by Tim Bonyhady
CHAPTER 4
New Women
The women who attended the Ghazi Stadium in August 1959 all dressed alike. Although it was summer, the government prescribed a dark headscarf, dark coat, heavy stockings, closed-toed shoes and gloves, as well as sunglasses. The object of this ‘uniform’, as it became known, was to cover the women almost as much as the chadari and make the unveiling as inoffensive to traditionalists as possible. While some of the women probably had all the prescribed clothes, at least a few had to procure theirs. For Shirin Majrooh, whose father-in-law was a government minister, that meant putting on a chadari for what she hoped would be the last time, hurrying to the bazaar to buy fabric, then making a coat to wear at the stadium.
Some ‘new women’, as they were dubbed, echoing the international language for female emancipation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wore this uniform for years. Others departed from it, as the government expected. When Andrew Wilson photographed ‘Miss Afghanistan’ and her friend in November 1959, they had already switched to light headscarves and begun wearing them pushed back to reveal more of their hair, and the friend in the photograph was also wearing a light coat. By 1960, a few women were wearing lipstick; by 1961, many had abandoned their coats, and their hemlines were shorter, their dresses tighter and necklines lower. Soon some discarded their scarves, a few wore slacks and nail polish.
Enthusiasm for the new clothes was to be expected of the upper echelons of Kabul society, but their number was small. American diplomat Leon Poullada defined Afghanistan’s ‘elite’ in 1960 as the families of the top government officials, wealthiest merchants, largest landowners and the royal family, while the ‘intelligentsia’ included senior government employees, professional men, teachers, students, literati and army officers. Poullada estimated these two groups comprised at most 12,000 people or one per cent of the Afghan population. Even the urban middle class—defined by Poullada as lower civil servants, shopkeepers, artisans and literate religious leaders—accounted for only about a million people or eight per cent of the population.
The extent of unveiling was a matter of speculation and dispute. While Louis Dupree maintained that three in four women in Kabul did not wear the chadari, an American diplomat put the number at only one in three. The significance of the change of dress was another issue. Some observers suggested that women who unveiled were so obsessed with fashion that they cared about little else, and a preoccupation with unveiling diverted attention from more important social and political issues. Yet the new clothes were both a symbol and a harbinger of bigger change, especially in Kabul.
Westerners played a small part. When Jeanne Beecher, the wife of a Pan Am official in Kabul, ‘sensed the desire of native women to make the fashion scene the western way’ in late 1959, she persuaded the Women’s Welfare Association to let her start a dressmaking class, helped by the wives of other Pan Am officials, using materials sent by Pan Am including 200 patterns provided by Vogue. ‘As a result,’ Beecher explained, ‘friendships were formed and soon we were entertaining them in our homes—and vice versa.’ In April 1960, fifteen of Beecher’s students, all upper-middle-class Afghan women, modelled their completed garments in Kabul’s first fashion parade, staged at the United States Information Center.
The government required change of its female employees, barring them from wearing chadaris. Radio Afghanistan, as the government station became known when its reach increased, took on more female broadcasters, who then exhorted women to embrace ‘progress’. The government newspaper in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif published a poem encouraging women ‘to break their centuries-old tradition of seclusion and uselessness and take equal part in the problems of all’. In Kabul the Anis published a letter arguing that the practice of reserving the front seats on buses for women was ‘undignified and contrary to the movement to free women from traditional bondage’. The Women’s Welfare Association staged lectures about ‘the role of women in modern societies’ and, assisted by the Asia Foundation in New York, established Afghanistan’s first training course for female secretaries, which soon attracted big classes under male instructors.
The government also introduced another westernised uniform for girls to wear to and from school as well as in the classroom. While boys retained freedom of dress, girls in senior school had to wear this uniform when schools resumed in September 1959. By November, when schools closed for the winter holidays, all girls had to do so. At one Kabul high school, they displayed their enthusiasm by gathering outside their classrooms shouting, ‘Long live Daoud!’ In Herat in western Afghanistan, local merchants paid for the construction of eight new classrooms at the city’s girls school so it could offer the full twelve-year curriculum. When Daoud visited, one speech of welcome was by Herat’s male mayor, the other by a woman representing ‘teachers, students and women’.
Afghanistan: Ancient Land with Modern Ways, a 200-page illustrated book with text in both Pashto and English edited by a senior official, Abdussattar Shalizi, celebrated these changes in 1962. The book’s photographs showed female students at the university walking through the grounds and in the library; women working in a hospital and laboratories; mothers with their children at a city playground; women at a Kabul cinema screening two British films, though they were five years old because Afghanistan could not afford new ones; and women working as stewardesses and receptionists for that pioneer of emancipation, Ariana Airlines. But while Shalizi claimed to be making ‘the first serious attempt at telling an honest story of the Afghan people, through the medium of pictures’, only two photographs showed segregation of men and women. None included women in chadaris.
Photographers who visited Kabul for international news agencies similarly celebrated ‘The New Women of Afghanistan’, as United Press International titled a series in 1962. One photograph showed three women, all wearing headscarves, employed in the government-owned printing factory. Another showed two employees of Radio Afghanistan—one with headscarf around her neck, the other with it on her arm—no longer restricted to a back entrance but leaving by the main door. A third photograph showed members of the Girl Scouts, an organisation established by liberal Kabulis as another step towards modernisation. The caption described them as ‘marching toward a bright tomorrow…entirely different from that of their mothers and grandmothers…insisting upon taking their full share in the building of their country’.
One of Japan’s great photographers, Shomei Tomatsu, pictured Afghan women very differently in 1963 on an assignment for the magazine Taiyo, which led to an exhibition in Tokyo and then a book. While Taiyo was edited by ethnologist Ken’ichi Tanigawa, Tomatsu paid scant regard to the documentary. Women in chadaris were an opportunity for him to create images involving striking abstractions and contrasts of darks and lights. One photograph of an unveiled woman was exceptional for Tomatsu’s focus on her face and disregard of her clothes.
Two foreigners wrote at length about being a woman in Kabul. Phyllis Chesler, an orthodox Jew from Brooklyn, arrived aged twenty-one soon after marrying Faiz Khairzada, the son of an Afghan banker, whom she met when they were both at college in upstate New York. After five months in Kabul, Chesler returned to the United States against Faiz’s wishes, but helped by his father. Prita Kumarappa Shalizi was born in Bombay, then won a scholarship to study in the United States where she met and married Abdussattar Shalizi, then accompanied him to Kabul where he edited Afghanistan: Ancient Land with Modern Ways and they had three children.
Chesler’s time in Kabul spurred her feminism. Far from identifying her experiences as those of a newly arrived westerner, she has cast them as ‘akin to those of an upper class Afghan woman’. Her accounts are in the long tradition of captivity narratives about women as prisoners in Islamic societies desperate for freedom. A pivotal episode was her first ‘escape’ from the family compound when, alone and bareheaded, she took a bus to the city. ‘Someone brushed by me, slowly. A man in brown yelled something at me. Two large mou
staches whispered near my cheek. Coins jingled. Laughter’. Chesler believed this response was a consequence of being mistaken for an ‘uppity’ Afghan woman, who had dispensed with the uniform of 1959 and was out unchaperoned. More likely, the men recognised she was a westerner and were exploiting the opportunity to harass, fuelled by offence at her dress and conduct.
Very different accounts came from Prita Shalizi, who became a contributor to Afghan, Indian and British newspapers and magazines, then brought together much of this journalism in 1966 in Here and There in Afghanistan, which had a propagandistic tone much like Abdussattar’s book. The family compound, Chesler’s prison, was a joy to Shalizi. She enjoyed its fruit and vegetables and the proximity of her extended family, even as she knew her mother-in-law was shocked to see Abdussattar take on domestic tasks never done by his father. She recognised the chadari could have the benefit of conferring anonymity on its wearer and her criticisms of it were mild. She wrote: ‘To me, it was both confusing and irritating, for I often lost track of my relatives who might have accompanied me to a shop, a movie or a picnic.’
Shalizi argued that the unveiling had led to radical change. She wrote of the new women: ‘They have acquired emancipation not only in the business world but also in the social—for now they are free to attend official functions, dine out in public and go to the movies with their menfolk!’ She elaborated: ‘After centuries of living as a dependent of man…and catering to his every whim…the Afghan girl is now intoxicated by the power of independence engendered by her own income, earned by her own effort. Indeed, even the married woman makes every effort to continue in her career as a result of the social and economic benefits that thereby accrue to her and her family.’
In fact, only a small proportion of those who unveiled found paid work. In 1960, 1400 women had done so according to official figures; in 1962, still not 3000. Many were lowly paid as seamstresses, waitresses, janitors, bookbinders and switchboard operators. But there were 500 female government officials and almost 500 female primary school teachers, along with twenty-six female social workers, fourteen radio announcers, three architects, a geologist and a doctor, who had trained in Pakistan when women were not permitted to study medicine in Afghanistan. More change was also afoot: fifty-five of 500 medical students and sixty-six of 381 science students at the university were female.
Segregation continued at the university. Women generally sat at the front of classes, occupying the first row or two, expected to have eyes only for the teacher, while the men filled row on row behind, with the young women always in their gaze. Yet this division was not absolute as revealed by a photograph from 1962 that shows some of the first women medical students in the back of a class, with men on either side. Outside the classroom, as a visiting American student reported, women began to play badminton, previously a male sport. At first, they only played with other women but after several months they played against men.
The annual independence celebrations provided another yardstick. When a march-past of school students was added to the entertainments at the Ghazi Stadium, girls did not simply take part. They led the march, which journalist Abdul Haq Waleh identified as a form of redress ‘for ignoring them in the past’. But despite Daoud’s pivotal role in introducing change, in 1962 he addressed his ‘countrymen’ and spoke only of ‘the sons of Afghanistan’.
When Daoud’s decade-long rule ended in March 1963, the government press stated that he chose to resign, but that appears improbable given his appetite for power. More likely, King Zahir Shah forced him to quit after Daoud’s advocacy of an independent state for the Pashtuns of north-western Pakistan brought Afghanistan close to war with Pakistan, severely damaging the Afghan economy when Pakistan closed its frontier. As the press identified unveiling and the end of purdah as Daoud’s greatest achievements, the daily Islah lauded how ‘Afghan women, who had been idle for centuries by being confined to the four walls, entered the social life and formed a new force…working side by side with men for the country’s progress and prospects’.
The only event to celebrate his rule was a function staged by the Women’s Welfare Association where Daoud was mobbed by women, some bareheaded, others in headscarves, many clapping, a few with hands held high. While several were crying, most were shouting, ‘Long live our beloved Sardar!’ In thanking him, the association’s vice-president, Saleha Farouq Etemadi, began: ‘We cannot say in words what we feel in our hearts.’ She declared that ‘true Afghan daughters and mothers’ would always serve their country in keeping with the vision of Daoud, ‘the founder of the present movement’.
CHAPTER 5
Masters of their Destiny
King Zahir Shah was notorious for his ‘playboy youth’. When newly married in 1931 to the thirteen-year-old Humaira Begum, he reputedly employed a driver to tour Kabul’s one lycée and ‘choose the most desirable girls for the king’s bed’. But after assuming most of Daoud’s power in March 1963, Zahir Shah presented himself as a champion of Afghan women. On a visit to the United States in 1963, he declared that emancipation was ‘one of the most successful things we have done’, ‘accomplished in six months’, making Afghan women ‘masters of their own destiny’.
More change followed as Zahir Shah set about introducing a new constitution under pressure from Afghanistan’s growing urbanised middle class. He appointed a seven-member, all-male committee to prepare a draft, then had this document considered by a twenty-nine-member advisory commission including two women, and by the first loya jirga to include women delegates. When this assembly met in 1964, the room was arranged with rows of four seats on either side of a central aisle with the women seated together—a standard piece of segregation, allowing photographers to picture the women so they seemed a significant presence, though they were just four among 448 men and spoke only on the jirga’s fourth day. Where the old constitution had made no mention of women, the new one gave them equal rights, entitling them to vote and stand for parliament.
Afghanistan was soon lauded as a ‘new democracy’. Yet all political parties remained illegal. When a national election was staged in 1965, the king’s advisers constructed the electoral boundaries to ensure Pashtun dominance. They stymied several candidates including Nur Mohammad Taraki, who had just founded the communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan which characterised itself as ‘the party of workers and peasants’ set on ‘class struggle’. But the king let some of the party’s members stand free of interference, and four succeeded, led by Babrak Karmal, a general’s son, who had adopted the name ‘Karmal’ or ‘comrade of the workers’ after Daoud jailed him for three years in the mid-1950s for leading student protests at Kabul University. Four women were also elected—two in Kabul, one in Herat and another in Kandahar, despite that city’s conservatism.
Afghanistan’s government-owned newspapers were soon rewriting history to credit Zahir Shah with the unveiling. He was said to have ‘ordered all the women in the royal family to discard the chadari’ years before 1959, then given ‘freedom to Afghan womanhood’, which ‘many people thought impossible’. While the king’s image had long been on stamps and banknotes, a new cult of personality made his portrait ever more prominent. During the independence celebrations at the Ghazi Stadium in 1960, his image was not only carried by motorcyclists and gymnasts but also printed on a flag and ‘fired into the air to come down slowly by parachute’. In 1962, it was sent up ‘by fireworks’. In 1964, it became a flying carpet—carried by aircraft in the form of ‘woven pictures’.
Queen Humaira, who did not unveil at the stadium in 1959, also acquired a new identity. When the Women’s Wefare Association staged the first gathering of prominent women from across the country in 1962, Humaira joined them for a group portrait, in which she appeared, like most of the delegates, without headscarf or coat. Humaira’s travels overseas also put her in the limelight. On a visit to Munich without Zahir Shah, she was photographed wearing pearls, a knee-length dress and again no headscarf, being received b
y the West German President, Heinrich Lübke. When she accompanied Zahir Shah to the United States, Humaira became the most photographed and filmed Afghan woman since Queen Soruya.
Humaira usually wore dresses made by a French tailor in Kabul, but some of her outfits were from Paris, where her favourite designer was Pierre Balmain, the renowned couturier of royalty and movie stars. While she sometimes wore gowns with low necklines on her travels, they were never sleeveless unlike Soruya’s most renowned outfit from 1928. When Humaira attended the king’s birthday buzkashi game in Kabul, she wore neither a scarf nor the sunglasses of the ‘uniform’ from 1959. In 1963, she expressed her ‘satisfaction at the way in which her dreams of seeing enlightened and progressive Afghan women were being realised’. In her one interview in the United States, she declared: ‘If you were to visit, you wouldn’t believe women have been out of the veil for just four years. There’s such a tremendous difference, such progress.’ She was also privy to some of what was to happen. ‘One of these days we hope to have the vote’, the queen remarked, a year before the 1964 constitution granted it.
Rhetoric was high and hope and excitement palpable among the intelligentsia. In the Kabul Times, Afghanistan’s one English-language newspaper, a contributor declared ‘attempts to keep women in fantastic isolation’ an ‘irresponsible blunder in the history of this nation’. Another exclaimed: ‘The old-style woman, all slave and submissive, is fading fast. The revolution ushered in by the ripping of purdah gives equal rights to that fair sex who subsisted formerly on the scraps of emotion left over from man’s spate of selfish satisfaction.’ Historian Mohammad Ali maintained that all jobs were now open to Afghan women—despite his daughter Mahgul leaving for the United States because of the discrimination she experienced as a woman doctor.
