Afghan women under the Taliban

Extract

[...] It woman] is not supposed to be taken out of the house to be smelled." With such a negative, backwards view, it is easy to feel the pain and sympathize with all the women that have to unjustly suffer. While The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini does not deal directly with the issue of women in Afghanistan, some of the traditions and restrictions imposed by the Taliban are prevalent throughout the book. The idea of restricting women and preventing them from acting on their own initiative for love, education, or anything else is looked down upon. [...]

[...] It is interesting that there is a homosexual theme throughout Kite Runner, and much of this is probably the result of there being no women for men to choose from. Even men with no homosexual feelings would become homosexual simply because they were so restricted from seeing women and were not able to express their sexual desires otherwise. Life for women under the Taliban is impossible to imagine for a person living in the U.S. The oppression and constant abuse that women suffered is beyond inhumane and is a major step backwards for civilization as a whole. [...]

[...] Afghan Women under the Taliban Living in the United States it is often easy to take for granted many of the liberties that we hold so dear and which were gotten so long ago. However, when thinking about equality, we must remember that great strides have been made to accommodate different people, but at often times people forget that such things as women's rights were at one time not considered universal until legislation in the 20th century gave women in the U.S. [...]

[...] The actions of the Taliban regime also encouraged higher rates of disease and a lower life expectancy. As 40% of the doctors in the country before the Taliban were women, and they were mostly forced to quit work, the overall death rate went up, however, women were more hard hit then men were. As women were being denied access to travel, they were also not allowed access to medical care, which led to higher death rates for women than men from natural and preventable causes. [...]

[...] After taking the powers of government, they quickly instituted new rules which deprived women of many of the liberties they enjoyed before in the country. Before the Taliban, Afghani women were very similar to those in our own country; they were given the right to vote in the 1920s and even had their equality protected under their constitution in the 1960s (Department of State), however this all quickly changed. In 1977, women constituted 15% of the national legislative body (Department of State), and were 70% of schoolteachers of the civilians in the government workforce of the teachers at Kabul University of the students and 40% of the doctors in the country (NOW). [...]