Cultural Values or Universal Rights? Women's Narratives of Compliance and Contestation in Urban Afghanistan

Abstract

There has been an ideological tug-of-war over women's place in Afghan society from the early years of the twentieth century between the modernizing tendencies of its urban-based elite and the forces of conservatism represented by the Islamic ulema (religious leaders). Following the US-led invasion and the international donor community's subsequent efforts to “develop” the country, this struggle has acquired a new lease of life. Current debates reproduce the now familiar divide between cultural values and universal rights that characterizes the wider feminist literature. While Afghan voices have been part of this debate, they tend to be drawn from more educated and politicized groups. This paper uses the narratives of a small group of Afghan women from poorer urban households to explore how they evaluate the changes that have taken place in Afghan society and where their views position them in the ongoing debates.

Keywords:

• Microfinance
• culture
• intrahousehold bargaining
• economics of the family
• empowerment
• gender

JEL Codes::

• R2
• Z1

Notes on Contributors

Naila Kabeer is Professor of Gender and International Development at the Gender Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. She has done extensive research, training and advisory work on gender, poverty, labor markets, and social protection. Her recent publications include Mainstreaming Gender in Social Protection for the Informal Economy (Commonwealth Secretariat/Routledge) and “Can the MDGs Provide a Pathway to Social Justice: The Challenge of Intersecting Inequalities?” (MDG Achievement Fund/IDS).

Ayesha Khan is a social science researcher with the Collective for Social Research in Pakistan. She had been engaged in research for the past twenty years on poverty, gender, reproductive health, and refugee issues. Her most recent work has focused on the theme of women's empowerment and its linkage to paid work for women in different contexts and to women's experience of reproductive issues in Pakistan.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the excellent research assistance provided by Naysan Adlparvar and Sogol Zand on this project. We also thank Valentine Moghadam for her comments on an earlier version of this paper. We would also like to thank Feminist Economics anonymous reviewers whose comments helped us immensely. The research was funded by Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Notes

1 See Ahmed-Ghosh (2006) and Barakat and Wardell (2002).

2 The Pathways of Women's Empowerment Research Partners’ Consortium was funded by the Department for International Development, UK. The funding for this project was provided by NORAD, Norway.

3 Our field researchers were Sogol Zand and Naysan Adlparvar.

4 The online Supplementary Appendix is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2014.926558.

5 We confirm that the persons identified in this contribution have given permission for personal information to be published in Feminist Economics.

6 Violence against women – physical, sexual, and psychological – is one of the main security problems for women in Afghanistan, to the extent of being considered “natural” in Afghan homes (DFID 2008).

7 This is also noted by Abu-Lughod (2002).

8 It is interesting that these comments were not made in relation to the BRAC office, possibly because it had a more male-dominated culture.