ABSTRACT
For various reasons, including the pressure exerted by women's liberation movements, advanced capitalist countries have now nearly all caught up with their socialist counterparts, at least in the legislative sphere. However, they lag behind in nursery provision, as they do in public welfare generally, and their record on women's employment conditions and opportunities is poorer. The practice of the developed socialist states not only goes some way further than that of comparable capitalist ones, but an even greater gulf separates the two systems in the Third World
with respect to women's overall social and economic position. Compared with capitalist countries with similar cultural conditions and levels of development, it is generally the case that the socialist states in the Third World have a far better record on improving women's legal, economic and social position. They have also attempted to discourage customary practices which are oppressive of women, such as footbinding in China or veiling in Democratic Yemen. In short, women in China, Cuba, Democratic Yemen or Soviet Central Asia, suffer far less discrimination on the basis of gender than do those in Guatemala, Iran, Pakistan or Nigeria, even though they have still not attained full equality with men. This chapter attempts to explain why this is so and discusses the main policies which have been adopted as well as the practical and theoretical considerations which have influenced Third World socialist states on this issue.
