Afghanistan is one of the worst places in the world to be a woman. Once women hit puberty, society restricts their movements to the point that going outside their own homes is a rare treat. Most Afghani women spend all their time confined to their fathers house, and then, once they are married, the house of their husband. A woman who has spoken to a man that is not a family member is suspected of being impure. Women in Afghanistan exist as commodities to be bought and sold by men. A family will broker a marriage deal using a daughter, the husbands family will pay a bride price to the family of the daughter being sold off. The most valuable women are the most beautiful, but also the most chased, and being chased revolves around speaking to no men outside of the family.
Women are usually discouraged from working outside of the home, and the vast majority of afghan women are discouraged from being educated beyond the age of ten, educated women are less valuable in Afghanistan because education makes them harder to manage.
In Afghanistan, the function of a married woman is to produce sons. A woman who produces daughters is blamed for not wanting sons, it’s a belief of Afghans that women can choose the gender of their child by thinking and praying hard for a son. Women who have daughters are looked down on for not praying hard enough or not being dedicated enough to the idea of having a son.
The need for sons is so overwhelming that a family without sons will sometimes dress up a daughter as a boy and treat her as a boy until she reaches puberty because a family with no sons is seen as inferior. For poor families, doing this allows another member of the family to work outside the home. For richer families, it is thought that treating a girl as a boy will increase the odds of the next child the woman births being male.
Usually these girl children raised as boys are open secrets in their neighborhoods. The neighbors know and choose not to say anything because the appearance of a gendered society is maintained and by puberty, the girls are strongly encouraged to revert back to living as women.
Jenny Nordberg'ss book follows five or six girls from all classes of society dressing as boys. One is the daughter of a female member of parliament, a second dresses as a boy to help in her father’s store, a third, who never changed back into a girl, works as a policeman. For the women who continue to live as men after puberty the dangerous time for these women is after puberty but before they are old by Afghani standards, which means mid-thirties. Once they are older, society doesn't care they are living as men because they are no longer sex symbols. Young women in afghanistan are valuable when they are young virgins, guaranteeing a man sons he is sure are his own. the older they get, the less value they have on the marriage market and thus to society.
While these girls dress as boys they are given all the privileges of manhood in Afghanistan they go outside, they play sports, they fight, they are allowed to continue their educations, etc. Then when puberty hits they are changed back into girls because a girl being around boys during puberty means it’s possible she's been made impure by the act of speaking to a boy outside of her family. This dishonors the family and often results in an honor killing, a murder of a person usually a woman, who has dishonored the family by failing to conform to the conventions of society.
Nordstrom interviews women who spent time as boys, and they say that the time they spent in the male world changed how they thought about themselves, boosting their confidence and making them realize, to use one example, that they have the ability to work outside the home.
A moteafe of the book is the extreme patriarchy of afganistan . The author asked men what it meant to be a woman, and got many different answers. However when she asked women what it meant to be a man, the answer she received was always the same. "Freedom."
If you have an interest in learning about afganistan and the role of women in that society during the American occupation you should read this book. It will teach you about tipical family life, the way women are chosen as wives, the efforts of the Americans to promote gender equality, and contemperary afgani atitudes.
In the last two years, the talaban have made a comeback in afganistan, taking over more and more of the country. This book chronicles a time before this talaban resergence, and one thing I thought as I read is that the talaban must be incomprehensibly bad, because the women in Afghanistan already seem to have a hard lot without the talaban in power. Afgani society is built around keeping them down, which is why, perhaps, so many are encouraged by their parents to dress as boys.
Amazon link. https://www.amazon.com/Underground-Girls-Kabul-Resistance-Afghanistan/dp/0307952509.