Viral Pic: Women Walking On Kabul Streets In Mini Skirts, 1972

Shortly after the Taliban had seized power this year in Afghanistan, a photograph is being circulated on the internet showing three women wearing skirts in Kabul, Afghanistan in the 1970s. The fact check behind the picture has been conducted and the picture is absolutely genuine. However, what this image is showing is not what the majority of women dressed in Afghanistan at the time.

The picture does not entirely represent the culture across all of Afghanistan in the 1970s, but there was still a steady progression for women’s rights in the country. To recall, Afghan women were first eligible to vote in 1919 and it was a year after women in the UK were given voting rights, and a year before the women in the United States were allowed to vote.

In fact, even the purdah system was abolished in the 1950s (Purdah literally meant seclusion of women from public view by means of clothes, curtains & high walls at home). And, in the 1960s a new constitution brought equality to many areas of life. However, during coups and Soviet occupation in the 1970s, through the civil conflict between Mujahideen groups and government forces in the ’80s and ’90s, and then under Taliban rule, women in Afghanistan had their rights suppressed.

There has been a complete ban on women’s work outside the home and only a few female nurses were allowed to work. There was and still is a ban on women studying at schools, universities or any other educational institution. (Taliban have converted girls’ schools into religious seminaries.) South of Afghanistan has been under Taliban threat for over two decades. The women, willingly or forcefully, are locked inside their homes most of their lives out of fear of Taliban threat.

As you can see in the picture, Afghanistan was actually a country where women were quite empowered before the Taliban invasion. When the Taliban invaded, they spread extremist mentality among the people. The same kind of mentality holds true in Saudi Arabia. The extremist mentality of the rulers are did not allow the process of empowerment.

The extremists believe that women are inferior to men, that they cannot study, they cannot drive, they cannot expose their skin, and that they do not have any right to speak to the people outside their family. It is they who are stuck in the past, and thus seek to impose the same on the common people. The result is that the people themselves are being brainwashed into accepting this as a law.

The picture which was taken by photographer Laurence Brun in 1972 gives us an idea of when “women were free” at a time. Now that the Taliban is back to power, they are creating a catastrophic situation with their systemic misogyny. In areas where the Taliban still has influence or control, women are still severely oppressed. Empowerment is the least of their concerns. The conclusion is that, when you allow extremists to rule a nation, you cannot expect there to be any progressive change towards the betterment of the nation in terms of the conditions of the people themselves.