Women in Afghanistan

Few weeks ago, I developed jointly with another department of the organization I am working for a proposal for an intervention that looks at economic and civic empowerment of women in Afghanistan. Although I was quite pleased with the project idea we came up with (a combination of working with entire communities, in particular men, to create an enabling environment in which women and men can equally participate in economic and civic activities), I somehow doubt how much we are really going to achieve, given the slow pace of change in regard to situation of women in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban seven years ago. It was among others the article below that once again made me think of whether we will be able to achieve the targets we set ourselves, or whether our ideas on how to bring change into the lives of women in Afghanistan are mere day dreams of idealists.

"Afghan women still forced to cover upMay 16, 2008 Rosie DiMannoKABUL–Shrouds are meant for burial.But not in Afghanistan, where public life for women is still all about the covering up, the obscuring of femaleness.Six years after the fall of the Taliban, the cocooning burqa hangs on, even in a liberated capital rushing headlong into modernity, as if leaping millennia in one breathless hurdle.Tradition, family pressures, shyness and a sense of personal security without violation – all are given as reasons for clutching still to the metres of billowing fabric that cascade from scalp to ankle.The burqa remains stubbornly ubiquitous, if now worn by a smaller minority of women, at least in the capital. Beyond Kabul, and especially in the ultrafundamentalist Pashtun south, most adult females dare not venture outside without it, wouldn't dream of doing so.In truth, the burqa doesn't make women one bit less provocative – if that's the fear – because what's forbidden is always tantalizing, in the way of human nature. There's a kind of peek-a-boo coquetry just beneath the concealed surface, a flash of skin below the hemline, painted toenails in strappy sandals, bangles jangling at the naked wrist. Even the most conservative women, elderly ladies who wear old-fashioned pantaloons under the dress under the burqa, reveal a fancy frill beneath the voluminous swathing.Emancipation is an incremental thing in Afghanistan, literally measured in centimetres. Those women who tossed off their burqas after the Taliban were routed now wear skirts that cover nearly as much leg and long-sleeved tops no matter how hot the weather. And they always wrap scarves around their heads and shoulders, often lifting an edge to hide the bottom half of their faces. It's a gesture learned in girlhood.But at least they can see and breathe more easily. The burqa – so uncomfortable with all that weight of fabric affixed to the tight skullcap – muffles sensory perceptions, causing women to stumble and fall, never being able to see their own feet, the world dimly viewed through an embroidered slit.There is no religious justification for the burqa. It is entirely a product of paternalism and patriarchy, males asserting their ownership of females – what only they are entitled to see in the privacy of the family home.But the burqa, more than the chador or the veil, is infantilizing as well, like a newborn's swaddling. By wearing it, women are constricted and controlled, and this hindrance is not just symbolic. It's evoked in every burdened step a female takes [...]
Columnist Rosie DiManno is on assignment in Afghanistan, where she covered the Taliban's fall in 2001.