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The Soviet Union was geographically close to Western sexual reform, but because of much slower economic development and public restrictions on the distribution of new sexual education, Ukrainian women missed their chance to join the progress toward gender equalization in sexual matters. Compared with the West, in Soviet countries there was not much evidence of a Ukrainian women sexual revolution at the end of the 1960s or even in the 1970s. Indeed, sexual patterns in Soviet countries have only gradually shifted in the Western direction of reform.
The "demographic crisis" detected in the early 1970s in the European regions of the USSR (low fertility and high divorce rates) was interpreted by scientists and their bureaucratic colleagues to reflect a breakdown in family values, attributed largely to Ukrainian women participation in the labor force. Early socialist ideals relating the need for gender equality were now viewed as misguided, and the policies that sprung from the concept of emancipation of Ukrainian women were blamed for having brought the nation to the brink of a population catastrophe.
By the mid-1980s, discourse in Ukraine had begun to promote family life and traditional gender roles. Pedagogical campaigns were launched to cultivate femininity and masculinity and to improve interactions between Ukrainian women and men. Demographers and pedagogues devised pronatalist "sex role socialization" classes. Women and men were taught that being a cultured, moral person required that they realize the dictates of their gendered nature. Sexual moral education texts launched vivid attacks on emancipated (used pejoratively to mean autonomous, ambitious, and assertive) Ukrainian women. At the same time that women's movements in Western Europe and North America seized upon images of sexual equality, and egalitarian relations between men and women became popular among university-educated groups, Soviet experts were attempting to encourage traditional interactions between the sexes by modifying the behavior of Ukrainian women and girls.
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