Women Get Vote in Afghanistan

Recently, Dangerous Minds brought to everyone’s attention the fact that women’s rights weren’t always as bad as they are now in Afghanistan and other parts of the Arab world. During the twentieth century, rights of Afghan women developed to where they could vote (in the 1920s) and expanded into professional careers and high-level education. But today, among other things, women are not even allowed to leave their house without a male relative to chaperone.

What changed? Apparently, the Taliban was the change. A 2001 report from the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor says:

Prior to the rise of the Taliban, women in Afghanistan were protected under law and increasingly afforded rights in Afghan society. Women received the right to vote in the 1920s; and as early as the 1960s, the Afghan constitution provided for equality for women. . . . In 1977, women comprised over 15% of Afghanistan’s highest legislative body. It is estimated that by the early 1990s, 70% of schoolteachers, 50% of government workers and university students, and 40% of doctors in Kabul were women. Afghan women had been active in humanitarian relief organizations until the Taliban imposed severe restrictions on their ability to work.

However, this is not merely a problem in the war-torn Taliban-driven country of Afghanistan. According to a more recent study, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen are the worst Arab countries for women. In Egypt, for example, 99.3 percent of women and girls are subjected to sexual harassment. (And there are many more facts like that.) Despite the hopes of some over Arab Spring, not much has changed.

• What effect do different religions have on the rights of different people groups? (Not abuses of religion, but actual doctrine.)
• Why are human rights important?