Why are things so bad for Afghan women?
People wrongly assume that the Taliban is a sort of alien force, imposing misogynistic views on an unwilling society. For instance, Ellen Goodman of the Washington Post Writers Group writes in a recent editorial that: Afghan women had slowly gained rights through the 20th century. They helped write their country’s 1964 constitution. They served in parliament and went to universities. They were 40 percent of the doctors and 70 percent of the teachers. Then the Taliban turned their homeland into a patriarchal jail. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Afghan women did gain rights throughout the twentieth century — in the cities. In the countryside, where the majority lived, no such thing happened. And the Taliban did not turn the Afghan homeland into a patriarchal jail; it was already a prison for women. There are three causes for women’s predicament. First, Afghanistan was and is a rural society, and in the south and east dominated by tribes. This tribal society is deeply patriarch
