and its role in wider society? In analyzing texts written by sexologists, my interest lies in the social matrices out of which identities and differences emerge. While there exists a growing body of scholarship on the topic of gender in Czechoslovakia, ³ almost none of these works focus on the expert discourse of sexology or, more broadly, psy-entific operations within state socialist governmentality.

Sexology as a form of expertise in Czechoslovakia

In Czechoslovakia, scientia sexualis was institutionalized and applied through both scientific discourses adapted for a general audience as well as implemented via state policies. The Sexological Institute in Prague was founded in 1921 as The Institute for Sexual Pathology, a name which reflected the contemporaneous preoccupation with perversion and deviance. The Institute prides itself on being the world’s first university-based sexological institution, established only two years after the famous Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, which was a private institution unaffiliated with a university. The Prague institute has existed up to the present day, uninterrupted throughout the whole communist period (1948–1989). An integral part of Charles University’s Medical School, it was suspended during the Second World War together with all other University activities. The work resumed in 1945 under chief doctor Josef Hynie, who hired a team of doctors to work with him. His first colleagues were Jan Raboch, Václav Dobiáš (Hynie, 1975), Vladimír Barták, and Karel Nedoma (Hynie, 1985). In 1950, these men were joined by psychologist Iva Šípová, the first female member of the Institute, and another male doctor Jiří Mellan (Hynie, 1975). This core group of clinicians worked together for decades and later went on to train other doctors in sexological expertise.

Hynie originally specialized in dermatology and venereology. In the late 1920s, he visited the Hirschfeld’s Institute in Berlin and studied with Adler in Vienna. These encounters proved to be formative and set him on the path of sexology. However, he abandoned the then predominant psychoanalysis in favor of objective examination methods, which set the tone for the decidedly behaviorist approaches that informed Czechoslovak sexology. In order to express its orientation to the population at large, not just its deviant members, the Institute changed its name to The Sexological Institute in 1950 (Hynie, 1969). Apart from research, all members of the Institute wrote and lectured widely on sex education and education towards marriage and parenthood. They were the chief experts writing books and pamphlets for the general public, selling one-and-a-half million copies during the first three decades after the war (Hynie, 1975). In the 1960s, the sexologist Barták and others created the radio program Důvěrné hovory (Intimate conversations), and sex doctors began to appear on various TV shows in the 1970s. At the same time, marriage education was supported by various state institutions such as the State Population Committee, the Advisory Board for Education towards Marriage and Parenthood at the Ministry of Work and Social Affairs, the Health Education Institute, and the Czechoslovak Socialist Academy among others.

Within the parameters of an authoritarian regime, sexology intersected relatively closely with the Czechoslovak state and its policies, yet at the same time it managed to maintain a surprising level of autonomy as a scholarly discipline and a form of expertise. Sexologists aspired to institutionalize their branch of medicine and thus strengthen its standing. Since the early 1960s they called for a more systematic presence in medical schools (Barták, 1977a). While optional lectures on sexology became available to students of the Prague medical school as early as 1934, they remained only elective until 1975 (Hynie, 1975; Taus, 1977). At that time, sexology finally became a specialization in postgraduate programs, typically for students who trained in psychiatry. Within the structure of the medical profession, sexology was closely connected to gynecology and psychiatry. Both of these disciplines opened their professional associations to sexologists in the late 1960s (Vondrácek, 1969), before sexologists established their own organization in 1970 (Mellan, 1970). Sexology had its base in the capital but in the 1970s began branching out into regional towns. The year 1974 marked two important developments. The first was the foundation of the first sexological center at an outpatient clinic outside of Prague. Further expansion into virtually all regional centers followed within three years (Barták, 1977a). The second important step on the road towards institutionalization was issuing the policy document ‘Guidelines of sexology, methods, and measures’ by the Ministry of Health. ⁴ Full integration into the health care system was completed in 1981 when the Ministry of Health, supported by the World Health Organization, legislated sexology as part of health care services (Pondelickova-Maslova and Urbanek, 2000).

It is obvious that the regime and its proponents saw sexology as important and that the significance grew over time. In the 1970s, sexologists themselves perceived their discipline as made possible by communist social order. Jan Raboch, Hynie’s successor in the position of the chief doctor at the Sexological Institute, claimed that the institute was founded after the Second World War ‘as a manifestation of the progressiveness of our socialist society’ (Raboch, 1977: 227). As much as the real genealogy of the Sexological Institute might be obscured by this statement, it seems that sexology during normalization was reluctant to attribute its own origins to the democratic First Republic, but rather professed itself a component of a communist system. ⁵ Sexology needed the state and the state needed sexology.

On analyzed literature and methods

My research in the archive of the Sexological Institute in Prague and the Czech National Library entailed looking for books dealing with the issues of sexuality as it occurs in private and public worlds. I found and read dozens of books, most of them authored by sexologists, some by their fellow travelers in other psy-ences. For the purposes of this article, I have limited the number of books analyzed in two ways. First, I selected only those books aimed at the public rather than internal expert debates within the field of sexology. This choice reflects the desired effect of psy-ences try to inform how we, people understand ourselves, i.e. people’s understanding of who they are, what their selves are. Second, given space constraints I chose important books from each time period. In order to reflect the growing volume of advice literature published over time, I focus on two books from the 1950s and three from the 1970s. I analyze here those sexual treatises and self-help manuals that set the agenda and/or were most widely distributed (judged by the number of re-editions and print runs). This choice comes with certain limitations. One of them is the heterosexual focus of the analyzed books. Since they were discussing marriage, we will not find homosexuality or other non-heteronormative sexual practices mentioned. However, I argue that accents changed significantly over time even within the heteronormative universe.

From the 1950s, I focus on two books. The first is Pohlavní život a výchova k manželství a rodičovství: Příručka pro vychovatele, učitele a rodiče (Sexual Life and Education towards Marriage and Parenthood: Guide for Educators, Teachers and Parents) authored by the preeminent sexologists Vladimír Barták, Václav Dobiáš and Karel Nedoma, doctors who spent their entire careers working in the Sexological Institute. This book was first published in 1955 and re-issued four more times. ⁶ Starting with a modest print run of 10,000, its eventual circulation was 180,000 copies. The other book I analyze is Manželství a rodina budoucnosti (Marriage and Family of the Future) by Vladimír Št'astný, published in 1948, the same year as the communist takeover. Unique among the other books analyzed in this article, this one was not written by a sexologist. I found it in the Sexological Institute in Prague as one of the very few books in the Czech language catalogued during the first post-war decade. As such, its inclusion suggests it influenced how sexologists at the Institute thought about marriage and family.

From the 1970s, I analyze an immensely popular self-help book Mladé manželství (Young Marriage) co-authored by the sexologist and psychiatrist Jiří Mellan and the psychologist Iva Šípová, who both worked at the Sexological Institute. The first edition of 150,000 copies was published in 1970 and sold out in a month, likely also thanks to its graphic depictions of sexual positions. Subsequent editions followed in 1972, 1974 and 1978, without explicit imagery; these three re-editions during the 1970s added a further 184,000 copies into circulation. The book has become a classic with the last edition published in 1991, two years after the regime had ended. I also focus on the manual Pohlavní problémy mladých lidí (Sexual Problems of Young People), published in 1977 by the same Vladimír Barták (1977b) who co-authored one of the books for young people entering marriage published in the 1950s. This edition of Pohlavní problémy mladých lidí was the 6th to be printed. This manual was aimed at young soldiers in compulsory military service, published by the Health Division of the Ministry of National Defense. The third book examined is Field Guide for Choosing a Marriage Partner (Klíč k výběru partnera pro manželství), first published in 1975. The original print run of 40,000 was later expanded by 80,000 copies and was reprinted throughout the 1990s and 2000s until its last edition in 2010. The book’s author, Miroslav Plzák, was a psychiatrist who focused on marital problems and founded ‘matrimonology,’ a discipline aimed at solving the problems of married life. Even though he was not affiliated to the Sexological Institute, the doctors working there considered him a colleague and Plzák was generally known as a sexologist.

My analysis is informed by rather straightforward approaches to discourse. I follow Sharon Marcus in what she calls ‘just reading,’ a method ‘which attests to what texts make manifest on their surface,’ (Marcus, 2007: 3) instead of searching for silences within texts. Similarly Eva Illouz argues for a strategy focused on the ‘literal meaning of texts’ and makes a choice not ‘to read “into” the meaning of practices (or) to read “above” the shoulders of social actors’ (Illouz, 2008: 19). By these means I will account for the ways in which discourses of sexuality were connected to and constitutive of the broader social structure. I will look for systematic patterns in sexological texts that appear repeatedly so that I can reasonably expect their social resonance. In this way I attempt to capture the change that occurred within Czechoslovak society between the 1950s and the 1970s. While speaking of change, I am also aware of the cultural dynamics in which shifts do not obliterate what had preceded them. Rather, new cultural texts incorporate older ones, shedding parts of them and reworking their meanings.

Equality, work, emancipation: Intimacy in the long 1950s

When communists ascended to power in 1948, Czechoslovak sexologists were focused on venereal diseases, fertility treatment and sexual education. Three of the seven core members of the Sexological Institute, Vladimír Barták, Václav Dobiáš and Karel Nedoma, were directly involved in educating the public on issues of sexual health. Books published during the long 1950s took the form of sexual treatises informing readers about the basic biological properties and function of sexual organs, embedded in philosophical-style essays on society. These sexual treatises shared certain common features. They were interspersed with references to abolishing private property and highlighted women’s involvement in the workplace. The bourgeois ideology of marriage was rejected because it reproduced social divisions through class endogamy; upper-class marriages functioned as a vehicle of transferring money and privileges onto the next generation. To the contrary, socialist marriage was to be based on mutual affection, not economic constraints. Men and women, unencumbered by the class positions of the past, would meet as friends and comrades, forming relationships based on true affection and love. ⁷ Equal standing inside and outside the home was underscored by the importance of the collective and by attitudes to work. The institution of marriage was not to be abolished, but profoundly changed. Quoting Marx, Engels and Lenin, sexologists decried bourgeois marriage for subjugating women and propagating false morality. In describing bourgeois society, sexologists Barták, Dobiáš and Nedoma wrote:

Only female proletarians and poor peasant women took part in the work process, however they could only hold lower posts in factories or fields. Their work was more exploited than the work of men because they were paid less for the same work than men were. In bourgeois marriage, the woman was assigned to the household and childrearing. Economically, she was completely dependent on her man. The freedom of choosing a partner often yielded to economic imperatives, and the choice was frequently exercised by parents. Spouses then matched economically, rarely in mental traits. Such a marriage was a prison for the man, however even more so for the woman, because she was not as free as the man. In the case of the breaking of marital fidelity, society strictly denounced the woman while tacitly tolerating the man. (Barták et al., 1958: 12)

The socialist future looked bright with its unequivocal assertion of social and economic equality. The new regime aimed not only at overcoming class differences but was keen on gender equality as well. Women were freed from their husbands’ tutelage, and became workers on a par with men. The state focused on ‘socializing the household’ which meant more available services such as communal cafeterias at the workplace, public laundering and institutionalized care for children from a very early age; all aimed at ‘liberating the woman from the stultifying kitchen effect’ (Št'astný, 1948: 54). Material conditions of all working people became secured by the state so that individuals became equal and could enter marriage freely.

Marriage was never to be abolished under communism, as sexual treatises penned by sexologists often stressed. A man and a woman were to be united in the highest bond of mutual love and sexual monogamy. Quoting Lenin, the authors often cautioned against bourgeois immoderation and self-indulgence in sex and mostly advised strengthening of self-restraint and self-discipline. However, quite different approaches were also found:

In a free and noncommittal relationship between two young people, a relationship that could be replaced by another in a year’s time, there is more purity than in conventional marital fucking which lasts a lifetime without higher pleasure because it is based in prejudice, economic reasons or cowardice … The sexual purity called for by priests and moralists is false; where it was enforced by strict monogamy, ascetic ideals, monastic seclusion, or in youths by moralizing and hypocritical education, it has its reverse in prostitution and illicit adultery on one side, and abnormal sexual fantasies, psychopathological phenomena and real perversion on the other. (Št'astný, 1948: 60)

The relationship between the biological and social expressed in discussions of sexuality at this time proves to be especially interesting. When the sexologists Barták, Dobiáš and Nedoma (Barták et al., 1958) explained what sexuality was, they began by explaining sexual reflexes, instincts and hormones, breeding in animals, they also presented drawings of reproductive systems and glands, and discussed developmental defects. There is very little in their book’s section on sexuality that would suggest any non-biological properties of human sexuality (the only exception being a claim that it is emotions that distinguish human sexuality from that of animals). Sexuality was framed in the context of biological processes and natural instincts towards procreation. This well-known script posits sexuality as immutable and naturally heterosexual. However, when sexologists moved to explaining the factors forming sex life, they named mostly social factors such as social environment, diseases, diet and exercise regimen, relationship to work and other people. In their account, sexual arrangements changed historically depending on the political economy of a given society. Sexologists told a story about oppression and struggles for emancipation in linear fashion from primitive communal societies through slaveholding and feudal societies, then to capitalism toppled by socialism.

This progressivist narrative of materialist underpinnings to social structure followed the Marxist template; Czechoslovak sexologists deployed it to accentuate the influence of social formation on sexual life. The social is by definition malleable, in flux and open to possibilities. Inserting the social into the story of sex told by sexologists, however, did nothing to challenge the heteronormativity of their account – sexuality remained unquestionably heterosexual. Socializing the sexual, though, did free gender from its rigid traditional understanding, one which assigned specifically limited characteristics and tasks to each gender and conflated public with masculine and private with feminine.

Czechoslovak sexologists in the 1950s were preoccupied with women. As we have seen, they endorsed women’s involvement in the workplace and rearrangements that would ease the role of the mother in relation to that of the worker. Moreover, they insisted that women must decide freely about their bodies. That included having information about contraception in order to prevent unwanted pregnancies. These authors were providing such information. Št'astný suggests the method of fertile and infertile days because other forms of contraception would prevent women from getting satisfied during intercourse (Št'astný, 1948). Barták, Dobiáš and Nedoma mentioned coitus interruptus and condoms as available contraceptive methods (Barták et al., 1958: 79), however warning about their unreliability. It might be that these authors invoked women’s interests while being actually focused on male sexual satisfaction. Št'astný’s insistence on completed intercourse during infertile days and Barták et al.’s questioning the efficacy of contraceptive means which hinder man’s pleasure would suggest as much. However, it is the woman’s (or shared) sexual pleasure that is discursively deployed here, never the man’s. ¹⁰

Motherhood was promoted during communism; however, some authors suggested a woman can legitimately forego motherhood:

‘Woman can say no to the function of mother. Under normal circumstances such a decision is not normal. However if a woman is convinced motherhood is not her calling or if she avoids motherhood for health reasons then her decision is legitimate and worthy of respect’ (Št'astný, 1948: 71).

The emancipation of women was highlighted throughout these books on sexual and coupled life. The capitalist order was equated with the subjugation of women and patriarchy, and socialist arrangements were hailed as an antidote to capitalist exploitation of women as property. Št'astný quoted from a letter written by a woman: ‘I am outraged by the conduct of some people with whom I had to live physically, by the complete lack of friendliness. How can you even meet a woman if you do not like her and take her as an object?’ (Št'astný, 1948: 49). Readers familiar with western second-wave feminism could easily think that the above-mentioned excerpts came from the Marxist feminist writing of the 1970s. Czechoslovak sexual treatises from the 1950s understood the independence of women in the context of abolishing private property. People were not to own the means of production or one another. Both class and gender relations were reformulated at the same time. Women were not to be housewives, they were to enter the workforce, with domestic chores and childrearing to be taken care of institutionally. Women were to be equal to men in formal status and in the realm of work, while their right to sexual pleasure was also recognized: no small feat. The new gender regime was, however, stripped of feminist underpinnings and administered in a top-down fashion through expert knowledge and state policies. Thus gender was reformulated, without the aid of feminism. The fact that these revolutionary changes to the gender order did not come from below, from actual women (and men), may explain why they also did not last long.

Hierarchy, family, and privatization: Intimacy in the long 1970s

The interpenetration of love and work, the intimate and the public, calls for social change and the emancipation of women were all but gone by the 1970s. Sexologists did not discuss the circumstances under which prospective couples would meet but instead outlined the one and only course their relationship should take. The very same author Barták, who co-authored the treatises of the 1950s analyzed earlier, wrote two decades later in his book Pohlavní problémy mladých lidí (The sexual problems of young people): ‘First lovers, later spouses and finally parents – this is the natural developmental process for human sexual and love relationships’ (Barták, 1977b: 51). Family was supposed to be ‘a safe haven in our mechanical and automatized world’ (Barták, 1977b: 7), sexuality was reduced to procreation because ‘man and woman can only live sexually when they take into account all possible outcomes, that is having children and raising and taking care of them’ (Barták, 1977b: 37).

While in the 1950s serial sexual unions were described as better than hypocritical marriage between unequals, two decades later loving sex became equated with marital sex while loveless sex, understood as sex outside of a long-term serious relationship epitomized by marriage, was posited as dehumanizing, degrading and dangerous, particularly for women. Barták worried that young people conflated desire with love and might dissipate their lives with fleeting sexual encounters.

Mistaking affection (zamilovanost) or even a short-lived flare-up of desire (vzplanutí) with love (láska) has always been possible. Today, the danger of such a confusion is ever so higher because young people progress in their relationships all too quickly to physical sexual intercourse. If a young couple embarks on an intimate sexual life without love they can hardly avoid a bitter disillusionment when affection or even just physical enthrallment vanishes. It could become terribly cruel to a girl who gets pregnant under such circumstances. (Barták, 1977b: 26)

In a widely read book Young Marriage (Mladé manželství) (Mellan and Šípová, 1970) sexologist and psychiatrist Jiří Mellan with psychologist Iva Šípová provided sexual and relationship advice to newlyweds. Their aim was to give candid and scientific information about sex, which would make marriages happier and more lasting. However, in talking about sex, they also inadvertently talked about gender. While in the 1950s relationships were very explicitly predicated on equality, Czechoslovak sexologists in the 1970s explicitly presupposed inequality and difference between potential partners, and strove to provide advice on how to choose a partner so that inequalities balanced themselves out. Some characteristics, however, could not be put in harmony: ‘The situation is easier for couples where the man has a higher intellect than the woman. These settings complement the patriarchal family system. It is truly a stumbling block if the situation is reversed’ (Mellan and Šípová, 1970: 46). The authors explained that such a situation leads to neurosis, and inferiority complexes in men and permanent dissatisfaction in women. Such dissatisfaction is similar to sexual dissatisfaction; it can be even more unbearable and painful. And further, only the proper gender positions can bring about sexual pleasure. ‘Intimate life is one of the situations where undistorted personality manifests itself; intimate relationships reflect mutual relationships in the non-sexual realm. Partners can only have such roles in their sexual life which they occupy in their marriage’ (Mellan and Šípová, 1970: 75). The authors subscribed to the idea that sex reveals the inner truth about a person. This truth is gendered and fixed. The (hetero)sexual fulfillment these sexologists cheered for hinged upon firm binary gender oppositions.

In Young Marriage, the idea of companionate marriage was still present; however, the importance of gender equality in such marriages became fuzzier. In a contradictory way, equality was presented as important, almost indispensable, but also almost unattainable and in the end harmful. In the first chapter of their book, Mellan and Šípová started off by emphasizing the equality of men and women in all areas of life, critically presenting an image of an unequal past in terms that seem very similar to the critique formulated in the 1950s. ‘Over the centuries, marriage was based on an uneven status between men and women. [A woman was] dependent not only economically but also in her opinions’ (Mellan and Šípová, 1970: 13). However, the following paragraph weakens and muddies the stress on equality.

But could centuries be erased from people’s heads within two or three decades? Can views on men’s and women’s role in marriage and family be changed during such a short period of time? Can ideas about the basic roles of both sexes be changed and recast between one and the following generation, even though the social conditions were changed via revolution? Is it actually desirable, even if it is becoming apparent that it is sometimes unconditionally important and there is no other way? (Mellan and Šípová, 1970: 14)

The intimate landscape painted here is the one where the home presents an island of safety, security and authenticity pitted against the outside world, particularly the workplace. ‘If troubles arise in the workplace, one gets all the more attached to his partner, his desire for understanding increases in proportion to failures in relations with people outside marriage. The need for love in marriage grows’ (Mellan and Šípová, 1970: 59). Thus, the public sphere threatens an individual with failure that can only be ameliorated in private. Moreover, it is not only work which is alienating; other people, in fact anyone who is not one’s spouse, is considered a stranger. In this way, marriage and family become not only the model for human contact as expressed in the maxim ‘family is the basis of the state,’ here marriage and family are the only social bonds one can safely enjoy. Such a vision is profoundly antisocial.

While books in the 1950s started with great expectations of two young adults meeting who would share interests, participate in work tasks and fall in love, the book Field Guide for Choosing a Marriage Partner (Klíč k výběru partnera pro manželství), first published in 1975, opens with an image of corrosion. Its author, psychiatrist and widely known sexologist Miroslav Plzák, perceived marital union as prone to dissolution and yet vitally important for raising children. He argued pragmatically for the necessity to preserve marriages and sought to describe how to do so.

It was clear to him that the days of our grandfathers who ruled over their wives were long gone (Plzák, 1975). Marriage in his day, regrettably in his view, was understood as a democratic institution where both parties were equal. Although this was what the law said, Plzák argued that such an arrangement was not only impractical but also untenable. In a couple, voting was impossible thus marriage cannot be democratic. It also could not be equal. If both partners attempted to equally decide in all areas, everyday life would be paralyzed and endless disputes would lead to a divorce. The spheres of influence needed to be divided between a husband and his wife. ‘Man carries on his shoulders the weight of his job so that the family is economically secured. Woman does not understand the details of his everyday difficulties, hardships and worries. Woman carries on her shoulders the care of the home’ (Plzák, 1975: 38). Citing statistics from 1971, Plzák argues that men made on average a third more than women but male wages went in their entirety to the family, while women repaid their lower earnings by housework (Plzák, 1975: 143). Also, childrearing needed to be assigned to women. Men simply could not care for babies so until puberty, children of both sexes were to be ‘managed’ by their mother. While adolescent daughters stayed under maternal purview, teenage sons were under the command of their father (Plzák, 1975: 87). Plzák urged women to ‘cease the foolishness of trying to tie the man to housework’ (Plzák, 1975: 90). Men made money to bring home the bacon and pay for their wives’ beauty products while she took care of the household in return. Plzák concludes by asserting that men and women are so different that they are basically different species: ‘man is like a rhinoceros, woman like a colorful parrot’ (Plzák, 1975: 171).

Where some of his colleagues still perceived true love as the cornerstone of a successful marriage, Plzák firmly held that love was overrated: ‘The ideology of a marriage that builds its strength solely on the existence of marital bliss is not only reprehensible, it is at its core counterfactual and unfeasible’ (Plzák, 1975: 39). Complaining about a lack of marital happiness is the ‘peak of stupidity’ (Plzák, 1975: 38) and stems out of romantic ideas about marriage. The only realistic approach to marital love is through discipline: ‘Married love is a pinnacle of emotional discipline. It is the product of a calm life and produces this calm life’ (Plzák, 1975: 140). Precedence should be given to duty over love. Disciplined life within marriage could provide a recipe for all humankind whose ‘existence on earth will not be saved through love but only through just and coherent order, discipline, and simply a high level of organization’ (Plzák, 1975: 123). Such an organized life can only be predicated on hierarchy; therefore people should abide by it, and not only at home. Mature people subject themselves to authority, while those who pride themselves on defying power are ‘clucking chickens in the midst of a complex structure of human society’ (Plzák, 1975: 85). Both society and domesticity are organized according to the same principles.

We refuse to hear anything about the need for discipline in marriage because we remained enslaved to art nouveau ideas about marriage and keep believing that above all marriage should be a groove of love in which spouses romantically frolic, and we resist the assertion that marriage must be an institution that is ‘office’ of sorts (ouřad). (Plzák, 1975: 85)

Work in Plzák’s writings was disconnected from love and at odds with domestic life. At best the workplace served as a place of inner emigration when domestic conflicts intensified, or at worst, provided a space for illicit sex. Sexologists warned that the workplace threatened the home with extramarital affairs. ‘Out of 280 divorces for infidelity which we dealt with in our marriage counseling center in 1971, only 4 started outside the workplace’ (Plzák, 1975: 145). When disputes raged at home, one could retreat to work ‘where I have my good and proven relations’ (Plzák, 1975: 165). These close work relationships were seen as threatening the marriage from time to time.

Written in the first years of normalization, after the clashes of 1968, the Field Guide for Choosing a Marriage Partner often addressed the situation of an impasse where partners ‘cannot agree on anything’ and ‘the difference in opinions grows steadily and escalates in protracted opposition’ (Plzák, 1975: 28). Nowhere did Plzák write explicitly about the broader social situation but his proposed solution resonated with the one called for by political elites: he suggested a calm repose and order which guaranteed to free people from uncertainty. Marital love blossomed only where ‘the emotional love between spouses is subsumed to the duty to provide a calm home for our progeny’ (Plzák, 1975: 146, emphasis in original). Quoting his colleague Dobiáš from the Sexological Institute, Plzák insisted that ‘Noble and quality emotional relationships can only grow where order prevails’ (Plzák, 1975: 84). In such a marriage, everyday tasks are automated and carried out without the need for reflection in a manner similar to walking, riding a bike or operating a machine. Mechanical arrangements might threaten its protagonists with boredom. ‘In the average family of the Czechoslovak republic the spouses spend together about 90 hours per week (free Saturdays and Sundays included). The ideal way of facing mounting coupled boredom is completely indisputable and without debate: a child’ (Plzák, 1975: 77, emphasis in original).

Reproduction was presented as the utmost aim of sexuality. Married people should reasonably enjoy their sex lives and if some erotic imagery improved marital sex, so be it. However, spouses should understand that ‘sexuality serves reproduction above all and provides pleasure only secondarily’ (Plzák, 1975: 59). It would be unwise to succumb to eroticism and especially young people should not ‘engage in unbridled sex without love and emotions’ (Plzák, 1975: 59). Plzák thus posited love as a control mechanism disciplining youth, but romantic feelings should also be pragmatically abandoned after the wedding. Sexuality without the check of long-term bonds could endanger the social order, so only discipline and self-composure could bring about peace of mind. Social stability undisturbed by men and women desiring different arrangements at home and beyond would come as a natural result.

Demographic changes and the call for political transformation in the 1960s

What happened between the communitarian, egalitarian and public-oriented 1950s and atomized, hierarchical and private-focused 1970s? The decade in between, the 1960s, was a time of political change not only in the West, but also in some Soviet satellites. Czechoslovak citizens were not calling for freer social mores but demanded political reforms to the system of government. The liberalization of social life continued, as if by the momentum of the efforts towards equality begun in the 1950s.

In 1963, a new Family Law was adopted, widening, among other things, the grounds for divorce. The law was further liberalized two years later when the ‘non-guilty’ spouse’s consent was no longer necessary for the divorce to be granted. Demographers argue that Czechs have historically had relatively high level of divorce rates. However, those accelerated markedly in the second half of the 1960s. While there were approximately 10,000 divorces a year in the early 1950s, in 1969 the absolute number of divorces for the first time exceeded 20,000 per year (Demografické informační centrum, 2013). Other demographic changes were also under way. The birth rate fell constantly ¹³ throughout the whole decade of the 1950s. ¹⁴ It picked up a bit in the first half of the 1960s only to drop again in the second half of the decade. The legal changes of the 1950s, including abortion rights, and the laws adopted in the 1960s brought about social liberties to Czechoslovak citizens, particularly to women. Freer social mores manifested themselves in demographic behavior. I would argue that it was scarcely more social liberties that Czechoslovak citizens were clamoring for, but rather political freedoms.

Demands for structural changes in both the political system and civic life culminated in the Prague Spring of 1968. However, these hopes were quashed by the Soviet invasion that August. Communist party hardliners regained power and steered the country in a rigid pro-Soviet direction (Křen, 2005; Rothschild, 1989). At the first Communist Party convention in occupied Czechoslovakia, which took place in 1971, the leading role of the Party was consolidated. Among other mostly economic measures, communist leaders postulated the necessity to increase the social esteem of parenthood. This claim was elaborated in a subsequent government resolution in 1972 on measures for promoting the social esteem of parenthood. ¹⁵ Its primary aim was to draft a new framework for education towards marriage and parenthood for all school grades and spread it beyond schools through mass media. ¹⁶ Also, the resolution called for opening more marriage counseling centers designed to prevent family breakdown in the face of increasing divorce rates.

The state intensified its interest in the family as the vehicle of population growth, which was expressed in government resolutions and subsequent social policies. In December 1972, the provision was adopted to significantly raise bonuses for families with children; three months later, cheap loans for newlyweds were made available (Opona, o.s., 2013). As a result, birth rate jumped dramatically to almost 200,000 children born in 1974 when birth rates peaked (Český statistický úřad, 2013).

The period following the defeat of the Prague Spring is called normalization. It is marked by the re-establishment of communist power when a reconstructed political cadre came to power with a new slogan – ‘the normalization of conditions’ (Křen, 2005). Its aim was to eradicate any opposition and extinguish any spark of revolt. The regime oscillated on ‘the border between authoritarianism and (exhausted) totalitarianism,’ (Křen, 2005: 874) requiring conformity from its citizens and their political obedience. The state strove to draw its citizens away from the public realm, luring them into families instead. I want to argue that this privatization of life was facilitated by the shift in discourse on sexuality and intimacy from public to private, from a larger collectivity to individual couples founding a family unit.

Discussion

In Czechoslovakia, intimacy was publicly mediated through sexological discourses on the proper form of marriage. At the inception of communism, love, sex and family were understood in close connection to the public world of work. Intimacy in the 1950s was closely connected to the broader society and its political economy. Socialist subjects were constructed as authentic in the public realm of work and equal to one another, including gender equality. When normalization arrived in the 1970s, intimacy was severely privatized. Close ties were to be enjoyed only in the safety of a family circle detached from the workplace. The authentic self was to be cultivated within domestic confines.

While women’s equality enjoyed its discursive heyday in the 1950s, the 1970s returned to a traditional parlance connecting women with housework and childrearing. Women who entered the workforce en masse during and after the war did not in fact leave in the 1970s to become housewives. Communist ideological imperatives, and its legal code, ordered everyone to work. The emphasis on hierarchical gender roles is so pronounced in the self-help manuals of the normalization era that readers today might mistakenly conclude that women indeed withdrew into families while men became the sole breadwinners. Yet during normalization, both men and women continued to work in order to make ends meet, while both were also expected to find their self-realization at home.

The cultural change that happened shortly after the end of the Second World War was marked by the restructuring of relations between the dominant and subordinate classes. Sexuality in the 1950s, shortly after the communist takeover, was conceived in liberatory terms of romantic love. The prospective couple came to the forefront, replacing traditional kinship interests in passing on property. Intimacy in the long 1950s was understood as an egalitarian enterprise. But the romantic project of the 1950s was not, as romantic love often is, individualized. Our prospective couple was expected to meet in public heterosocial environments of collective work units or other work settings stressing the collectivist character of new social arrangements. The new discursive practices of sex and love carried a new regime that stressed the equality of women and men while focusing on the collective. Make no mistake: marriage and family were supposed to be the anchors of sexual life at any given point in communist times. In the commencement of the regime, however, we could still hear echoes of the sexual radicalism of the socialist avant-garde. But this discourse was all but abandoned when normalization began.

There was a consensus on gender equality and the interconnectedness of work and family life in the decade following the regime’s inauguration. But normalization-era discourses on intimacy were slightly more dissimilar from one another. Authors working in the Sexological Institute underscored love as the sine qua non of a lasting marriage. It was no longer romantic love conjoining two equals, but rather a special emotion for a relationship that was the basis for childrearing. Love was understood as an exclusive bond enclosing the family. However, the psychiatrist Plzák represented another strand in sexological thinking during the 1970s. He disavowed marital love and even ridiculed it. His was a pragmatic approach that stressed calm and self-composure as the sole path leading to a contented life. The doctors working in the Institute and elsewhere shared this accent on hierarchy. Only couples where men occupied the higher position and both parties attended to different tasks could succeed in their marriages. Men and women were supposed to mind their respective business, at home and beyond. Hierarchical society wielded power over atomized families; people were expected to obey this authority and seek fulfillment outside the public sphere, especially in families. In Czechoslovakia under ‘normalization,’ the turn to the individual and home functioned as a distraction from (and also an engine of) the constricted political climate.

Not only were sexological psy-entific discourses present in the communist East, they navigated local subjectivities to be complicit with the regime’s imperatives as these transformed over time. Rose is mistaken when he claims the communist East was devoid of psy-ences (Rose, 1992, 1996). Psy-entific approaches were essential in constituting intimate selves governable according to the needs of an authoritarian state. Sexology thus played an important role, which grew ever more pronounced with the shift towards therapeuticization.

This change was circumscribed by a change in the form in which sexologists spoke to the public – from treatises in the 1950s to self-help manuals in the 1970s. While sexologists always present the public with information about the sexual and reproductive functions of human bodies, the accent on individualized familial fulfillment grows significantly stronger with time. While in the 1950s sexologists published treatises of public education (osvěta), which envisioned a new society that would better serve the needs of people, two decades later such writing took the form of self-help manuals instructing individuals to change themselves and not to expect society to reform according to their wishes. In the 1970s, experts argued for changes in attitudes, behaviors and ways of experiencing sex in a therapeutic manner.

Therapy as a mode of solving problems focuses on the individual instead of society, placing personal fulfillment above commitment to a broader collectivity and its organization. Illouz captures this social erosion propelled by therapeutic discourses: ‘No longer capable of creating heroes, binding values, and cultural ideals, the self has withdrawn inside its own empty shell’ (Illouz, 2008: 2). Therapy in general is not a call to arms, but rather quite the opposite: it invites inward-looking and individualized solutions. In the 1970s, the normalized ‘Czechoslovak society was more inward, lethargic, and slack’ (Rothschild, 1989: 208). I propose to understand this shift in connection to the incoming therapeutic narratives of the intimate. The proliferation of the therapeutic outlook was an international phenomenon at the end of the 1960s (Illouz, 2008: 6). In the case of Czechoslovakia, therapeutic discourse was mobilized to convey both the individualized solutions to problems which is characteristic of therapy as a form of intervention as well as the desirability of familialization which was the content of self-help sexological literature of the 1970s. Communist elites supported a cunning strategy to dull reformist impulses. They drove a wedge between public and private spheres so that people lost interest in political changes and became preoccupied with family life. Retreat to families emptied the streets and squares of the protesting public that mostly reshaped into docile private families. A sharp public/private divide kept society ‘normalized’ and in order. Privatization of the family was a function of government policy normalized through shifted sexological discourses.

Family was important in the preceding decades. In the 1950s, family was held to be the basis of the new society, so in order to serve this new purpose it had to be strengthened by public amenities and equal access to work and public goods. In the 1970s, however, family was understood as an exclusive engagement one could (and should) have. As Illouz puts it, therapeutic culture ‘is a reaction against a stultifying technical and bureaucratic disenchantement’ (Illouz, 2008: 149). In its therapeutic mode, family provides a refuge from the outside world. In this vein, the normalized family in Czechoslovakia was sealed off from the public world of work.

Sexuality and gender are always mutually structuring. In the 1950s, sexologists understood sexuality as based in nature but profoundly shaped by changing political economies. Sexuality was understood as historically embedded and the accents on social change opened gender to reinterpretation and emancipation. In the 1970s, social conditions froze during normalization. Sexuality was still understood as formed by social forces such as the family, however, these were not perceived as pliable. Although conceived as social in origin, sexuality was nonetheless seen as rigid. Similarly the gender order solidified alongside binary oppositions. At any time during Czechoslovak communism, the sexuality discussed by sexologists in books available for the general public was implicitly understood as heterosexual. In any case, having sex in public brings about a radically different gender order, as the Czechoslovak 1950s exemplify. Conversely, sex in private coincides with rigid and binary gender arrangements.

Contextualizing the historical understanding of sexual discourses and how it has shifted in a communist country shows the extent to which one can productively employ feminist concepts forged in the West to navigate the sexual and intimate landscapes of the East. Western theories are, to a large extent, applicable outside of their original context. However, I would suggest there are also important analytical gaps. As analysis of the collectivist 1950s shows, romantic love does not have to be deployed within the social settings of growing individualization. Furthermore, progressive views of gender do not require freeing sexuality from its hetero-constraints or necessarily bring about other valuable freedoms. In the 1950s, gender was emancipated without feminism, with all the pitfalls this entailed.

When accounting for ‘Eastern’ sexual trajectories, what is perhaps most striking is the reversed order of sexual liberalization with sexual conservatism in Czechoslovakia as compared to the West. While in the 1950s Czechoslovak experts discussed sex in the context of women’s emancipation, the restructuring of gender and class relations, and framed the intimate issues of sex in a public context, western women were pushed from jobs they had during the war back into families while sex was rarely mentioned in public. Yet when the feminist movement came into full force in western countries in the 1970s, Czechoslovakia was caught in the grip of normalization wherein sexual life was conceived of in privatized terms of the family. In broader terms of societal arrangements, however, the chasm between two societies organized around different political economies diminished over time. The 1970s Czechoslovakia became decidedly structured along the public/private divide. Intimacy was reformulated as private enterprise, the space where the state leaves you alone, the realm where one’s ‘authentic’ self can be cultivated. This understanding divorced people from extra-familial engagements and inadvertently put social organization more in alignment with the western model. Therapeutic discourse was the vehicle that brought the two systems closer. Interestingly, Illouz posits the general spread of therapeutic culture in the West to the period after the 1960s (Illouz, 2008: 15). In this regard, the Czechoslovak development coincides with that of the West. However, while the individualizing therapeutic culture in the West went hand in hand with the rise of neoliberalism, the privatization of personal relationships in Czechoslovakia furnished the atomized stage of late socialism. Nevertheless, both shared a very similar therapeutic self-understanding; in fact I would argue that it helped ease the transition to the western modes of being after the socialist political economy collapsed in 1989. Intimacy understood as domesticated, couple-based, and family-oriented is a heritage of the ‘normalized’ 1970s.

Some cultural critics perceive therapeutic discourse as ungluing society by divorcing the individual from her or his social loyalties. Others argue, following Foucault, that therapy is intrinsic to contemporary modes of power as it refashions individuals so that they are complicit with it. I would argue that these two forms of perception do not have to be at odds. When the Czechoslovak state redrew and strengthened the boundaries between public and private in the 1970s, it employed both therapeutic approaches at the same time. Therapeutic discourse in the service of an authoritarian state drives an individual further away from the public realm by cushioning the walls of her or his private family unit, which in turn reproduces the subjectivity the authoritarian state wants in its citizens: atomized, content and governable.

Gender and sexuality were shifting categories in communist Czechoslovakia. Sexologists functioned as important mediators of these categories for the general public as they interpreted what it meant to be a man or a woman or advised how to live happily in marital and sexual unions. Gendered and sexual selves were recast in sexological treatises and self-help books on marriage over the decades. Such changes bore the changing nature of the regime from its egalitarian and utopian beginnings to the hierarchical and pragmatic late stages.